NO DEALERS / Direct Sales + Price Transparency = Yesss Thank You!!! 🙌 🙏🏻 👍

[dleepnw]

This could get tricky if Scout/VW was hoping to leverage the dealer network for service and repairs.

On the other hand, dealers need to calm down. A majority of all dealership profits are from service repairs and maintenance, not the sale of vehicles. If they stay on board, those services could flow to them.

If this does get dicey, where are Scout owners going to go? Do you think they would build out their own service centers? Perhaps Rivian will be able to pick up some of the service needs since they are providing the software and network architecture? Scout chips in more funding, Rivian builds out more service centers. Could be a win-win.

Some open questions for sure.

 

[SpaceEVDriver]

If Scout and Rivian were clever, they would sponsor a series of SAE courses and certifications on repairs, warranty / recall work. They could open up the service network to any service center around the country. Instead of relying on a dealer network model, my favorite local garage could put in the $$$ required to get their techs and service center certified and outfitted for Scout and Rivian EV service. The local garages are going to have to get caught up on EVs at some point...

 

[astricklin]

Having bought and still own a Tesla, it’s good, weird, and terrible. The good is all that it’s hyped to be. No middleman, no hidden or BS fees. The weird is you need to secure your own financing and have a cashier’s check upon taking delivery. Weird having a $60 or $70K check in your wallet, or whatever it’ll cost. Terrible, but because this is Elon, that direct buy means prices can change daily or quarterly. It was cool when I placed my Tesla order on an app and paid $250 using Apple Pay. The next day the price dropped $2,500. Cool that I got the discount. Then a month goes buy and price goes up $1K, but again cool that I’m locked in on lowest price until I take delivery. Now a year has gone buy and Model Y is going to be refreshed so they’re dropping the price of current version and my trade in is now $21K less than I bought. So terrible if Scout does what Tesla does in that regard.

Off topic, it is cool to get over-the-air updates that truly improve the vehicle. And right now I have a 30-day free full self driving trial. It’ll be hard to beat Tesla’s tech, but I’d trade it in (literally) for a vehicle I can appreciate. And here I am, waiting…

This sort of pricing thing happened with legacy auto as well. My uncle bought a Jeep Gladiator Sept 2022 and paid full sticker. Now they're going for 25% off. This certainly affected trade in and used prices as well.

My feelings on residual value of vehicles is that you should just keep the thing until it's worthless and it finally needs a repair that you just can't justify. Then you have extracted maximum value out of it.
Of course there's the concern of it gets wrecked, and if you have it financed, then that's why there is gap insurance.