Erin Baker: Is the car dealership a dying breed?

Boutique dealerships, set up in urban centres, areas of high footfall, are doing very well – witness Simon Dixon and his Rockar store at Bluewater for Hyundai, and the Jaguar Land Rover store at Westfield, Stratford. These stores have a lot of custom through them, sell a lot of cars (albeit it tends to be the cheaper, smaller models with less margin in them), and have a much higher proportion of female, and young, visitors than your average dealership on an industrial estate. 

And yet, Speaking to the Managing Director of a mass-market car brand this week, he commented that, despite his brand offering to deliver cars to customers’ homes for test drives, the vast majority of people still prefer to visit a dealership, especially to collect their new purchases. It’s something to do with the theatre of it; a car is a huge financial outlay, and customers want the traditional reward of collecting it with a red ribbon, a handshake from the dealership principal or maybe a bottle of fizz. 

What astonishes me is how long brands have let their dealers languish in the Eighties, full of cheap suits, casual sexism and boring, off-putting static displays of their products. The dealer is the interface between customer and company; for the vast majority of people, the dealer will be their only experience of the brand. Why haven’t manufacturers bent over to make it a positive experience? The only good experience I’ve ever had of testing a new car has been at the Moving Motor Show here at Goodwood.

My mother, a woman in her Sixties, went off to buy her first car in decades last year. She’s a high-flying career woman so has always had company cars, but recently retired. Being cash-rich and time-poor, and, like most people, knowing nothing about cars and so lacking the nerve to buy privately, she took herself off to a huge dealership in Kent to buy the convertible of her dreams from a premium brand. What joy, what excitement, what celebration that experience should have entailed. Splashing out more than £20,000 on a car! An impractical, indulgent, dream car at that!

She turned up on the forecourt where there were quite a few models for sale. She started nervously meandering between vehicles, while two salesman watched her from inside. No one approached her for 20 minutes. Another young couple turned up in an Audi A4 and were pounced upon.

She ventured inside, explained what she’d like, and said she wanted the 1.8-litre or 2.0-litre model. She was taken for a test drive in a 1.2-litre on the grounds that she “wouldn’t notice any difference”. She did. 

She sat down with a smarmy, patronising salesman to discuss part-exchange, and at the end of the conversation he confidently said that he expected she’d “like to go home and talk to your other half about it”. She’s been divorced for 30 years. Not a good start. And yet she bought from the dealership in question, because where else would she go? 

Consumers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. There are some very good dealerships about, but anecdotal evidence suggests the bad outnumber the good. Manufacturers are aware of this and are on the case, but it’s not before time. Innovation and fresh thinking are now key, before the idea of picking up your purchase from a forecourt becomes one that no one wants to consider.