The original agency debate focused heavily on price consistency, direct customer access and a cleaner online-to-offline journey.

Those benefits are possible, but they describe only the visible side of the model. When the OEM becomes the contracting seller, activities previously absorbed by independent retailers move upstream as well.

Inventory risk, local pricing exceptions, customer data, order management, complaints, refunds, delivery failures and parts of consumer responsibility need an owner in the new model.

An agent can still provide consultation, test drives, handover, local relationship management and parts of aftersales support.

The economic role changes because the retailer may no longer buy the vehicle, set the final transaction price or carry the same stock and discount exposure.

Dealer remuneration therefore has to reflect which operating activities, assets and risks remain with the retailer.

Central price control works only when the central organisation can handle local tax, finance, fleet, trade-in, campaign and delivery exceptions without pushing them back into informal dealer workarounds.

Direct customer ownership works only when CRM, consent, order, payment and service systems can carry one customer record through the lifecycle.

A central sales contract therefore creates an operating requirement across functions that may previously have been separated by the wholesale boundary.

Existing dealer agreements, stock, systems, customer promises and local processes do not disappear on the date the new contract starts.

For a period, old and new economics can coexist. Dealers still need confidence in the transition, the OEM needs stable market performance, and customers should not become the integration test.

The implementation plan therefore needs an explicit parallel-run design covering stock, incentives, data, customer communication, systems cutover and exception ownership.

Agency and direct-sales structures can change consumer, competition, tax and principal-agent obligations. The detailed effect varies by market and contract.

Those questions are part of the operating design because they determine who can set price, hold stock, contract with the customer and carry liability.

This article is commercial and operating analysis only. Current market-specific legal advice is required before implementation.

Before approving an agency transition, map each material activity against four questions: who performs it today, who performs it tomorrow, which balance sheet carries the exposure, and which system records the event.

If one of those answers is unclear, the model has not finished transferring the work even if the legal contract has changed.

The useful implementation metric is how many critical operating events have one clear owner and one working path through the new system.

The later at.Pointe work on direct sales follows the same mechanism further: once the independent dealer buffer is removed, the manufacturer inherits more of the variance around pricing, stock, fulfilment and aftersales.

The distribution-economics work also looks at the capital side: changing the channel only creates value when the upstream cost and operating structure changes with it.

This 2024 article is retained as the agency-model decision tool rather than as a forecast that agency will become the universal retail model.