Car dealerships in North America continue to wrestle with major disruptions that started last week with cyberattacks on a software company used widely in the auto retail sales sector.
CDK Global, a company that provides software for thousands of auto dealers in the U.S. and Canada, was hit by back-to-back cyberattacks Wednesday. That led to an outage that has continued to impact operations.
For prospective car buyers, that may mean delays at dealerships or vehicle orders written up by hand, with no immediate end in sight.
On Monday, Group 1 Automotive Inc., a $4 billion automotive retailers, said that it continued to use “alternative processes” to sell cars to its customers.
It sounds like it is currently trivially easy to make car dealers miserable simply by pretending to be interested in buying a car and then deciding not to buy at the last moment once they’ve gone to all the trouble.
It depends on what car you are interested in. Some cars are in such high demand that they don’t stay on the lot that long, they’ll just wait a week and get another taker.
I used to have this group of friends that were pretty savvy on finances and negotiations. For fun and sport, they would go to auto dealers and pretend to be interested in a car they had zero intentions of buying. All to hook and reel in the salesman and then decide “no” at the last second and walk off the lot.
I mean, the idea is humorous and I dislike most auto salesmen too, but I have better things to do.
Oh no not the dealerships 😐
They’re literally the backbone of funding for conservative politics lol
I worked for a car selling website and one thing I loved was the lack of pressure. Now im in insurance and its way more stressful in that everything needs to work perfectly.
I worked at car dealers in the late 1990s. Even then, when the power went out occasionally, and we had to revert to pen and paper, it was a fucking nightmare. I cannot imagine the hand-wringing that went on with the same situation in 2024.
The last time I bought a car, I asked a few questions about how they calculated their financing and was told “Don’t worry, the numbers are correct, the software does the hard math for us”. I would have walked out right then if I didn’t understand more of it than they did – I was still getting the deal I wanted, and ultimately I was able to get the numbers to make sense with the help of the Internet. But if the software really did go down, that dealership would probably grind to a halt, because nobody could do the hard math manually, not even the “Finance Manager”.
The “hard math” can be done easily and quickly with a financial calculator app. The one I have shows the amortization schedule as well.
I agree, which is why I was astounded when the Finance Manager basically said he didn’t know. Isn’t that his job?
First they came for the car dealerships…
And I did nothing, because fuck those fucknozzles in the ass with broken glass
I got my oil changed a week and a half ago and they actually said - they couldn’t do certain things because of the cyberattack. As a result they couldn’t log it or print out paperwork or… something. For an oil change it wasn’t a big deal, but I didn’t even think about the rest of the dealership’s operations.
Fortunately, their payment system is isolated, but it gave me pause before I swiped my card.
I work in tech and the biggest regret I ever made was subscribing to security reports. For months, I was doom scrolling about the latest vulnerability, or another leak.
I think I’ve accepted that somewhere, my CC is already exposed.
Oh, yeah. I just gave up on it. All my info got exposed in the recent AT&T hack, including my SS#, which is available as a data dump on the open web.
My credit is locked, I use a data removal service, and my fingers are crossed. As for the rest… Meh. I’m just gonna keep on swimming.
