Used Cars


Dealers Management Control: a stranger?

budget
It seems strange, but still today there are dealers with millionaire turnovers, which have Management Control limited only to aspects of the official budget, often managed in outsourcing. All very useful data, of course, but that underline an already consolidated state; forcing the company, often, for sudden and late solutions. The main point is that the dealer focused on himself, or on trusted men,...

The automotive dealers haven’t changed their core business yet

core-business
Excited by the increasing data related to the 2017, there are, however, automotive dealer, multi-brand, and service operators who are sulky and whiny. Of course, a positive signal it’s better than a negative one but, as Catalano (italian comic actor), would say, those numbers hide some truths that many pretend not to see. Dealers complain about the reduction in margins, despite the closure of...

Spare parts bought online, the end of the workshops?

spare parts
In many years who sells new cars can sustain especially with several collateral activities, which in the end, analysing the balance sheets, are not at all collateral. Warehouse, Workshop, Bodywork, Financial Services and Insurance represent much more than “forced activities” to have a mandate. The quickest to look around have turned their company into a multitude of activities on their...

A KPI will save the entire Automotive field or it will bury us?

kpi
There is no sector in which it is possible to disregard a trivial KPI. But let’s start by saying what a KPI is: it is a dashboard. It is a screen, an A4 sheet, which shows the trends of a given variable that, and we will talk about this, has a decisive influence on a business. Let’s start with a prejudicial element that divides an entrepreneurial activity from all the rest. I can know if...

LPG systems, layout and security

LPG
One of the most known indicator that gives us an immediate idea about the safety level provided by a vehicle is the number of stars rated during the Euro NCAP test. The stars are rated to the shock tests passed and to the presence of security – related contents. Thanks to the tightening up both of the tests and the calculation method, today we have on our vehicles an infinitive of electronic devices,...

Digital Automotive: if you are too far ahead, you may risk to burn yourself

Digital-Automotive
The future is in the digital, actually, it is the present; if your company isnÕt ready to ride the wave of the Digital automotive you are the dinosaur that is disappearing! Now this is a mantra repeated endlessly to the point that someone wonders: “could it be real what they go on telling us in every meeting?” Good question … but maybe not! Only because “everybody” says...

The digital dealer isn’t a solution, rather it is a problem!

Digital Dealer
The category of most-read post ever, on Automotive Space (IT), concerns the guarantee of compliance, or the legal; we refer to more than 50,000 consultations in just over four years. A trend that increases with increasing sales of used cars; probably because the closer it approaches to second-hand market, the more people need information… or even because the more sales are high, the higher is the...

The Smart Configuration

Smart animal
This time to me it’s hard to split the passionate Giorgio from the Automotive Professional One, but I know most of you will understand me. The configuration of a vehicle is a moment that can be so emotional as rational. And it’s more than this, the configuration is like a driver to incline the customer towards the contract signing (the ‘lucky winner’ among brand-dealer-seller...

Interview with Paolo Gagliardo, Head of Brand Lancia/Chrysler for EMEA – 1^st part

Gagliardo
Interview Date: January 4, 2013 Professional Profile: Paolo Gagliardo, after an MBA at Columbia Business School in New York, has built great part of its career in the Automotive industry. He has worked in Ford Motor Company and FIAT in various Marketing, Sales and Product assignments in the UK, US and Italy. He has also worked in the Italian Railroad Company, as Chief Marketing Officer and Piaggio...

Car is… Feminine

Femmine
This year in Italy – in the middle of the worst car market since the 70’s – nearly 600,000 new cars will be personally purchased by Women; and Women will also influence the decision to purchase an additional 250,000 cars, used by Italian families. Every day on the streets of the “Bel Paese”, millions of women are driving and dealing with the maintenance of their 13,400,000...

Where shall we go?

Emotion
I belong to a relatively new generation, too much committed to principles and values typical of the previous generation and I consider myself quite prone to decode the behavior of the next generation. Today society evolves towards integration of communication tools and information and this will make it less necessary to move to cultivate relationships. Let’s look at today and let us realize how...

Dealers: welcome to interesting times!

Interessanti
The car market trend is positive in the World: in 2012 the enrollment grew by 5.7%. Not in Italy, where dealers falls in the middle ages and develop the numbers of 1979, when there were the Fiat 127, the Alfetta and the VW Golf’s first series, inflation was 24% and “Car and Driver” was at 1,25 US $! To comment this data, some authoritative representatives of the carmakers and three of the...

Carmakers’ sperimentations whilst thousands of dealers are drowning!

