What value are dealerships adding to the purchase experience?

Blue highway

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I was coming here to ask about everyones service experience. Personally I have not had issues servicing my previous Fords until now. My 21 F150 has been in Service for 5 days due to a Sync 4 issue and I have not received a text, call back on what the issue is. I have a GTPE on order and am wondering if there service centers are really ready to handle an EV. It might just be this particular service center
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Dealers are all learning but updating modules is not a difficult skill for a tech to learn. However they do NOT look for all available updates and apply them. They only address what you are complaining about. To me this is Infuriating, but dealers aren’t paid for it so they don’t….

Changes to Sync4 show up periodically as do updates to the phone app…. Other car modules get updates but it is harder to notice most of these. Sync 4 has updated 3 times in 6 months. The phone app has updated at least 6 times.

My frustration is mostly that there are updates released that take months to show up in my car. According to other forums, VW OTA updates are slower than Fords. Tesla does a lot of updates OTA but it can take 6 months or more to get updates that others have.
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Mach1E

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Go buy a boat.

You can buy from a dealer or manufacturer direct.

Which is better? Total crap shoot.


In general this is how boats work-

Manufacturer direct-
- long distance for major service
-clear pricing, but higher prices
-better quality/more options, but expensive
-long wait times (up to a few years)

Dealership-
-local service
-in stock boats that you can sea trial (except Covid)
-some have no haggle clear pricing some it’s hard to get a quote
-cookie cutter boats, but cheaper

There are pros and cons to each model.

The good thing about car dealers is you can buy a car and have little to no contact with the dealership. Lots of credit unions have car buying services.

I bought my Chevy SS long distance over the phone. All paperwork through email and online signatures and they shipped the car 500 miles to me.
 

RickMachE

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We asked our dealer if they could leave all of the protective stickers on the car so we could peel them off ourselves because 1. Super satisfying to peel off protective stickers 2. Do an unboxing for the Instagram 3. Didn’t want to have to pay for them to do this task. They said no to that.

We also asked for them not to wash or detail it that we wanted to do that ourselves too because we wanted to give it the first wash and didn’t want to pay for that either. They said no.

We just want our car! ?
Tip - dealer prep is already paid for in the invoice/sticker...
 

Reign of Ravens

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I think there's a lot of potential for dealers to add to the buying and ownership experience. The trouble is, many of them have gone down the path of trying to charge people for unnecessary things and they have traditionally priced themselves above other car shops as well. It's hard to regain that trust, and to change society's perception. When it comes to buying, the dealerships are basically a showroom and offer opportunities for hands-on experience. They're not bad as a place for locally buying and selling used vehicles, either. I know there are used online used car sales services that are popping up, and maybe some day those will also eat the dealerships' lunches, but for now it's still an area where physical presence has an advantage.
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