While I really like the idea of buying a NEW car direct from the manufacturer, a used car from Amazon is significantly less appealing - both for the consumer and Amazon.
* If Amazon spends the appropriate time researching into each car's history, properly inspecting and repairing any defects and working with customers if there are problems - they will not make a net profit. Not 'maybe', they won't.
* If Amazon doesn't have due diligence, people will get cars with endless problems, Amazon will be covered in bad press, and the whole thing will collapse due to low demand.
Plus, unlike buying a new car where inspection doesn't matter nearly as much - buying online gives you 0 way to really look at it yourself and take it to a local mechanic to have it inspected. (Which I am EXTREMELY glad I did, I nearly bought a car that would have been a disaster)
I suspect this effort will last maybe a year and a half at best.
Cars are bulky, heavy, expensive, and lose value quickly with age. Even new, the competition is so tight and logistics so hard that it's a nightmare. Used cars are so much worse an industry to work in.
Since they go through the dealers it's probably just the dealers' existing "certified pre-owned" scheme.
Yeah, it’s just the normal Blue Certified process. It’s an interesting look to dig the checklists up for various CPO programs from various OEMs to see what they demand.
https://www.ford.com/cmslibs/content/dam/brand_ford/en_us/br...
>* If Amazon spends the appropriate time researching into each car's history, properly inspecting and repairing any defects and working with customers if there are problems - they will not make a net profit. Not 'maybe', they won't.
Given that used car dealerships have existed for decades, it's possible to do profitably. Why can't amazon?
If you're a used car dealership you can:
* Avoid paying any shipping costs, and require the car be driven to you in person
* Have a shop attached to the dealership for inspection to avoid paying a third party
* Have a person at the ground level look over the car and refuse to accept ones that are obviously junk, minimizing wasted time and money
If Amazon is literally just acting as a front-end/advertisement for Ford and has 0 involvement than most of this doesn't apply.
It's only a concern for places that act as a true online retailer, taking on all the inventory and risk associated with it.
I've bought used iphones off amazon with no issue. (no other way to get a small-sized iphone 13 mini except used)
If people are foolish enough to buy used cars from Carvana, they'll be foolish enough to buy from Amazon too.
Nothing wrong with Carvana if you use due diligence. Bought an ‘18 Fusion Hybrid in mid-2019 that I was able to trace back to Avis’s rental fleet before it went unsold by Avis to CVNA into their sales pool.
(Figured at the time that the ‘hybrids’ cost more to rent, and anyone getting one as part of an upgrade would have treated it better than an econobox. Paid off quite nicely.)
It was a reasonable price at the time and I’m sure as hell glad I don’t have to go back into the used car market now with how stagnant the prices got.
When public transport ground to a halt during COVID, I suddenly needed a car. I bought one online via Cinch [1]. No haggling, no hassle, and it was delivered to my door a few days later.
I have no intention of entering a car dealership ever again.
I did the same thing with Carvana. The experience was wonderful until after I got the car. They waxed the stupid thing with the windows down. There was wax in random places EVERYWHERE in the car. I asked for money for an internal detailing (I was willing to just deal with the external part having the worst buff job I've ever seen). They offered $75 and the lady on the phone said she could get her SUV detailed for that much. In Texas.
Anyways, in the end, you can get them to do almost anything by simply saying you want to return the car. That's pretty damn expensive and something they have no choice but to honor. Still, if you don't know this trick, it's a good way for these guys to be sneaky. This would've been easier for me to deal with if I could just physically bring it in somewhere and say "give it back clean".
That being said, I also understand you have better consumer protections in the UK, so maybe things are different for you.
Did you find this at the time of delivery? Or was this something you found out afterwards?
I would assume "decline to accept" is different than "return car", is that true?
Yes - declining to accept happens at the delivery truck itself. Once you've accepted it, you have a small window of time (1-2 weeks?) to return it. To do that, they have to send a truck back out to pick it up.
I think it's because of some law in the US requiring a grace period to return cars. One of the best consumer protection laws in the US, in my experience. I saved a lot of young military guys a lot of money by forcing them to return their 22% APR, 0% equity, brand-new, street demon car and get something vaguely reasonable.
I had to threaten to sue them by opting out of their time triggered arbitration clause to get them to give me the deposit back on a car they couldn’t/wouldn't deliver. Carvana sucks.
The haggling involved in car buying is a choice. Over the years various sellers have used “no haggling” as a selling point, Saturn for instance. But I can walk into any dealership and choose to pay the listed price without haggling.
They have multiple avenues for haggling beyond price. Leveraging loan terms or penalizing you for cash, insisting on addons like 'safer' blinking tail lights that they auto-install on every car, the creativity never ends.
