There's a good piece on autos and business in the German Welt today, which discusses this trend.....car dealerships are 'dying'.
So, here's the German process shifting....where you can go to an on-line dealers (heavily discounted) and buy your new car, with 10-percent (minimum) off what the local dealer can offer.
The dealers? Well, they are suffering to some degree because they were established decades ago, with a particular business model. Dealers were set to make money off of you as you bought the new car.....plus the profit from you trading in your old car, and it being resold at a higher price....then finally off the maintenance required.
An example of the on-line folks? Jutten and Koolen. They go out to the manufacturing folks and get the rock-bottom price, and basically add on 500 Euro in the pricing scheme. They build up a internet site which works. You avoid the dealer and his gimmicks which might add several thousand Euro onto the price of a new car.
Around eleven years ago, my German wife happened upon this discount deal and ended up buying a new Audi TT. The savings? It was around 7,000 Euro total. Yes, we had to pick it up at the factory, but it wasn't a big deal. This past summer, she went back to repeat that formula....with a Audi A5. Savings? In the range of 8,000 Euro.
The problem here is that more Germans are doing this, and it's a serious problem for the long-term view of German car-dealers. Fewer of them in the future? I might go and suggest in the next decade that it'll be rare to find a new car dealer in towns of 20,000 people or less. The cities like Frankfurt or Hamburg? They will survive on.
The arrival of Scout-24 as a site to sell your used car? That's just added burden for the dealers because the private citizen is now managing his own sales effort, when it comes to getting rid of the older car.
It is a changing landscape.
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