Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why I bought the Lucid Air”.
Thanks to fly for sponsoring a portion of this video, this tweet took on a life of its own. It started off as just an innocuous kind of fun story. It ended with a very lively discussion and a lot of publications, but i couldn’t tell the whole story in 240 characters. So here is the full version. Explanation, backup and proof of this 50 000 fiasco before i get to the rest of the story be sure to stay tuned later on in the video for a chance to win a playstation 5 or 5 200 pc gift cards. So here’s a bit of background on everything that happened when i posted this tweet. It seemed super innocuous to me.
I didn’t think much of it. I just thought it was interesting story to share and then, when the article started rolling in and questions started coming in, there was a lot of stuff in there from people wanting to know what happened to dealership names. People calling me a liar. There was a lot of discussion going on, including a lot of pent up frustration about what’s currently going on in the world of cars.
So here’s a bit of background for financial planning reasons i needed to get a new car for myself in 2021. My model three was coming off of lease in december and after driving tesla for eight years, so a model s in 2013 for three years, a model x for three years and then a model three for two years. I just wanted to try something different other than tesla i’d been looking at the same screens and same ui for a while. I just wanted to try something new, but i was open to another tesla and again how to get a car in 21.
I wanted to be electric, so i reserved pretty much every electric car that could fit my family of five in 2021. uh. I had two model x’s on order. These are all refundable deposits.
I had a plaid and a long range, neither of which i have delivered and fun fact. My wife’s actually gon na take the long range model x, which has a very moving delivery date. I had reservations for rivien r1t r1s. I had a deposit down for a lucid air and i had several deposits down at different dealerships for the mercedes eqs, which is really what this whole story is about. So obviously, the past few years have been different. They’Ve impacted the electronic squirrel, the car world because of chip shortages and because of that cars are in short supply and that’s where this story begins.
I had decided in my head that the best chance i had to get a car was what was going to come out the end of the year. The mercedes-benz eqs was going to be delivering towards the end of the year and i thought that seemed like a really nice option. It was something different. I wasn’t necessarily sold on the look so much, but i love the interior of it.
I, like the efficiency, the hyper screen. Tech seems super awesome, and that was a decision that i made that i was going to go with the mercedes, but because mercedes is a legacy automaker, they don’t have a direct consumer model like uh, tesla, riven or lucid, meaning. Those companies sell cars directly to the consumer, whereas cars manufacturers have been around, for you know, longer than tesla go through a dealer model and folks outside the us is a hard concept for them, but each dealership usually is owned individually and they have the right to Do whatever they would like with those cars when those cars these? Traditionally it’s delivered to that dealership, the dealership owns them. They could sell them for over sticker understicker, whatever they choose and as i learned, the manufacturer of the car in this case, mercedes has very little control of what that car is going to be priced at so the eqs since they’re, not a direct consumer model.
When you go online to configure one, you are sent directly to a dealership and most dealerships are offering refundable deposits and i really want to make sure i got a car this year. So i had deposits down at different dealerships. I had one locally one that was a little bit far away and one that was even closer, so three dealerships all had cars and the one car that i was excited about was at mercedes-benz of ontario. If you don’t know ontario’s, not just in canada, it’s a city here in california, so the car that i had reserved was actually already sitting in the port of long beach um.
They knew the car, they knew the vin number uh. They didn’t know the final sticker price yet because mercedes hadn’t fully released that, but they said, if i put my deposit down and at the time it was a refundable, five thousand dollars that that car would be mine. So that seemed awesome.
I signed the paperwork to reserve the car and they just didn’t know when mercedes was actually going to release the cars so fast forward to kind of middle of november dealer calls me saying the car is in uh. It’S here, here’s some pictures of it. It has to be cleaned. You know you just got off the truck. We want you to see it.
It looks beautiful if you want to come. Take a look at the car, we’d love for you to see it. We can’t sell to the first week of december until mercedes officially, you know, releases the car, but there is going to be a market adjustment. They called it and i expected a market adjustment on cars.
We’Ve seen that going on, especially here in southern california, for a while there’s been you know, crazy markups on rav4s that we’ve seen ram trxs bmws. Every car has had this quote market adjustment, so i was expecting something and they told me it was going to be fifty thousand dollars for that eqs 580. and i’m saying five zero, i’m not misspeaking and needing to say 15. I am saying 50 000 market adjustment on the car.
I was unsure what to do or what to say uh. At that point i just i asked for a couple days. I just think about it and, as you can see by my conversation, gone with the dealer, i was floored by what was going on and again.
This is not to say that all legacy automakers are bad or doing something wrong. We’Ve seen a lot of reports of ford dealerships, for example, trying to charge exorbitant amounts for lightning deliveries when they’re starting and then ford themselves get involved to try to de-incentivize the dealerships to honor sticker price. So there are things that manufacturers can do and things that i hope manufacturers do eventually lean into this, isn’t just not to say that what tesla’s model does is great. The direct consumer model is the only way to go, because i don’t believe that there’s a compromise that can be struck between the traditional and the new that ultimately benefits the consumer and hopefully the dealerships as well. I understand that they need to make money.
