Nice article, all too true. GM does have a "build your own" feature on their website. I have used it to shop for a truck. After you select all the options you want, the system will find all the trucks that are close to what you want at local dealers. The problem is the trucks they find are never exactly what you want. They have packages or other options that you don't want or they don't have the options you do want. As an example I want an auto dimming rear view mirror, but I don't want to buy a "convenience package" I know I can order a truck and wait for delivery and pay full retail, but as the system works now you have to buy off the lot to get the incentives. And without the incentives I can not afford a new truck. So, I will probably settle for a truck that is as close to what I want off the lot. The dealer system probably will not change for a long time.

Dear Mr. Levinson, I 100 percent share your views but man is man: it's going to be very hard to educate youngs to buy cars via the internet, with seniors it's almost impossible, at least in the EU. Youngs do e-buy computers, phones, music, e-books but a car is a car, is much more than a question of mere mobility, there's some kind of physical pleasure in looking at it, and being talked by a dealer's salesman to buy what it was not intended to be bought. Even professional car purchases are dominated on this side of the Atlantic by wives and sons and daughters, who want to see cars, touch them, smell them, sit in them, look into the trunk. Some years ago, there was a kind of real war between EU dealers and car makers for original or non orginal spares, things have not improved since, because one still can never be sure if the spare is original or a fake. Sitting at my desk, I still see the question quite hamletic: I bought myself an electric byke, I evaluated and selected it via internet, but I went to a local dealer to see and order it ...   

Agree - go to Japan.  It is exactly that purchasing model.  It can be done. 

But a huge source of waste is the paperwork.  The last time I was in a dealership, I challenged them on the mountains of paper that had to be filled out.  I told them there was such a thing called electronic records.  I was told that due to (frivolous) lawsuits, electronic records in the car industry was not acceptable - it all had to be paper.  Whether or not that was precisely true remains to be seen; however, since everywhere I have ever gone there are mountains of paper that no other industry matches, there likely is some truth.