I’m going to assume you’re being honest and unaware that this statement is patently false. In the US, it’s a rather simple process to understand how a given vehicle is selling, and what level of discount can be negotiated. Many people hate the negotiation process, but it comes at the END of the research that establishes what is the current market price for a give make and model. Motivated bargain shoppers can access production figures, sales figures, and data about inventory levels for the model... Make your own decisions.
Except for your first sentence the I mostly agree with you, but; While an exceedingly well informed and diligent person can pretty much identify how US pricing will develop for a given model, nobody can do so with any consistency because the total information is very, very rarely available to even the best informed people.
With the complexity of incentives at each step from ordering, floor planning, option choices, dealer adds and financing choices at every step it is literally impossible for anybody to know with any precision what any individual deal might be. Thus Audie is 100% correct. Your assertion is valid to a certain extent, in that you're less likely to be 'ripped off' as your knowledge increases.
A couple of decades spent in periodic design of vehicle distribution product design has convinced me that nobody, not even dealer principals, actually understand the impact of all the features that effect changes in effective pricing or vehicle resale values. In general, sure. Specifically, no chance!! The only even close analogies are in industries like hotels and airlines, with Amazon leading the pack in merchandising and services. To think any vehicle distribution process is actually transparent to consumers is folly.
My last point. The 'price guarantee' business is genuinely one of the cleverest tricks available in retailing. I led a team that evaluated that kind of system for a retailer everyone on this forum probably knows. As it happens fewer than .03% of buyers who could use such as system to their benefit actually do so. However, confidence fo price matching rises substantially. Thus, when an Audie shows up they lose money. There are very few Audies! The other major line of defense is to ensure that the SKU from manufacturers is specific to the retailer. Matching is pretty near impossible if the model number changes. One would not think vehicle manufacturers do that but they frequently have regional and even dealer-specific models, which usually differ in some inconsequential way, but often actually carry vin identification. When such things happen effective comparisons become a muddle.
Many of us do not know how good we have it as customers of Tesla.
