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Originally Posted by Porsche Chick
The dealership in the mall is a huge gimmick, plus it keeps you from test driving the car. Seriously? Why - oh, why - are people lining up to buy a car they haven't driven?
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I don't about your neck of the woods but over here they put the showroom in the NJ mall with perhaps the highest incomes in the state. I seriously doubt that there have been any visitors to that mall, who live in $1 million and above homes, who have not stopped into that showroom. Getting a person to go out of their way to otherwise visit a Tesla showroom is a whole bigger effort requiring advertising, direct marketing and manpower to execute. The funny thing is that I'm willing to bet they took the idea from the German luxury car dealers that came up with the idea to park new Porsches, Mercs and Range Rovers in the mall's corridors but didn't take the next logical steps of putting the cars in an actual store where they could sell to the customer properly and build a book of leads.
Its the Apple store equivalent of cars. Frankly I can't believe luxury car makers haven't followed Tesla's lead. You have wealthy shoppers walking inches past your product with tons of parking space to house test drive cars that can be valet'd over to the buyer in minutes.
And as far as buying the car without ever driving it, there must be many, many people who configured a Porsche online and pretty much had their mind 99% made up before the first model even came off the trailer. The showroom visit was more confirmation of the prior website experience. They only needed to confirm that trim looked as good in person as it did in all those high resolution pics. That the seat was as plush to their bascksides as they hoped. That exterior had the wow factor that they required. Most luxury buyers aren't really serious driving enthusiasts that demand some spirited driving experience during a test drive...nothing like when our big Porsche dealer here sent over two Caymans during an autocross just for us to beat on. A luxury car test drive is probably no different than a Honda test drive, drive down the street. Stop at a few lights. Maybe go crazy and go 5 miles over the sped limit. That's not really where the sale is made with a 'passive' type driver. It was back at the showroom when they imagined what their neighbor's face would look like when they pulled up in that new S class or 7 series. Tesla knock most of that right off the salesman's to do list right inside the mall.