Instead, GM BuyPower proved to be a confusing maze of marketing material that did nothing to ease the painful process of haggling with dealers for a car price. The crucial difference between BuyPower and AutoCentric is the fact that AutoCentric will team with dealers of all vehicle makes and models, while BuyPower only showcases General Motors' cars. Cars have been a tough sell online. Cars can only be sold legally through dealerships, requiring dealers to cooperate with the manufacturers they sometimes view suspiciously. Also complicating matters is that car pricing varies a great deal by region, making the kind of universal quotes that shoppers want hard to deliver.
Selection is a big issue as well.
Manufacturers like GM originally wanted to have shoppers look only at their own models, but with AutoCentric GM will bow to consumer demands to compare all cars, say, in a particular price range, and not just Fords. Some analysts say consumers could have a hard time swallowing the information as objective. On the surface AutoCentric may sound like yet another unnecessary layer between consumers and new cars, but most analysts seem to think it's a good deal more promising than GM BuyPower. Any online car dealership has got to allow consumers to either quickly find the bottom-line price, or a price that is very close to it. Still, when GM BuyPower launched, the company was full of promises that consumers could get price quotes.