Automaker consultant Tom Goodwin exposes chaos in the car buying process

Dealerships have become so technology-obsessed that they've forgotten the fundamentals of customer service, Goodwin argues. (3 min. read)

Author

Marcus Amick
June 03, 2025

Tom Goodwin

Tom Goodwin, a marketing operations expert and author of "Digital Darwinism,” discovered just how broken the car buying process has become when he went undercover as a customer for a major OEM consulting project.

The breaking point? One simple email inquiry that triggered six different responses (many of them AI-generated) within two hours.

What they’re saying: "This was simply one of about 53 examples that I came up with of the entire process being broken as a consumer," Goodwin told Daily Dealer Live hosts Sam D'Arc and Yossi Levi. "It's representative of an industry that has adopted so much technology and become so complex... it just completely ignores what it is to be a human being just trying to do simple stuff.”

Why it matters: Dealerships have become so technology-obsessed that they've forgotten the fundamentals of customer service. The result is a broken system that actively deters potential buyers instead of converting them into sales.

“[Dealers] just completely ignore what [the process] used to be—a human being just trying to do simple stuff,” he said.

From the inside out:  Goodwin argues the industry's customer service problems stem from a fundamental lack of empathy at every level. The people designing and implementing these systems have completely lost touch with the buyer experience.

“The worst people on the planet to know what it's like to buy a car are the people who work for an OEM, because they've not bought a car for the last 27 years; their assistant has bought the last seven cars for them,” he added. 

“The second worst people on the planet when it comes to knowing what it's like to buy a car are people who work in a car dealership, because they have a completely removed perspective on what it’s like.”

Zeroing in on solutions: To address the challenges, Goodwin recommends that dealerships focus on expediting their response time with more one-on-one human interaction—leveraging whatever method best suits that sales associate, be it text or phone call.

“The whole industry is obsessed with AI. We (car buyers) are very valuable people. We spend a lot of money. This idea that, somehow, our time is not worth an assistant in the local dealer is absurd. So just spend a little bit of time. Remember some details, use basic CRM…It should be nice to talk to people.” 

Final note: There’s a place for AI in the car sales process. However, the technology is better applied for follow-ups for operational matters like service bay requests, parts of the process that are more friendly to automate, said Goodwin. 

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