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

Tags: &, AMEX, Allen, Bank, Capital, Capricorn, Commission, Company, Conference, DealerTrack, More…

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Comment by Thomas A. Kelly on January 11, 2012 at 5:12pm: I think privacy issues may be beyond the scope of the DMV. The State AT would handle that I believe.

Comment by Eric Damiani on January 11, 2012 at 4:52pm: From the Automotive News Article:

"Bruce Gould, executive director of the Virginia Motor Vehicle Dealer Board, said in an e-mail today that TrueCar "should be OK" as long as its new pricing model complies with Virginia's payment guidelines for lead generators. The payment essentially has to be a flat amount, not tied to a sale or referral."

I don't understand why the Privacy Issued was not discussed, True Car retaining ownership of the referral and the advertising violations. I hope the Virginia Dealer Association is aware of these other issueds and bring them to the attention of Mr. Gould.

TrueCar and Dealers were fined:

"House said that some Louisiana dealers and Zag.com, the former name for some of TrueCar's operations, paid fines for advertising violations in the late summer and fall of 2011"

The article doesn't say that they approved to do business as the Yahoo article states.

Read more: http://www.autonews.com/article/20120111/RETAIL01/120119935#ixzz1jB...

Comment by James A. Ziegler on January 11, 2012 at 4:49pm: WOW, the latest article about TrueCar in Automotive News is getting a lot of angry comments by their readers... LOOK http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120111/RETAIL0...

Comment by Heather Graham on January 11, 2012 at 4:45pm: Thanks Jay and Dave!

Comment by Heather Graham on January 11, 2012 at 4:45pm: When all this broke loose, I inquired to my Zag rep and asked what they were pulling from each dealership specifically. She sent me a standard 3 page document that was updated in 1-11. This includes a 90 day history extraction when first signing up!

It's a far cry from what is in our contracted dated 3-10 (on a contract version dated 1-10) in which the DMS was referred to in a couple of sentences! I have the pdf of the more recent document.....if you'd like to see it, send me a note and I'll forward it to you (or let me know how to upload it to this site).

Comment by Jay Prassel on January 11, 2012 at 4:44pm: @Jim, you're right, somebody had to use their credit card.

Comment by David Blassingame on January 11, 2012 at 4:41pm: Automotive News just published this.

http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120111/RETAIL0...

Scott Painter has agree to change his method of collection from dealers in Virginia.

Comment by James A. Ziegler on January 11, 2012 at 4:38pm: No matter what TrueCar says... somebody in that company obviously bought those domain names. AND that shows us beyond a shadow of a doubt what their agenda is and how their culture feels about their customers, the dealers who they have designed a program to put out of business. The truth is not in them ...or at least that's the way I see it. Am I wrong?