There's very little difference between a dealership, and a scalper. Both capture all the items in the market, then work together to inflate the value, artificially. The difference is that many places have laws preventing scalpers, and many places have laws requiring that you buy a car through a dealerships.

Dealers and scalpers provide liquidity. Sellers want the item off their hands now, buyers want something without waiting months for a seller.

Dealers link these two needs together and take a cut for the service. There is no monopoly or requirement to sell a car through a dealer. It’s just that people find the service worth the cost.

We’re talking about new cars though. There are laws in some states (see everywhere Tesla doesn’t have stores) requiring dealers to be used instead of going direct to manufacturers.

> There is no monopoly or requirement to sell a car through a dealer.

This is false. In most states, direct sales are illegal.

Actually dealers have monopoly protected by law in most states.

Monopoly as in there is only one dealer?

> monopoly: the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.

Dealers have a legislatively enforced [1] monopoly on new car sales.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dealerships_in_the_United_...

> There is no monopoly or requirement to sell a car through a dealer.

This is incorrect. It's required, by law, in most states:

> In the United States, direct manufacturer auto sales are prohibited in almost every state by franchise laws requiring that new cars be sold only by dealers.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dealerships_in_the_United_...

In WA if you trade in to a dealer you pay tax on cars difference. When you sell privately, buyer pays full 10% tax on used car.

I think a lot of the objection is that dealers don't make it clear what they're actually selling the thing for.

I've heard of plenty of cases (so yeah, anecdata) where a dealer might advertise the car at MSRP, but it's not until you get in there, and actually try to buy it that they reveal they won't actually sell it for MSRP - there's "market adjustments", and mandatory addons and other things.

Price obfuscation and outright lies are of course, unacceptable. I think the general advice for years though, has been to email dealerships asking for final price and using Costco as the benchmark for who to waste time with or not. Although, the supply demand situation may have shifted so far into seller’s favor that dealers can abandon even those standards.

> dealers can abandon even those standards.

Again, based on anecdata, They really have.

I heard of one person who confirmed a price with a dealer, drove there, then suddenly Salesmanager Bob (who confirmed the price) is suddenly unavailable, and the other sales managers couldn't possibly honour that because there's all these other fees, charges, mandatory addons for it.

Their attitude is basically if you want it, and you've spent this much time already trying to buy it - what's another couple of thousand to you.

I know so many people who knowingly sold their used cars that had structural issues that are hard to diagnose.

Selling used cars in the current market is one area where information asymmetry probably tends to play out in favor of sellers trading into dealers. Of course, it probably screws the ultimate buyers in a lot of cases. It's not just structural issues. There are a lot of known mechanical issues that a used car manager isn't going to notice in a 5 minute examination for a tradein.

Former owners aren’t middlemen, which is a huge difference. I’m much more ok with a brand deciding they need to raise prices as opposed to someone in the middle doing it and pocketing the difference.

The site isn't meant to "get one over" on dealerships. It's merely a tool riding on the back of capitalism and free speech to reward the lowest priced dealers, pull back the veil of sneaky bait and switch pricing models and attempt to force more competition across the industry.