Assuming you pay via dealership financing that is likely true but many dealerships have a different price for a car if you are paying cash for it.
I wish I could be comfortable doing so for such a large purchase, but there is too much variability in the quality of used vehicles and sellers have a disincentive to disclose potential issues.
I don't like buying at dealerships but I do like being able to inspect the vehicle at the same time I am signing the paperwork.
Carvana has 7 day return policy no questions asked. Buy it, take it to mechanic. Return it if its no good
I'm aware, but there are more caveats to a return then there are to a transaction that never happened.
This is great news. I look forward to a day when I never have to talk to a salesperson again.
> Forty-eight states have laws that limit or ban manufacturers from selling vehicles directly to consumers
Why on earth is this a law? (I mean besides the obvious lobbying efforts and likely scare-mongering from powerful auto dealers) Is there an actual reason/benefit for this though for consumers?
These laws are anachronisms back when they didn’t want manufacturers directly selling vehicles to consumers because there was a fear (or maybe, an experience?) with manufacturers selling vehicles without any reasonable ability to get parts, repairs, etc.
Nowadays with nationwide fast shipping and the internet these aren’t really problems… but in the 1950s I could see how there would be some benefits to having a dealership near you.
It was more protection for local dealers, to avoid the manufacturer coming in to a market that the dealer had developed and undercutting them.
Yes, but that's the first layer. The second layer is "Why would we care about undercutting local dealers"? And there are good reasons to avoid undercutting, not just greed, as is often the case.
In my view if the local dealers will go to hell in a hand basket I won’t shed a tear. Michael’s Subaru of Bellevue couldn’t tighten some gasket under the car and my car was leaking oil after the oil change. When I took the car to the dealership they said it was because of my car being too old (older Subarus have indeed a problem with oil leaks). The guy behind the counter looked like he had anger management problems with my request to take another look. So yeah, if Amazon will put these dealerships out of business - good riddance.
You know, sometimes they get anger management issues after the 1000th angry customer asking them to fix what appears to be a design flaw in the car that customer bought. I'm not sure that buying from that dealership via amazon would do anything for you (amazon is just listing dealer cars), or that the situation would be better if you bought directly from the manufacturer.
They were merely well organized and. connected to state legislatures. It's just regulatory capture.
Do you think there still are, or just were?
I think Ford would be happy to sell a car direct and pocket at least some of the commission they otherwise pay to the dealership. But they sort of need dealers also, to do local marketing, help customers who want hand-holding, and to provide warranty/recall service.
Has Tesla been selling cars directly to consumers without these problems?
Telsa has precisely this problem; they want a lot of control over the repair process. It can be tough to find an independent mechanic to work on them.
https://service.tesla.com/docs/ModelS/ServiceManual/en-us/GU...
> Tesla does not allow the use of any used, recycled, alternative, aftermarket, or third-party replacement parts. Use only new parts ordered directly from Tesla.
That's quite an interesting statement from Tesla. How much weight does it actually hold beyond just being "their opinion" considering that the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act forbids the voiding of warranties for those reasons?
IIRC, they won't sell parts to a non-certified mechanic, and there's a lack of third-parties making the more complex parts. You're fine if you need a tire swap. You're not gonna have much fun if you have to replace the screen.
A Federal-level right to repair can't come soon enough.
You can buy (almost?) any part directly from Tesla as a plain Joe [1], but you may need a VIN for certain parts (mainly the actual computers?).
In the event you want to DIY a repair, Tesla publishes all their service manuals they use at their service centers (e.g. [2]) and you can can even use the exact same software their technicians use for the deeper repairs, albeit at a price that is expensive if you're a plain Joe, but for a repair shop it doesn't seem to be terribly expensive.
On the topic of 3rd party parts, there isn't quite as robust a marketplace.
[1] - https://epc.tesla.com/en-US/landingpage
[2] - https://service.tesla.com/docs/ModelY/ServiceManual/2025/en-...
> a price that is expensive if you're a plain Joe, but for a repair shop it doesn't seem to be terribly expensive.
That's actually a lot less than I was expecting. Toyota's is $1500/year.
But what can they legally do if you decide to use parts on the secondary market anyway? (... are they punishing consumers for this?)
Nothing. But they don't need to. They just tackle it at the supply side.
If you're a mechanic who wants Tesla parts, you need to go through Tesla. If you go through Telsa, you can't use third-party parts or resell the first-party ones. As a result, the market for third-party parts stays largely too small to exist.
I think Tesla's practices are gross here, but wouldn't a better solution to be Right-To-Repair legislation instead of protecting dealerships?
