Ford Will Spare You Hours At A Dealership With New Online Tool

Driving around in a new car is undoubtedly great, but the process of acquire a new ride can be a far cry from fun. If you’ve ever gone shopping in a dealership you’ll know that halfway through the affair you’ll be wondering if you’ll ever make it back home again. Between the paperwork, waiting, and negotiating, it becomes very grueling, very fast.

Ford wants to end the purgatory-esque image that is so often associated with car dealerships with a new online shopping experience called, Ready.Shop.Go. This web tool will launch in several Midwestern states within the next few months and will allow users to complete some of the most annoying steps of buying a car before they ever set foot in a dealership.

“People are looking for better online solutions, and with RSG it offers time savings and convenience,” Chris Thornton, the Retail Network Experience Manager at Ford, tells Inverse. “We’re enabling the customer to be in control and shop on their terms. That way if they’ve done the experience up front, it’s going to save time for them and cut down delivery time that would normally be associated with buying or leasing a new vehicle.”

While this won’t completely cut out all of the hoops you need to jump through to hop in a new whip, Ford hopes it will be the first step in streamlining the process. Customers have the ability to browse through prices, lease options, schedule test drives, and even apply for credit right from their home.

“That amount of flexibility and transparency in the process is a time save because they can do that on their own, fill out all that personal info and submit that through Ford credit and they can get an online approval back in as quickly as 60 seconds,” Jeff Schiller, Ford’s Retail Network Coordinator, tells Inverse.

So if you’re looking for a new Mustang in the Midwest and you don’t want to spend your whole day at Ford, this might be a simple solution to expedite closing a deal. The feature will be implemented right onto Ford’s website so you won’t need to do anything special to start using it.

Even though this will save you time, paperwork is unfortunately an inevitable part of car shopping. Thornton and his team are working on trying to make shopping with them as seamless as possible.

“This is like an enhanced shopping experience, but there’s still a number of forms you have to sign once you go into the dealership,” he explained. “So we’re looking at how we can incorporate more of those forms into the experience, so save more time for the customer.”

Now that’s a future I can confidently say all of humanity is looking forward to.