If there are no negotiations, and Ford's price is too high compared to the market, Ford is going to lose sales. That's micro-economics.
> besides your house, it's likely the most expensive thing you'll ever buy.
This is Hacker News, and I've spent 10s of millions on servers, colo, and cloud.
> This is Hacker News, and I've spent 10s of millions on servers, colo, and cloud.
I'd bet you negotiated those contracts too.
I did negotiate server/colo/cloud prices, but I spent person-months of effort deconstructing what the right price was. I've never done that for a car.
I once interviewed for a CTO job at a major storage vendor, and in the discussion they said that most of their major customers successfully reverse-engineered prices, and that kept their margins down. I've heard that (over beers) from some server resellers, too.
What does this mean? Did they perfect the negotiating process? Did they figure out what your margins are, then demanded that you halve them?
The customers figured out the prices of the hardware: disks or flash, a way to connect them to a "server", the "server", the network that the "server" offers.
If it's truly absurd then they'll walk away and buy a cheaper car (or a used car) instead.
Right - so let's get rid of negotiations all together and everyone pays whatever absurd price the sales team at Ford can think of without laughing out loud.
This isn't a box of cookies folks... besides your house, it's likely the most expensive thing you'll ever buy.
There is no "one" price for the asset... unless we remove all the competition that drives down prices (dealerships) and put all the assets into a single basket owned by one of a small handful of manufacturers in the world. What could go wrong?