I found the following quite telling:

"Abhishek Agrawal, who is the managing director at Vulcan Capital and heads all growth equity investments for the firm, will be joining the TrueCar board of directors.

Current investors in TrueCar include Upfront Ventures, Jeff Skoll’s Capricorn Investment Group, USAA and Allen & Co.

“The Vulcan Capital investment supports TrueCar.com’s mission to bring truth and transparency to automotive retail and provides us with the capital necessary to grow the business and develop better products for consumers and dealers,” said Scott Painter, founder and chief executive officer at TrueCar.

The company calculated that its users and its certified dealers have completed more than 1 million retail transactions since inception, nearly 400,000 this year alone.

TrueCar works with nearly 7,000 franchised and independent dealers operating in all 50 states and the District of Columbia."

The "Transparency" Painter refers to is NOT the common sense legal and moral transparency we in the business are all aware of.  According to Painter himself, he believes the consumer has the right to know all of our triple net costs.  He rails against "stair step" programs and "trunk money" that make that difficult for the consumer to determine.  He thinks if there was absolute transparency, the industry could achieve a 20 million SAAR.  He is either completely ignorant of the fact that complete transparency in a market results in "disintermediation" OR doesn't care. 

"Disintermediation" is the ELIMINATION of the "middle man."

TrueCar still demonizes dealers as a group to attract consumers.  The pitch seems to be that "Our dealers are "transparent" while others are not."  Part of this message is the implication that if not for TrueCar, even TrueCar dealers would be like the dishonest ones.  In other words, car dealers are inherently dishonest.

It seems many dealers figure they are getting some "plus business" out of the relationship.  One might wonder how many of those customer they were going to get anyway, but now pay a fee to TrueCar for.   Previous customers are going to the dealership, then leaving to use TrueCar to validate the dealer's price.  If the TrueCar price is HIGHER than the price the dealer quoted, the dealer never hears about it.  But I'm sure the dealer hears about it when the TrueCar price is lower. 

Some enterprising dealers have cancelled their contracts with TrueCar.  They have found that they can still access the TrueCar price information to validate their own deal and close the transaction quickly WITHOUT paying any fees to TrueCar.  But what is so amazing to me is how dealers are so cooperative and supportive of a business entity with a mission statement that includes objectives that are intended to ruin them while demonizing them as a group. 

WTF!