TRUE CAR and ZAG Cyber Bandits, Parasites or Good for the Car Business?
Jim Ziegler asks...
I am hearing a lot of discussion about True Car and ZAG. I continually scratch my head and wonder if desperate dealers are doing the marketing limbo "How Low Can You Go?"
Are we so bad at what we do that we have to line up and pay vendors to lose money? AND, who is giving these people access to your data that is used against you?
Who owns these companies and what might be their ulterior motive? Sometimes I ask questions to which I already know the answer.
Am I wrong?
What do you think... JIM
Jim Ziegler's Guidance and Recommended Action Plan:
Ten Areas We Need to Concentrate on to Bring This Monster to It's Knees...
- Government investigation of ALL Data Aggregators taking consumer information from dealers' DMS. Sadly enough, dealers who do business with TrueCar are exposed to liability charges. Cut off all access to unecessary data, no matter who takes it from the dealers DMS and make it illegal to "resell identifiable consumer data" and "transactional data".
- Educate Your Fellow Dealers; If anyone takes financial transactional data, they expose the dealer that allowed it to violations, especially if it is passed on to other vendors or shared.
- Educate Consumers to what they're doing with their information...
a. You buy a car from a dealer, do you really want your personal information, and maybe even your financial information, passed along and sold and shared by "God knows who?"
b. These People Charge the Dealer $300 which the dealers have to build into the deal
c. Your Privacy and the Security of your Information could theoretically compromise your identity if you do business a company that takes data from the dealership. - Educate Investors and potential investors they could possibly be mislead if anyone is telling them this is a safe investment because of all of the dealers pushing back, associations pushing back, and government regulators in many states coming after TrueCar's business model as NOT compliant, in some cases they're saying it is Not Legal.
- AMEX, USAA and all of their affiliates do not want the bad consumer relations this push back is creating with their members and customers.
- Cancel your dealership's Affilation with TrueCar. Tell people with TrueCar certificates that YOU don't honor TrueCar and you feel the company is NOT reputable. Educate consumers as to perceived data exposure if they buy from a TrueCar dealer. Make sure that each consumer knows that using TrueCar actually increases their vehicle cost by $300 to $400.
- Make the dealers selling at huge losses take all of those deals. Big problem right now is too many Nissan Dealers and others are taking huge losers to get the factory money. The TrueCar reverse-auction business model will continually push those numbers down until the factory money is non-existent. Consumers need to hear from many dealers, "We don't do TrueCar"
- Keep calling your National and State Dealer Associations demanding they get involved and stay involved... No excuses.
- Get the Manufacturers into the game. If GM, Ford, Toyota, and other majors change the rules about how we advertise and do business to protect the dealers, we can cut off their ability to set pricing. So keep it up at every dealer meeting. Call your Dealer Council Members and protest to your factory reps. Tell the manufacturers, if they want showroom and facility improvements, we need the ability to make fair profits.
- Tell everyone you know. Educate other dealers and industry people. Watch the Painter interviews... I believe this is the first time a vendor has publicly announced they intend to bring down the dealers and hijack our business, taking our profits and starving us out with our own data. Painter has said manufacturers and dealers should go bankrupt and he, in his God-like way "will control distribution..."
When the TrueCar-Yahoo Deal kicks in we need to stand firm and "Just Say No" we don't honor TrueCar deals.
Read this article as a reference: http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20110831%2FFIN...
AND, if you doubt the mission... read this... http://www.zag.com/websiteASSETS/whitepapers/ZAG-WhitePaper3.pdf
Comment
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Comment by David T. Gould on January 20, 2012 at 4:55pm
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Unbelievable Jim. No holds barred.
