Amazon to start selling cars

Amazon announced that from next year, they will sell cars on their site. Amazon won't be the actual seller of the cars, the local dealerships will have that honour. This is due to strict laws in many states created to protect car dealers.

The announcement doesn't give details about how much Amazon will receive for each car sold, but given that car sales is already a low margin industry, I don't expect it to be much. For Amazon, this is probably more to do with forging a relationship with Hyundai, where new cars will now have access to the hands-free Alexa technology. The next step would be for Hyundai to use Amazon's AI technology to help improve the manufacturing process, and to run all their factories on AWS.

The threat from Amazon was still enough to send the share prices of online car dealerships down over 5% on the news. That business is tough enough, I wouldn't want to be competing against Amazon.

Read more here - Amazon will allow auto dealers to sell cars on its site, starting with Hyundai.