No surprise and fits with a thread I was going to start about how times have changed for car buying habits.

Our local paper has a feature every few days of old photos. Today was the early 1980s and every photo that has vehicles is dominated by Fords.

One photo shows about 10 cars and all but one is a Ford. Cortinas, Granadas, Escorts, Capris. The other car is a Datsun!

Now you take a photo with ten cars shown and you you could have ten different marques.

Just thinking of our street of ten houses, only one has a Ford and its a 15 year old Fiesta.

New car sales have fallen for the last 4 years.

Private buyers may still go into a showroom and order from the dealer. But a large number will identify the car they want and buy on-line through a broker. I'm not sure whether dealers have the authority to negotiate fleet sales - or do they effeectively hand over to head office.

Cars also have far fewer scheduled services, and although there are occasional lemons, typically cars are much more reliable than a few decades ago. So there are less opportunities to build customer loyalty and upsell when they next come to change.

There may also be a number of other factors at play - eg:

• do many people increasingly regard cars a expensive "white goods"
• will EVs soon outsell ICE, existing large companies may not be dominant

And finally, compared to the brokers, it is very expensive to run a showroom - staff, building, cars, insurance etc etc.

So closure of dealers, sad though it is, comes as no great surprise.

If you order a car via a broker, in all probability it will come from a franchises dealer. A dealer that has accepted they will make practically nothing on the car itself, but it’s a registration to attract bonus from the manufacturer. It’s a bit misleading stating that Ford are closing down 200 businesses, simply because they don’t own any of them. They may be withdrawing franchises, but that’s not closing down companies.

I was under the impression that Ford did buy a lot of dealerships in the 90's, so it did occur to me that this latest could be ford dumping privately owned dealerships in favour of their outlets that they own.

Then they would have the dealer discount that they give away to the private dealerships, to themselves!

Just a thought!

Edited by focussed on 28/02/2020 at 22:36