I'm not going to buy a Tesla

[Miguelito Loveless]

29. Used to do IT for a company that sold F&I software to car dealers

So, I got a look behind the scenes at a lot of their shenanigans. Four years into my job, sales of our systems began to wain, and we were only selling to the “buy here, pay here” crowd, as all the brand dealers now bought there software and hardware from their manufacturers (captive customers). I wrote a six page memo to the owner that we should start retraining our staff in HTML and SQL database, and create web sites to help dealers sell cars on the Internet. Dead silence for two months. So, at a staff meeting I asked if he had read the memo. He said he had, and while he appreciated my suggestion, I didn’t understand the car sales biz (being a computer guy). Dealers were never going to sell cars, or even show cars online, as they had too much invested in proven sales methods: advertising in newspapers, on billboards, radio, and TV.

They went bankrupt in 2000.

Things were falling apart for “traditional” dealers over the last few years, and the COVID crisis is accelerating their decline.

Customers do have way more resources now than 20 years ago, and the death knell is tolling for the “good old days’’