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Comment by James A. Ziegler on January 20, 2012 at 3:48pm
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Tell me this isn't TRUE ? Just found out http://cars.com is licensing TrueCar bell curve to power http://newcars.com
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Are you believing this? Steven Dietz, partner at GRP Partners, suggests we delete these entire threads. He's acting as if TrueCar is viable and alive when we all know it's dying. The reason he'd love to see this thread and threads like it deleted is because all of the Investment World is backing off of TrueCar because of all the negatives brought to light and the magnification of the company's apparent inane mismanagement. Speaking of mismanagement, GRP Partners is looking really bad here, at least that's the way I perceive it to be. After all they are the financial backers that raised the money to bring this circus sideshow into the market with management resembling the antics of the crazy midgets in "Clown Cars" under the Big Top.
They (GRP Partners) and particularly TrueCar must be rapidly becoming a joke in the financial community... and GRP Partners, a long time respected firm must be getting their fair share of ridicule because of this train wreck, which I am assuming was probably Steven Dietz's brainchild. I am picturing the possibility that he's likely to have been the butt of more than a few jokes in the financial community. Needham LLC must have been an embarrassment to GRP Partners and TrueCar as well. Go to www.GRPPartners.com and check it out.
I am just wondering how AMEX and USAA are feeling about being associated with the tarnished reputation TrueCar is bringing to them as well?
I don't know about GRP Partners command structure, maybe Steve Dietz is the man there BUT I am wondering if the board of directors or the other partners are seeing him as a liability? Just conjecture, mind you, but if it was my company, his position might be standing on a banana peel. When it it was revealed that TrueCar's basic business model violated a number of states' laws, doesn't that smack of total incompetency of all concerned considering it was a $200 Million-dollar crap-shoot? Where was the high-school level due diligence? How could Scott Painter or Steven Dietz possibility save face? Of course I could be totally wrong, just thinking out loud about possibilities and possible scenarios.
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TrueCar Dealer Alert!
It’s been all over the news! You probably have been hearing the controversy regarding TrueCar and other lead generation programs. We have received numerous calls and emails on this subject. LADA contacted LMVC several weeks ago to determine what was being done to protect dealers.
The TrueCar business model is, in many ways, illegal in Louisiana. The Louisiana Motor Vehicle Commission has already called company management in for a meeting and a fine may be forthcoming. TrueCar has also “voluntarily” suspended operations and advertising in the state.
You may be aware that R.S. 32:1254(A) of the Louisiana Franchise Law requires an LMVC license to become a broker in this state. Brokers are only allowed to represent the buyer, not the seller. Contacts must be signed between the buyer and the broker before any service may be rendered by the broker, and no fee may be paid to the broker by the seller. Only the buyer may pay a fee to the broker. Additionally, no one, seller or broker, may use the term “invoice” or “dealer cost” in advertising.
We will keep you posted on any changes. As always, do not hesitate to call (800-375-5232) if you have any questions.
Thank you for your continuing support!
BobLouisiana Automobile Dealers Association
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Comment by Thomas A. Kelly on January 19, 2012 at 3:55pm
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Eric, The author of the article you posted this morning on CNNMoney messaged me.
40 minutes agoDoron LevinThanks for the catch on the botched arithmetic in Truecar story -- we're fixing now.
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CarFax is NOT a dealers friend, neither is Edmunds for that matter. TrueCar is the worst and most blatant BUT I can name a dozen other enemies that use our data against us after they charge us to refer customers to us we would sold anyway before they lowered our profits.
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Comment by bryan w shufelt on January 19, 2012 at 1:19pm
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Talking about people getting Data....Im wondering now what data Car Fax is getting? Like True Car they do not like dealers either, and tell the public how bad we are. When they are getting service info to update a cars history, what else are they getting??? I wonder what a company would pay to know how many cars rolled out of factory warranty today across America??
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Comment by Keith Shetterly on January 19, 2012 at 9:29am -
@ Jim: Did you see what Car Research (CRM company) announced pro-dealer and affirming that they do NOT sell or share dealer data AT ALL? Very strong.
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Kill the Data, kill the Beast(s) Right after NADA we will begin a campaign to make dealers aware and to scrub the DMS of intruders, data pirates and extractors... The Data Wars are about to begin. Right now we need copies of every vendors contract, the part where they disclose what they may do with Data. Send it to me personally.
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That is a MAJOR oops Keith
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