The Economist took a look at the business of car dealerships:

• In the past buyers would go to dealers to figure out what car they want to buy. Nowadays customers research on the internet and come to the dealership with a model and price in mind.
• Some dealers are trying to increase convenience by bringing cars to potential buyers’ houses for test drives.
• But customers have realized that test drives are largely pointless, since there’s usually little that can be learnt from a quick spin, and taking one may create an irrational emotional attachment that a dealer can exploit.
• What budding car owners do want however is someone who can talk them through the various features – without trying to sell them so they can make an informed decision.
• They also would prefer not to haggle.
• This is all to the carmakers advantage. Having a showroom that focuses on features could create brand loyalty through an Apple store like experience.
• Having customers believe that prices can’t be bargained with could also help carmakers raise prices.
• And since cars are increasingly connected to the internet and communicate data back to the carmaker, auto manufacturers are beginning to build a relationship with customers anyway.

Read more about the business, its history, the legal protections that it has, and how Tesla is trying to upend everything over here.

Source: The Economist

Facebook looked through its data to figure out what educational institutions have to do with marriage:

• 15% of married Facebookers appeared to have met their spouse in high school. Twice as many did so in college.
• Individuals are more likely to meet their spouse in high school if they live in rural areas.
• The schools that produce the most marriages are also often the most religious.
• At Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology where men make up 88% of the student population, there’s a 70% chance that a woman will find her husband at the university.

Check out the fill list of top colleges to find your life partner, the methodology, and some incredible infographics over here.

Source: Facebook

The New York Times and Tesla are currently engaged in a fight over a negative review that the Times posted about one of Tesla’s electric cars. Patrick George notes that this isn’t the first time that the auto and journalism industries have been at odds with one another. Here are some of the more interesting examples of the two disagreeing:

• In 1986 CBS aired a special about the unintended acceleration problems of the Audi 5000 sedan. The special included footage of an accelerator pedal pushing itself down. The footage was faked, the charges were baseless, and the news coverage almost destroyed Audi.
• In 1993 Dateline tried to show that GM vehicles had a propensity to explode in cases of side collisions. Footage of such an explosion terrified audiences although most cars would likely have the same problem if Dateline strapped explosives onto the side of other vehicles as well.
• In 2011 ABC produced a segment about random incidents of uncontrollable acceleration in Toyota vehicles. Sales of the vehicles tanked and recalls were initiated. Subsequent analysis has suggested that there was nothing wrong with the cars themselves.
• The history of bad blood between the two industries might be, in part, a result of journalists not truly understanding how cars actually work.

Read other examples of the media both fairly and unfairly targeting automobiles, why journalists do it, and thoughts on the Tesla review over here.

Source: Jalopnik

Jay Yarow went through a Quora discussion to identify certain trends in the failures of start-ups. He listed ten start-up ideas that never work, although he did point out that they don’t work – until they do. They include:

• Search – companies have tried and failed to compete with Google and Bing. It’s not happening.
• Hyper-Local news. Such start-ups aim to produce news stories that are relevant to you and your neighborhood. AOL is the latest entrant in the arena. It never works – the market isn’t big enough.
• An email competitor. Google tried and failed with Wave – a product that they said would change email forever and would displace it. Google was wrong.
• A better car company. Several companies have tried and failed to enter the car-market. You could point to Tesla as a successful example but the company in its 9 years has sold fewer than 2,000 cars.
• Kids. Several companies think there’s a huge opportunity in making things related to kids. But the market isn’t big enough – there are only 4 million new kids in the US a year, and Toy’ R Us, Walmart and Target dominate it.

To read more examples of ideas that just won’t work including social recommendations, micropayments, and music startups among others, click here.

Source: Business Insider

Via: Newmark’s Door