Open discussion: Car dealer industry

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retailfanmitchell019
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Re: Open discussion: Car dealer industry

Post by retailfanmitchell019 »

cjd wrote: October 2nd, 2021, 9:57 am One dealer here owns all of the new dealerships in town. I remember their original dealership with a Chrysler-Plymouth-Jeep-Eagle, but for some reason NO Dodges there. In later years it got a bit more odd as Kia was added to that location. So it became Chrysler-Jeep-Kia.
Before the Chrysler bankruptcy and sale to Fiat, Dodge had separate dealers. An example is the now-closed Worthington Dodge in Carlsbad, CA. Jeep had dealers with the Eagle brand in the 1990's.
Over at GM, Chevy has mostly had single brand dealers (although sometimes paired with Cadillac). GMC is usually paired with Buick (and formerly Pontiac).

Lithia owns DCH Honda in San Diego and DCH Chrysler/Jeep/Dodge in Temecula (where we purchased a car from).
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Re: Open discussion: Car dealer industry

Post by babs »

rwsandiego wrote: October 3rd, 2021, 6:31 pm
babs wrote: October 3rd, 2021, 5:54 pm
Alpha8472 wrote: October 3rd, 2021, 11:28 am I have seen many car dealerships with inventory problems recently. The local Cadillac dealership has only a few cars left in the display lot outside. At first, I thought the dealership was closing, but it turns out that they are just out of cars.

The Dodge, Chrysler, Jeep dealership next door has all sorts of old used cars from other brands in the display lot. It looked really sad. They cannot seem to get enough new cars for some reason.

There is a Toyota Dealership in Oakland, California next to the 880 freeway that has a tall round glass building with wrap around windows. It displays cars on multiple floors so you can see a tower of cars from the freeway. For the past few months the tower has been noticeably empty.
If you want a new car these days,. you have to order it. Due to the chip shortage, they can't make enough cars for the dealers to have inventory in the lot. Toyota has figured how how to acquire chips and thus is now outselling GM in the US.
According to this New York Times article, Toyota cut output by 40% due to the chip shortage.

From the article:

"...Toyota Motor, the world’s largest automaker, plans to cut production worldwide 40 percent in September because of a shortage of computer chips that the company had avoided being hurt by until now.

The move will affect 14 plants in Japan and reduce output by about 140,000 cars and trucks next month, the company said. In the United States, Toyota expects to produce about 80,000 fewer vehicles next month than it had previously planned. The company is also cutting production in Europe, China and other countries..."
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos- ... 021-10-01/
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Re: Open discussion: Car dealer industry

Post by Super S »

retailfanmitchell019 wrote: October 3rd, 2021, 7:47 pm

Over at GM, Chevy has mostly had single brand dealers (although sometimes paired with Cadillac). GMC is usually paired with Buick (and formerly Pontiac).
GM is interesting in that their dealerships in the past could have had any combination of brands, with the notable exceptions being Saturn which required their own showrooms, and Geo which was marketed as the import branch of Chevrolet and had the Chevy bowtie as part of the logo, and was always at Chevy dealers.

I have seen single line dealerships for each GM brand, and have seen dealerships that had all lines except Saturn. (In some instances the Saturn Showroom was in a separate building but on the same site as a traditional GM dealership) Some combinations I recall were Chevrolet-GMC, Buick-Oldsmobile, Cadillac-Oldsmobile, Chevrolet-Cadillac, Chevrolet-Pontiac-Buick, Chevrolet-Oldsmobile.

More recently, GM has been trying to keep Chevrolet by itself, Buick and GMC in combined showrooms (this also included Pontiac before the brand was discontinued) and Cadillac is either by itself or combined with Buick-GMC.

Ford almost always paired Lincoln and Mercury together, in some cases there were Ford-Lincoln-Mercury dealers, but there were a handful that were Ford-Mercury without Lincoln, and there are a handful of Lincoln only dealerships.

Chrysler always had Chrysler-Plymouth and Jeep-Eagle paired together, and Dodge would often be by themselves. Chrysler has been pushing to combine all brands under one roof in recent years, also with Fiat thrown in, but with the renamed Ram truck brand there are a handful of Ram only dealerships.

A lot of brands disappeared simply because there were too many similarities between them.
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Re: Open discussion: Car dealer industry

Post by BillyGr »

Super S wrote: October 4th, 2021, 8:30 am I have seen single line dealerships for each GM brand, and have seen dealerships that had all lines except Saturn. (In some instances the Saturn Showroom was in a separate building but on the same site as a traditional GM dealership) Some combinations I recall were Chevrolet-GMC, Buick-Oldsmobile, Cadillac-Oldsmobile, Chevrolet-Cadillac, Chevrolet-Pontiac-Buick, Chevrolet-Oldsmobile.

Chrysler always had Chrysler-Plymouth and Jeep-Eagle paired together, and Dodge would often be by themselves. Chrysler has been pushing to combine all brands under one roof in recent years, also with Fiat thrown in, but with the renamed Ram truck brand there are a handful of Ram only dealerships.

A lot of brands disappeared simply because there were too many similarities between them.
I remember the Chevrolet-Olds one in one local smaller town (I guess that was to serve different parts of the spectrum, as it was the only car dealer there) and there was one that was (I believe) Buick-Pontiac in another town. Neither exists at all any longer (nor does the other Chevrolet that was in the city with the Buick/Pontiac), and pretty much the whole county is GM dealer free (I think there is a small GMC only one in one far corner).