A lot of their money is made on service. Electric cars generally require less service, so there’s reticence to sell them for lower than they can make as much money while they can do it. But there’s somehow a compromise that can be struck from the corporate level down to the dealerships. And hopefully this can help shed a little bit of light on that larger discussion. So, while we’re waiting for these dealer markups to hopefully go away uh forever, the other thing i’m waiting around and sort of curious to see in its final form, is the buzzword of the day, metaverse uh.
In the meantime, though, there’s a new social app that is making their own metaverse and it’s called fly so inside of the app you’ll, see just a beautifully detailed 3d map of your local town and neighborhood. You can click on any place or building start a public chat, share stories with photos or videos, so others can see your experience at that exact location. It’S a pretty cool thing to actually see you can also use fly to privately plan activity. Share stories uh with just your friends at any place, you want drop a private chat, pin and invite your buddies, and it’s a really novel way to get to know the city you’re in and a fun way for your friends and others to live vicariously through you. Also uh, which is pretty awesome, they are giving away a still hard to find playstation 5 and 5 200 visa gift cards. If you want to enter just use the hashtag. I love this place when you’re posting, wherever you want inside the free fly, 3d social media app and you will be entered again, want to learn more about fly, link to it down below, and so at this point i reached out to mercedes of north america.
I had a contact there from from years ago, so i was like hey here’s what’s going on like i don’t know, if you guys are aware of this or you can do anything about it but, like i just feel like you should know, and this is the Response that i got and i think for a lot of people as i saw online, the last line of that was very telling. So not only were they saying that they really have no control of what dealers are doing, they’re individually owned, they can do what they want, but also there was a strong insinuation that the car was worth an extra fifty thousand dollars over what they told you the Suggested retail price would be. I understand that msrp and sticker price, whatever you want to call it is suggested.
I understand that, but 50 000 seemed very, very egregious uh to me and after the story went out, people called me a liar saying it never happened. So things that i shared here’s the original sticker from the car from the picture the dealer sent to me here’s my reservation for the car: here’s the option sheet. They sent me back when i reserved the car with the same vins matching and then again here’s some conversations that i had uh with the dealer. There was a very surprising turn of events. That’S not unique to just that dealer in ontario other dealerships that i’d spoken to and called were starting to comment.
Let me know that hey are in. Do you want one cause? I called every dealership in southern california and i had market adjustments uh ranging from 25 to that 50. 000. That seemed absolutely insane to me.
So, ultimately, i ended up going for a lucidaire for the direct sales model. There’Ll be a lot of coverage coming up on that, but this is more a story of what’s going on now in the car buying world, we’re seeing reports and a lot of reports of used cars going above original msrp, my wife has a honda odyssey minivan. It’S three years old, the lease was up. In december we had the option to buy the lease out residual that we owed was 27 000, so we opted to buy it. I can sell that car today to carvana carmax for over 40 000. That’S a pretty solid profit to be made.
It is a hard time to buy cars and where you live, that might not be an issue, maybe you’re an area where you’ve got dealers who aren’t charging over msrp or maybe a surplus of cars. But at least my experience here in southern california has been really hard trying to find cars. We have friends who bought a toyota sienna van for almost ten thousand dollars over msrp, and that was after negotiation to get to these things. Cars now really hard to find – and this is my story about what happened to me – that took on a life of its own, and i thought it would make sense to share that story here and i don’t hold any animosity towards towards mercedes. What i do starting to have a lot of contempt for is the current dealership model here in the u.s, it was designed to protect consumers to help foster competition so that we could get the lower prices. That was the idea behind it, but like so many once good ideas, time has kind of perverted that model. Right now – and i’m not saying every dealer does this – there are still some that are looking to protect their consumers and sell cars for for msrp, but clearly the idea of protecting the consumers. Uh is no longer there uh with the dealer model and i think something has to change. It’S probably why so many people there’s part of reason why so many people are gravitating towards alternative brands. Some people are going towards towards tesla.
I think what people ultimately move. Uh towards rivian and lucid, and whatever comes next, that takes out that dealer model, and it’s also why there’s been so much resistance met, especially to tesla for selling cars directly to consumers. Why they’ve been fighting lawsuits for years? Why they can’t officially sell cars in all 50 states? Why, at their showrooms, you can’t actually buy cars. You can just go online and order them there. There’S a lot of history and amos and a lot of lobbying dollars behind this and it’s an example of a system being fundamentally broken and flawed in the u.s, something that i hope can change, hope change for the better for consumers and i understand capitalism. I understand that the dealerships have the option to charge whatever they want.
That’S the beauty of a capitalist society. They can charge whatever they want, people will pay for them and they can keep doing it, but as a consumer, i also have a voice, and i chose to speak with my wallet or in this case the lack of opening my wallet and deciding not to spend The money for that car, so i think that argument goes both ways, but the dealer model here, in my opinion, is fundamentally flawed and if you’ve bought a car in the u.s in the past, probably 24 months, i’m sure you’ve experienced some form of this and i Wanted to tell my own story and share what happened to me. Hopefully we can start a discussion and maybe it can kind of shed some light on a system that to me needs to be fixed. .