Absolutely.
Guess who donates a whole bunch to their local and state-level candidates to prevent precisely that?
Tesla had to fight in court in many of the states for the right to sell directly to customers.
I think Tesla has "show rooms", and then you buy the car from California and import it. So you're not actually visiting a dealership when you visit a Tesla store.
[flagged]
I was talking about in states that banned direct sales, not generally
No, you didn't pick them up at a dealership. Because Tesla doesn't operate dealerships. They call them stores, or galleries depending on if direct sales are legal. They hold dealer licenses, but that does not mean they are a dealership.
If you're going to be needlessly hostile, at least be correct.
> You clearly don't know what you're talking about
Please omit swipes like this from comments on HN, regardless of who or what you're replying to. The guidelines make it clear we're aiming for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
They were adopted in the mid-20th Century when franchised dealers the norm but manyfacturers would use threat (backed by follow-through if the threat wasn’t successful) of opening direct competing manufacturer-owned dealerships to coerce franchise dealers practices, to take that practice off the table.
> Why on earth is this a law?
Car dealerships tend to be keystone businesses in towns; they wind up with outsized political power on the state and local level.
It stems from franchise law which exists to give franchisees a modicum of protection from adverse practices by the much stronger party in the relationship.
I'm sure that's a part of it, but I'm of the opinion that car dealers and other really local business owners like them are the modern equivalent of the landed gentry.
Locally powerful people can have a lot of leverage, even against a much bigger national-level entity.
> Starting today, customers can browse, finance, and purchase certified pre-owned Ford vehicles online through Amazon Autos, with in-person pickup at a local Ford dealership.
This whole thing sounds like dealership with extra steps and a middleman fee.
Would love to see how much pressure is put onto purchasing addons from the local dealers. I remember reading people running into that when picking up their Lightnings.
"We had us a deal here for nine-teen-five. You sat there and darned if you didn't tell me you'd get this car, these options, without the sealant, for nine-teen-five!"
"Yeah but that TruCoat.... Lemme talk to my boss..."
>(I mean besides the obvious lobbying efforts and likely scare-mongering from powerful auto dealers)
This is the only reason so far as I understand it.
You'd think Amazon would apply lobbying power to enable new car sales?
I would never expect amazon to perform any unethical behavior at all, because amazon is an honorable company
Vertical integration is, in general, bad for competition and often bad for consumers. There can be benefits, but too much control limits availability of parts, confuses incentives, etc.
> Vertical integration is, in general, bad for competition and often bad for consumers.
This is a gross misunderstanding of what vertical integration is.
YKK zippers makes an unbeatable product because of vertical integration.
A lack of vertical integration means that you're subject to the whims of larger markets (and increased interest and costs at every step).
The flip side to this is "control nothing". Buy the building your office is in and own an asset, or get a triple net lease and then pay margin on top of that. Own your own hardware or pay AWS to have 30percent profit margins...
(Potentially) making a better product does not mean better for a consumer, especially when a company has a dominant share of the marketplace.
It potentially means you can only get parts going through the company that sells the complete product.
It potentially means that you have to pay whatever price the company sets because they control the distribution pipeline.
Vertical integration has ZERO to do with any sort of market dominance.
A company could be vertically integrated, and have a small portion of the market. A company could be a full on monopoly and have little to no vertical integration.
YKK processing raw metals and plastics, building its own zipper making machines has nothing to do with how much market share it has. It has everything to do with product quality.
Faunc is another example of "vertical integration" where they make the mills, software and controllers for their devices, as well as servos and spindles. Servos and spindles are commodity items (you can buy them cheaply from china) yet Faunc makes their own for quality and reliability reasons.
You are correct that a high degree of vertical integration does not necessitate market dominance.
I would like to add some nuance though: As the supply chain becomes longer, the value of vertical integration rises. Now if we acknowledge that bigger players can profit more from vertical integration as well, and assume that players play equally well, we have a "devil poops on the big pile" situation, pulling the market towards a monopoly as the bigger player gets to profit more.
So it's not got exactly ZERO to do with market dominance ;)
> YKK zippers makes an unbeatable product because of vertical integration.
YKK zippers make an unbeatable product because they are a monopoly.
A monopoly in the market for YKK branded zippers? One can buy zippers from lots of different manufacturers.
https://idealfastener.com/zippers/
Also makes great zippers. They are more vertically integrated than most of their other competitors.
It's true of beer, too. In a lot of states (decreasingly so), breweries cannot sell beer directly to consumers, or even retailers. I once paid for a tour of a brewery, where the price of admission also covered a souvenir glass. The brewery would then give you a few pours of "free beer". They emphasized that they were definitely not selling me any beer.