Those Chrysler pairings make sense, given that the two were originally separate companies (the Jeep/Eagle coming from AMC when they bought that company out). Also makes sense that they have combined the remaining labels as some were discontinued.
In one case near here, the Chrysler dealer actually traded Suzuki to another dealer for the Dodge brand (that dealer now has people going kooky for Kia [worked better with Suzuki]/Hyundai, with or without puppies and babies [local commercial jokes]).
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Re: Open discussion: Car dealer industry

Post by buckguy »

Dodge was sold separately for decades. Some of those dealers also had sold Desoto in the past. For many years, the issue for Chrysler was where to sell Plymouth and how to slot the different makes. Competition among them was encouraged in the 50s and 60s and that led to the demise of Desoto and handicapped Plymouth, relative to Dodge, which was marketed as a medium priced brand but overlapped the lower priced Plymouth range. Chrysler and Plymouth made sense together because you had the low price field and a high-medium brand with little overlap. Eagle was a way to repackage AMC cars and AMC had bought Jeep from Kaiser.

GMC was the truck brand for non-Chevy dealers and that was established decades ago. Some sold the trucks, some didn't. The idea was to have the option and it gave them something that competitors like Chrysler-Plymouth or Mercury dealers didn't have. Other than Studebaker, none of the independents had truck lines. GM prevented their dealers from selling non-GM makes. Many small market dealers sold multiple GM makes---usually Chevy or one of the medium priced lines with Cadillac. Spitzer, a large family owned chain had Ford and Dodge dealerships and, unusually, a Buick dealership which had been grandfathered. It no longer exits although they sell Buicks elsewhere now.
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Re: Open discussion: Car dealer industry

Post by Brian Lutz »

Around here, all of the Chrysler products are now sold under one roof in the form of "CDJR" (Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram) dealers. Out of those a few also sell Fiats, and one dealer in Kirkland also sells Maserati and Alfa Romeo (which, aside from the Ferrari dealer in Seattle also selling Maserati from before the FCA merger, is the only one in the Seattle metro area.) A lot of the former standalone Dodge dealers are still around but selling other brands (many switched to selling Hyundais.) GM brands are a bit more complicated though, and you pretty much have the standalone Chevy dealers, a few Buick/GMC dealers (the older ones would presumably have also sold Pontiac and/or Oldsmobile before those brands were discontinued), and it seems that all of the Cadillac dealerships in the area are single-brand. On the Ford side it's less confusing, but as far as I can tell there's only one dealer in the area (in Issaquah) now selling Lincoln. Then again, when I drive by the Ford dealerships near my house it seems like at least 75% of the inventory on the lot is trucks, so I can't imagine Lincolns are selling much around here.

Import dealerships are a lot less complicated; aside from one or two combined VW/Audi dealers, combined Land Rover/Jaguar and some of the supercar/ultra luxury brands (such as a combined Lamborghini, Bentley, Rolls Royce and McLaren dealer in Bellevue) pretty much everything is single brand. In particular, the Japanese manufacturers seem to have a vested interest in keeping their mainstream brands (Toyota, Nissan, Honda) separate from their luxury brands (Lexus, Infiniti, Acura) probably because if they didn't most people would realize that many of the luxury brand cars are just fancier versions of the mainstream brand models.
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Re: Open discussion: Car dealer industry

Post by cjd »

The other Chrysler dealer here is Dodge-Jeep-Ram, I don't recall if they have Fiat. That one always had Dodge that I can remember, it actually dated way back to the 30s starting out as a main street location. In fact it just changed ownership last year after all these years.

I can also seem to remember a dealership that had only Oldsmobile, with Cadillac and Chevrolet being across the street. And Saturn being in a different building. In fact, I could be wrong but I vaguely remember a new Saturn dealership being built about 2007, which was toward the end of Saturn. Again, could be wrong on that, but it is now a Toyota dealer nonetheless. All of those are under the same ownership here.
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Re: Open discussion: Car dealer industry

Post by wnetmacman »

Where I am, in Lafayette, LA, there are just a few owners over a bunch of dealerships:

Ford is sold here by the same family that has held the dealership for decades. Chevy is the same, but added Cadillac about 8-10 years ago after the local Cadillac dealer shut down (Family sold out upon retirement after decades).

Every other dealership in town is owned by a regional group: Chrysler (CDJRF - Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram and FIAT) are sold by a three dealer group that also owns the local Mazda dealer (they got Mazda and Chrysler from the original family that held the dealership from the 1920s). Hyundai, Kia and a bunch of used lots are owned by a regional dealer that also owns other Ford, Chrysler and GM dealerships outside town (I bought both of my cars from different dealerships of theirs).

Buick, GMC, Lincoln, and a few others are owned by another group that holds all the dealers in the nearby town of Breaux Bridge - they have GM, CDJR and Ford all side by side there, right on I-10 for visibility. They also have a high visibility Chevrolet and Cadillac dealer in Broussard.

Nissan and Volvo are owned by one family, and Toyota and Mitsubishi are owned by another.

When I moved here in 2000, Buick and Pontiac were owned by a different family (we still have a place in town called Pontiac Point because they were there so long), Chrysler and Mazda were as mentioned above separate. GMC was a standalone dealer, as was Cadillac.
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Re: Open discussion: Car dealer industry

Post by klkla »

Alpha8472 wrote: October 3rd, 2021, 11:28 am I have seen many car dealerships with inventory problems recently. The local Cadillac dealership has only a few cars left in the display lot outside. At first, I thought the dealership was closing, but it turns out that they are just out of cars.
I leased a Mercedes for three years about a year and a half ago but then moved to Mexico for work reasons. Not sure how long I'm going to stay but it will be a while so I started looking at options for getting rid of the car. Because of the current supply chain problems the dealer ended up paying me almost $5,000 to take the car back :)
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