In reply to SV reX :
At the risk of starting to sound like the crazy guy who hasn't showered in three presidents standing on the corner screaming that the end is near....
I think that the manufacturers see used cars as a problem that they'd like to solve. Kind of like how the DeBeers people have convinced everyone that the diamond is "forever" but what absolute buffoon would try to give his fiancee a rock that had previous sat atop another finger?
While it may not be some mustache-twirling evil scheme that's been mapped out step-by-step, I think we're seeing signs that the days where you buy your car and own it until you don't want it anymore are numbered. Once that happens, you really don't need the independent dealers as much. Sure, the manufacturer doesn't want to deal in the used market as it exists right now, so let the indys - franchise holders with your brand or not - take those trade-ins and auction them to each other and sell them, undercutting your product on price all day every day.
The first thing that they're doing is trying to get people to purchase their car to order and then have it shipped to their local dealer where they take delivery. You don't really need an independent dealer to make that happen. You can have a small(ish) retail location that serves as a place for the truck to unload, hold the car for a week or so until the customer picks it up, and some offices to do the paperwork. Sure, the trade-ins will come but you can load those up and send them to auction and the used dealers will buy them up. Maybe you partner with your existing franchise dealers and instead of having them order truckloads of vehicles that are looking for a buyer, they can deal in used cars, get a fee to deliver new cars, sell financial products, and perform service. Hell, maybe you can even use that as a non-customer-facing location to simply put cars on Carvana-like carriers and deliver directly to the consumer.
Next up, they're working really hard to get into the MRC business. As a manufacturer, they don't want to have to rely on making a number of new sales every month, they want to have subscriptions with revenue that comes in from the existing customer base every month. So we get heated seats subscriptions, mandated OnStar (they're probably recognizing that revenue over a period of time as opposed to all at once, if I had to guess. I'm no CPA or MBA, but if they just wanted people to get used to OnStar, raising the vehicle price by that much would do the trick; I think you have to separate that cost out in order to recognize it as a pre-payment on a recurring monthly revenue item), and it'll continue from there. They're going to walk consumers in to this regime slowly and easily and let all the rage blow off when it's just heated seats. But once it's considered "normal" and people just shrug and buy it anyway they'll apply that to pretty much anything they can.
Once we're accustomed to paying our "options subscription" every month, the manufacturers will start telling us that maybe this model or that can't really be "bought" anymore, but it's lease-only with no buyout option. See also: The GM EV1 as well as more recent news with manufacturers making the process expensive or written out by contract. That's kind of a waypoint, I think, and it could be a way to handle franchise dealers - you're not really selling new cars like you used to, but you can re-sell or re-lease the captive lease returns.
That'll only last until the manufacturer transitions to a "mobility subscription" model. Buy a car? Lease a car? Oh, no, we don't do that anymore. You simply pay a monthly fee of $Texas for a set term and you're renting the car from us. After that term is over, you bring it back and we rent it back out to the next person until the asset is fully depreciated. Since every feature on the car - I mean, Mobility Device - is subscription-based, all the next customer needs to do is choose which option packages they want added to the base subscription and they can drive it off the lot. Something breaks? Well, I'm sure that since you don't own the asset anymore - the manufacturer would hold title, naturally - the provisions of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act no longer apply. You have no right to repair something that you don't own, right? So now you are responsible for keeping your mobility device in good repair and it must be brought to the manufacturer's facility - maybe they own it, maybe that's what the current franchise dealer transitions to - for any sort of maintenance or service. Once fully depreciated and no longer worth continuing to rent out, scrap it.
Anyway, that's my tinfoil hat theory. There's some holes there: what do the books look like if the manufacturer holds that much paper on that many discreet assets that they're renting out? Does the manufacturer split into a "mobility maker" factory unit and a "subscription management" unit that "buys" the cars from the factory? How are they going to manage things like registrations on that many cars in that many jurisdictions? Will people show up with porches and titchforks and run them out of town on a rail when they try that? I dunno. But the financial incentive structures that exist right now make doing whatever they can to move to a pure recurring revenue model very attractive. And, frankly, they don't really need an independent dealer network to sell their cars for them to accomplish that.