Agree. Dealing with Amazon customer support is such a great experience and it keeps on improving every time I reach out to them.
When did you last use their support? 15 years ago, I needed to click 1 button to chat with support instantly about a faulty iPod I bought. They issued a refund and return mail label instantly.
3 months ago, I had to navigate multiple froms and dropdowns to even reach a chat representative. And when I did, they had none of the information I spent several minutes filling out. The rep then grilled me about my order, seemingly incredulous that Amazon had sent me a "new" product that was clearly used and repackaged when I opened it (this has been common for years as Amazon commingles its own stock with that of 3rd party sellers).
FWIW I find Amazon's phone support to be faster than the chat stuff. It's usually just a couple mins, most of which time you're on hold while they're fixing it. My wife hates dealing with returns, but I find that it's usually no big deal, and often they'll give you $5 or $10 for your trouble, if things don't get sorted out the first time (which seems to be about 10% of the time).
? I've returned two items from Amazon in the last year and in both cases, all I had to do was click on the "Return" button and drop it off at my local UPS Store.
Why did you need to talk to support?
Because the Return button didn't give me an option to print a mail label. I had to click through multiple screens and finally located the support chat link.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. I remember when their customer service was truly great, about 20 years ago. Now it is not great, but still much better than car dealers, IMO.
this has to be satire right?
I can't imagine any support experience worse than dealing with Amazon "customer support"
christ help you if you mix that with a car dealership
There's no doubt that mixing these two could be a nightmare. But if you're replacing the pre-purchase haggling of a car dealership with the no-haggle process of buying on Amazon, then it might not be awful.
The real question is: who's on the hook if things aren't as described/pictured? It sounds like these all come with extended warranties, so that would mean it would be the dealer. They're no picnic to deal with, but that's going to be the case no matter whether you buy the car from them or from Amazon. If you can have a more pleasant buying experience by starting with Amazon, that's a win in my book.
As a knock-on effect, it could help bring down prices on used cars sold by other dealers, since buyers could point to these car listings as comparables.
> Why on earth is this a law?
Generously, protecting local labor is important in an environment that demands labor for survival and where considering alternative systems of providing for people is verboten. This is a confederation-level version of protections against offshoring jobs. Whether the jobs add value or not is its own dilemma.
Wonder if there an opportunity there to set up distribution in the few states that don't have that law and make everything easy online - out of state registration, delivery (for a fee). The dealerships in the 48 states will probably sue the manufacturers, they are not just going to let it slide, I suspect.
If I go to amazon autos, I see more than just Hyundai and Ford pre-owned certified cars for sale - I see toyota, chevrolet, kia, jeep, honda, etc. I guess this announcement is an official partnership with Ford corporate, but I assume smaller dealerships could have integrated before this.
>Amazon’s platform will be the middleman between the customer and the dealership
It's just a lead generator like any other. Why did Amazon choose to enter that market?
Because they make $60B/yr on advertising and car sales is a very valuable ad market.
Notably only in a few cities, at present.
This didn’t seem to work with a bunch of other startups out there. Carvana, shift, beepi, etc. These startups were all the rage in 2016.
I bought my car off of Shift (wonderful experience in 2016) for such a low price that my credit union heard the price I was buying it for and immediately went, “oh, honey, I’m so sorry. We can’t give loans for a salvage vehicle.” She looked at the carfax and was dumbfounded how it had a clean title, no accidents, etc. and was not just cheaper than blue book for a dealer but cheaper than for a private party by a significant margin.
They are "used" cars. I hate it when marketing departments try and manipulate the language. I hate it worse when everyone else just goes along with it.
We don't like euphemisms, bowdlerisms, or corpspeak either, and consider them loosely included under the word "misleading" in:
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
I've made the title say 'used' instead of 'pre-owned' now.
Sorry, I just literally copied the title, which I didn't find to be misleading. Can you help me understand what is misleading about "pre-owned"? Isn't that just a well-known synonym for "used"?
If submitters are supposed to change the wording wherever marketing corpspeak exists, there will be a lot more changed titles, and perhaps not always for the better.
Oh I agree. This is a fine-grained nuance and what you submitted was just fine. I didn't mean to imply otherwise and am sorry if it came across that way!
Sometimes it's only when the commenters start reacting to a title that we even find out that there's an issue.
Not really sure what you're targeting with the language.
My guess is the "certified" part of pre-owned. It's basically just the labelling they give to lease vehicles that come back without excessive damage or wear. These vehicles generally have lowish miles, low wear on pretty much all components, and have been reasonably well kept by the leasee.
