Automotive Industry News

It's not actually the dealers that are dropping the ball most of the time; it's the automakers themselves. They may not ship what has been requested by the dealers, instead shipping the vehicle they want. This leaves the dealers with an inventory that isn't what they requested or what their customers want.

Now that dealer is stuck with vehicles that are not what the customer wants or needs. At times it will mean a huge backup of inventory that will sit around for months. Those hard to sell vehicles need to go, but how are they supposed to go about the process?

Continued build up of those vehicles can leave the dealer with absolutely no cars that will fit their customers' needs or wants. You will definitely want to figure this in when you head into that local dealership and don't see a car you want.

Those vehicles that sit around for a while become a "brown banana". A vehicle that is sitting around and will be losing the value as it continues to be on the lot. This leaves the dealer with a problem they aren't sure how to fix.

Giving away the cars free, while it might thrill customers, is something that isn't going to happen. Even when they knock off a lot of money on the price, they are hurting themselves as dealerships are held to making a certain amount of profit. If they don't make that amount of profit, they could be shut down.

Remember those old days when you use to head to shop for a car and the salesperson would basically jam a sale down your throat? Yes, we really don't need those days to come back again, because it made the process of looking at vehicles a real pain.

You've probably had it done before - you know the old 'let me see those keys' routine. They would state they needed to look at your car to value it for trade-in, however, once those keys were gone it took some might serious persuasion for them to bring your car around so you could leave.

They would then begin a process in which they would wear you down over time and hopefully talk you into a sale. This was something that would convince many people that all dealers were bad. This also had people getting vehicles they didn't want and couldn't afford.

Hopefully this automotive industry news has allowed you to see that it can be a complex situation between the automaker, the dealer and the customer. Automakers need to work with their dealers so that all benefit.