German Car Sales Plunged An Astounding 50% In May

Even though Germany had its car showrooms open all of last month, most customers still stayed away from making purchases, despite all of the safety measures taken by retailers.

New car sales fell 50 percent last month, which is only slightly better than the numbers from April, which stood at 61 percent. There were a total of 168,148 registrations, according to data released by the KBA transport authority.

Read Article

PUGPROUD - 6/5/2020 2:36:36 PM

+2 Boost

To no one's surprise. Conserving capital during times of great uncertainty and unemployment to be expected.

MDarringer - 6/5/2020 3:38:51 PM

0 Boost

Our sales are definitely picking up but we are having people tell us they wanted to buy a car but assumed we were closed. The entire group was open the entire time. Meanwhile, inventory is collapsing with an unsteady refill promised.

PUGPROUD - 6/6/2020 8:39:04 AM

0 Boost

Do you anticipate the current situation driving up prices of both used and new cars until inventory refreshed or for prices to remain stable or down because of buyer reluctance to spend during period of uncertainty?

MDarringer - 6/6/2020 9:54:09 AM

+2 Boost

We're NOT seeing buyer reluctance. Sales are happening.

We're stuck with the Monroney sticker on new cars because we don't want to be perceived as doing "market value adjustments" as group policy, but because stock is tight we can afford to not deal as deeply. In fact, we have gone to placing "FBO" sheets on cars where we put the first, best offer take it or leave it. We've FBO'ed our Ford and GM crossovers with some money off, but not much. Pickups have "no haggle" pricing at full list take it or leave it. We are able to accept orders and that's been busy.

We have inflated our CPO cars.

We are also not being generous on trade-ins at our dealers because we want to avoid the expense of taking in headaches, but we sometimes refer a customer to one of our sub-channels if we're willing to take the car as an "as is" used rather than something that we can say is CPO. We have "channel" used car lots that are name-associated with our dealers and sub-channel lots that are ours, but appear to be independent because they are not name-associated. So "El Rey Supremo" used cars in the hood is ours, but is not name-associated. When we refer a customer to the sub-channel, a "representative" bids on the car the customer wants to trade in and the customer can decide to accept the offer or not. Then as a "courtesy" we handle the transaction for the customer.

Pent up demand for goods will cause a nice little 3rd quarter boom.