My wife and I have found certified pre-owned is sweet spot for price-to-value. We get a vehicle that's basically brand new - but with a massive cost reduction.
Except generally pre-owned is short for certified pre-owned like it is here, which means you get a much better warranty than buying on the used market.
You're paying for that warranty though. If you really want one, you can buy one yourself from one of several competing aftermarket warranty companies.
Used car dealers suck, in every way. They add zero value other than having a selection of cars in one place, and possibly a selection of lenders for financing if you need that. They also know every trick in the book to get you to pay more for the car than it is really worth.
Best way if you have a little time to do research and watch the local market is to buy a car from a private seller.
The car websites will also clean/inspect the cars and ship the car to your house which is nice if the car you want is not near where you live
But yes generally my experience with https://clutch.ca was they push you to some expensive financing deal through their people.
Do they really though?
I asked a used car salesman once, "what do you do to these cars after you get them" and he said "nothing." They get them from the auction and put them on the lot.
Now maybe some dealers do a little more. I am a bottom-feeder when it comes to cars. But stands to reason that any money they spend on the car is less profit for them when they sell it.
I remember a time when it was "certified used".
Most dealership websites in the US list cars as New, Pre-Owned or Certified Pre-Owned, meaning Certified is distinct from Pre-Owned.
But that nuance wouldn't allow them to get outraged about something trivial.
That is completely standard wording. Has been since the 90s.
That doesn't undermine their point though.
It's doubleplusgood language and perfectly cromulent.
- [deleted]
Pretend for a minute that this naming scheme was successful, that sales of cars called pre-owned were higher than cars called used. Neither term is deceptive, both accurately describe the situation. What this tells you is that the problem isn't the cars, it's the existing negative connotation attached to the word used. The car industry picked a blank slate term for themselves and how people feel about the term pre-owned will be in line with their feelings about the cars and nothing else. The fact that this term has been in use for a long time and still (by assumption) carries a positive connotation means that people are having positive experiences with used cars.
This to me is actually the opposite of deceptive. The used car industry took a risk by asking to be judged on their merits because pre-owned could have been synonymous with garbage in short order. There was little anchoring it to any particular connotation.
If you create a new term for something that there was previously a common, unambiguous term for, people's animal brains assume that there's some sort of difference between the new and old thing, even if the words literally mean the same thing (if you use the actual meaning of the words in technical or industry jargon to determine their meaning, you will usually be wrong.) In other words there's an "existing negative connotation," although you attach this to the word (is it the sound of the word or the ugliness of the letters that creates this connotation? It is a mystery) rather than to the actual thing that the old word denoted.
This is entirely deceptive, and nothing else. It is a change solely made to confuse people about the validity of their past experiences, and to sucker them into disregarding them when making very expensive decisions about their futures.
In some cases, the new term is just a euphemism, and it means exactly the same thing. Like how "homeless" turned into "unhoused". There's no difference in meaning. It's just meant to sound nicer.
In my book, it's the same for "used" and "pre-owned". It never occurred to me that anyone would think a "pre-owned" vehicle automatically came with a warranty. It was just a nicer way of saying that you weren't the first owner, without using the word "used" (which evokes "used up"). Also, I think sketchy used car lots sell what they call "pre-owned" vehicles, even though they don't provide certification and warranties (at least not ones you can count on, since they could just disappear overnight).
Are people deceived by the term "pre-owned"?
People in this thread are deceived by the term "pre-owned." They assume that it means that it has a higher warranty protection than something that is simply "used."
They think the classifications are "new," "used," and "pre-owned" rather than "new," "pre-owned," and "certified pre-owned" (which is a special warranty type.) So when they see "pre-owned" they think it is short for "certified pre-owned" which means that they're pricing in a warranty that they are not getting.
Are you talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45955996 ?
They were not confused, they were specifically talking about the distinction of 'certified' and how it applies to this article.
Colloquially, people commonly understand that "pre-owned" means "used".
This is different than people shortening their language while concurrently understanding the distinction.
How would anyone presume a warranty based off of the terms used or pre-owned? There's not an industry standard warranty that correlates to these terms. Anyone who's curious about a warranty would be told the terms of the warranty are anyway regardless of whether it was called it pre-owned or used.
Even if people thought that all "pre-owned" vehicles come with "higher warranty protection", then they would be correct. Per TFA:
> all the vehicles sold on Amazon will be backed by Ford’s warranties and roadside assistance guarantees. According to Ford, every vehicle that appears on Amazon has been “inspected, reconditioned, and comes with a Ford warranty, Ford Rewards points, and in some cases, a money-back guarantee.”