Idea: Leveraging Car Dealership Information Streams
Here’s a unique business niche for the right team that wants to leverage information flows to mediate the car dealership experience. Properly executed, a dealership is reduced to just being a function of capital, inventory, and space. Very lean once the start up costs are in place. No sales team (free targeted information flows instead). TestDrive helps dealers sell inventory, earn a small profit, and users don’t have to waste time/money.
Current system:
Individuals do most of their car testing online: research, reviews, maintenance projections, etc. This is information work. (There’s some opportunity in this space alone: compiling and processing those flows into an easy to use interface would be both a worthwhile and rewarding business.) Then they go out, put up with dealership up-selling, test drive (currently near-useless for 90% of the population), go home, look up prices, and then head to the right dealership (and put up with more up-selling in the process), then drive home a car.
Future:
So, lets call it TestDrive, empowered by the right information flows (partly sourced from the dealerships) could mediate this user process. Surviving dealerships will be essentially stacks of inventory (a result of a mechanic + land). User logs on, looks for a couple cars they want, and reports this list to the service. TestDrive shows up, picks up user in vehicle of choice, answers questions (without concern of commission – enforced by reputation), and drops user off. (This saves dealerships of costs associated with large amounts of retail space in dense urban areas.) TD repeats this process as many times as necessary (perhaps earning a small fee on the part of user or dealer). Once user fixes on a car, TestDrive pulls offers from its various stacks and helps mediate negotiations.
-Shlok
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