Buying a car in (almost) 2015 — #RequestForStartup
I bought a car over the holidays. Its a mom car — a white BMW X3 — but that does not matter.
What matters is that in the 10 years since I last bought a car absolutely nothing has changed. This should not surprise me; after all, car buying has remained pretty much unchanged since the 1950's. But living in the future as we do in San Francisco, surrounded by Ubers and Luxe Valets and Postmates and Metromiles, I was a little surprised at how terrible this process still is.
Cars are one of the biggest purchases we make and yet buying a pair of shoes on Zappos is a 1000 times more delightful experience than buying a car.
This a #RequestForStartup to bring car-buying into the 21st century.
Before reading further I ask that you please suspend disbelief about regulatory roadblocks, dealer contracts and lobbying power etc. and focus only on improving the customer experience. If Uber and AirBnB have taught us anything, it is that if you deliver a superior customer experience all this other stuff will get figured out.
With that in mind…
Innovation #1: eCommerce (whoa!) Simply let me buy a car online. I don’t mean do research online, “build” my car in some terrible flash app and then request a quote from a local dealer who will spam me for the rest of my life. I mean let me actually buy a car online and have it delivered to me. As a customer I don’t care where my car comes from. If in order to make dealers happy you have to strike some partnership with local dealerships, that’s great. I just care that I can buy the car online, and that it arrives at my house just like everything else I buy online. And if there are 30 extra miles on it because it was driven over from a dealership that’s fine with me. If Google Shopping Express can figure out how to get toilet paper from Walgreens and sparkling water from Costco, I’m sure BMW can figure out how to get a car from one of its own dealerships to me.
Innovation #2: Peer-to-peer test-drive marketplace (whoa whoa whoa!) Eliminate sales people. They are useless at best and actively annoying at worst. The best sales people are existing customers. Let me test drive one of the many many X3's that I constantly see around Noe Valley. Let the woman who owns the car tell me why she bought it, how it works for her family of 3 kids and a dog, if they’ve taken it up to Tahoe, what else she considered and why she chose this one. Believe me I would much rather listen to a real person talk about their real use of a car than any sales person. And if I end up buying a car online (see #1: eCommerce) as a result of my test drive with her, maybe she gets a commission. A number of startups are building these marketplaces for used cars, but I have yet to see one for new cars.
Innovation #3: Paperless-financing. We have an entire category of fin-tech stratups: Lending Club, Motif, AngelList and tons more sites can securely take your social security #s and other information necessary to qualify you as a lender or borrower, “sign” paperwork, and transfer $ between accounts. Yet buying my car required me to sit with the Weatherford BMW “finance manager” for 3 hours (not exaggerating) just printing and signing a whole bunch of forms, much of it on dot-matrix printers, attaching voided checks and just generally having a very surreal 1960's experience. This absolutely needs to happen online.
I’d love to hear from anyone working on this.
