Retail.com/AutoCentric. This pilot, run inthe Washington, D.C., area in 2001, was aimed at generatingmore leads for GM dealers, using the BuyPower "locate toorder" model but presenting information about cars frommultiple OEMs, not just GM. GM's motivation lay in thediscovery that there is little overlap (about 4 percent)between BuyPower users and those usingmanufacturer-independent sites such as Autobytel.com. Theplan was to create a joint venture called AutoCentric inwhich GM and its dealers would each hold 50 percent equitystakes. GM formed a partnership to use Autobytel.com'sfunctionality as the engine underlying the effort, which wasinternally dubbed Retail.com. The pilot, initially scheduledto run 90 days, was extended by several months, but GMultimately pulled the plug with the admission that "thebusiness model just doesn't work right now." Dealersreported that AutoCentric didn't result in a rise inqualified leads, and the appeal of the equity stake ideawent down the drain with dotcom share deflation.

Direct Sales Over the Internet. GM pilotedthis process in Brazil with a new car model called theCelta. Nearly 70 percent of the model's 112,000 sales (byyear-end 2001) were consummated online. Consumers canpurchase a Celta either by accessing the Web from home or byusing kiosks at Chevrolet dealerships throughoutBrazil. Buyers can also customize their Celta via theWeb. The dealer serves only as a drop-off point for thepreordered vehicles.

According to GM, Brazil is a price-sensitive market where more than 60percent of all auto sales are economy models and more than 65 percentof new car buyers have Internet access. Maryann Keller, author of twobooks about GM and the former president of Priceline.com's automotiveservices group, entirely dismisses the Celta's success as a tax dodgefor consumers who benefited from a quirky legal loophole (onlinepurchasers skipped a tax normally levied on the factory-to-dealer legin a conventional buy). GM says that loophole has since been closedand attributes the price advantage of the online purchase - about $700less than the showroom sticker price - to efficiencies built in to thesupply chain. The Celta's manufacturing process was designed from thebeginning to reflect Internet demand rather than just to crank outcars and push them into showrooms and parking lots.