Car Manufacturing: There's Gotta Be a Better Way

I don't proclaim to know much about the car manufacturing or sales industry, but one thing seems very peculiar to me... the dealership formula.

Even in good times, this concept doesn't make sense to me, and now in bad times it's even more confusing. Here's what I'm talking about:

You go to a dealer and they have hundreds, perhaps thousands of cars just sitting there in the lot. For starters, this seems like a tremendous expense in terms of maintaining inventory, paying for property and associated taxes, keeping the cars clean and safe, and even trying to match up the right car with the right person.

It seems to me that it would make more sense to have one central holding space for a large amount of cars (or even a produce-on-demand type system that would only produce cars when needed), and then the dealers themselves would have only a few dozen on their lot to use as test drive or showroom models. Then if somebody wanted a certain car the dealer would order it and ship it out (which seems to happen a lot anyway).

Again, the automobile industry is not my forte, but having cars just sit there for weeks/months on end doesn't make sense to me.

Who knows, maybe things will change... down the road...