For those who are Dilbert/Scott Adams fans, I just read his blog post about buying a new car, and it was a fantastic reminder that anytime someone criticizes the way Tesla is selling cars, they really don't know what they're talking about. People hate buying cars at dealerships and hate the whole experience. Is Tesla's system perfect yet? Perhaps not, but it's 99.9% better than what Adams describes:
Car Buying
Car Buying
Before we made our offer I did my research only to discover that there was no way to figure out a fair price for this particular vehicle. There are plenty of sites that seem to offer that sort of information, but not credibly, and usually not for this model. I assume the car-buying sites are in the pockets of the car dealers or have their own scams going. In the end, we were flying blind and probably got screwed on the price. But that leads me to my favorite part of the negotiating process. No, we weren't done yet. Once you have an agreed price, the dealer keeps negotiating, but more cleverly this time.
The next step in the negotiations - if you can call it that - involves a fill-in sales guy making a "mistake" that lists the price on our paperwork far higher than what we agreed. By the time you get to this stage of the process, you're worn out from looking at all of the numbers, and you're tempted to sign whatever they slide in front of you. But I've been through this process enough times to know that the first version is always the "mistake" paperwork.
....
As I assess our performance in this process, I want to believe we got a good price and that we cleverly declined offers for useless add-ons. The reality is that we are amateurs and we were dealing with professionals. The rational part of me knows that somewhere there are customers getting better prices on this same vehicle, which causes me to hate both the car and the dealership.