Speramentation
New scenarios for Italian dealers: the debarkation of Penske Automotive Group in Italy put in motion many brains and overheated … some phones. Carmakers and associations estimate that 1.000 dealers will go out of the business in Italy in 2012 . How to save these companies from the wreck? Federauto – the italian dealers association – has clear ideas: “it is necessary to ask incentives...

The residual value of your new car

residual value
For the last few days I have been hearing the ad on the italian radio for the new Alfa Romeo Giulietta and the part about maintaining its value in the used car market according to Eurotax and Quattroruote (the most important italian automotive newspaper) really caught my attention. I wondered: is it really true what they’re saying in the Giulietta ad? And, if it is true, why advertise it during...

Are the solutions for creating less pollution really effective?

pollution
During the approval phase for cars, automobile companies are required to comply with the regulations in the NEDC (New European Driving Cycle) established by directive EU 91/441/EC. This regulation calls for a series of tests that must be uniform and repeatable. To guarantee that they can be repeated, the tests are performed not on roads or a track but on dynamometric rollers in a laboratory at a controlled...

“Inflated” spare parts prices an anomaly only in Italy?

Spare parts
Very often, auto parts wholesalers buy from the manufacturers (even from notable brands) at discounts that in some cases, due to bonuses and incentives, reach 70/80%. In the supply chain there are two other steps, the parts dealer and the mechanic, before reaching the final customer. The three steps are required since the vast majority of service centers are small establishments that cannot keep large...

Is the service network up to the standards of today’s cars?

Diagnosi
I am inspired by my own personal experience and by the previous article by Matteo Ceronetti regarding the professionalism and ability of the dealer service network. I own an Audi A6. I have had other Audis in the past as well as a Mercedes, and, unfortunately, I have often found myself noting that the dealer service centers are not up to the standards of their brand image. The introduction of electronic...

Automobile customization: an Italian anomaly in Europe!

Customozation
I have been working in the automotive sector since 1993, first in the competition vehicle sector for important international companies both on the racetrack as well as at the operators’ premises, and then in the world of “tuning”. Tuning is a word that is often abused and linked to clandestine races instead of automobile customization. Article 78 of our rules of the road, in fact,...

Bifuel or not? This is the question…Part 1

Bifuel
In this period of expensive fuel, I suggest again the question of convenience or not to switch to gas. Whether it’s natural gas or LPG, the car is registered as an original bi-fuel or it is transformed , the advantages are many: savings on supplies, reduced emissions and always the ability to drive. What I am going to do is a list of the main concerns, of even greater concern, which can be in dealing...

Fiat in Serbia, what will the future bring?

Fiat Serbia
A national news program gave the news a few days ago that Italian companies are investing in Serbia where Italy will be the third largest partner behind Russia and Germany but with the goal, on the part of the Italian government, of earning the second spot if not even the first. Regarding Fiat and its future, we wonder about the status of the work being done on the new factory planned for Serbia, where...

Automotive, August 2011: STOP spitting out such nonsense!

August2011
Italian Market, August 2011: of the 70.307 total vehicles registered, more than 42% (29.929) have been matriculated during the last… 3 days of the month. From January 1st more than the 35% of the italian total registrations were developed in the last 72 hours of each month! Let us understand this strange phenomenon. Some manufacturers contacted to give an explanation for this strange phenomenon,...

Automotive communication: different roles between OEM and dealers.

OEM
Advertising and the art to manage the emotions of clients.  Advertising is considered the most powerful tool of marketing, has no limits or borders and has become an integral part of the economy in the world. Dorothy Miller the 2011 Nada Convention has analyzed this argument, noting that in the United States today, nearly 40% of car buyers do not trust most of the traditional media such as press,...

Thinking of Japanese design

Japanese
Thinking about Japanese design, I think we are in the phase where it does not receive any push to keep them always interesting and be able to create emotions. Until few years ago, Japanese design was powered by the legacy that absorbed by the advice of italian coach builders and designers, who with their proposals could combine elegance and emotions with advanced Japanese technology. Those elements...

NADA Convention 2011 and XXI Congresso Fenabrave: the revolution of Social Media make obsolete the CSI

Nada
As the GDP can’t be the benchmark of the economy because it does not take into account all the variables of real life but only the consumption, so the CSI can’t be the index with which to judge dealers, because it measures the satisfaction of “just one moment” and nothing else. Few manufacturers – more attentive to the evolution of consumers – does not measure satisfaction an end...

Want to sell more new cars? Listen really what women want!

woman car
Let us for a moment ‘in the shoes’ of a woman who works, manages house and children, goes to the bank, to the accountant, to a theater, in a library, and takes charge of organizing the weekend and holidays for the whole family. About this woman – in the world of automotive marketing in Italy – there is almost no trace. Yet in our country, the balance of car registrations has progressed...