Tammy Darvish took dealers' fight to Capitol Hill

Tammy Darvish, longtime face of DARCARS Automotive Group in Bethesda, Md., and now COO at Capital Automotive Real Estate Services in McLean, Va., was in the vanguard of dealership leaders who took their fight for dealer rights all the way to Congress.

Darvish, who was the first woman to chair the Washington Area New Auto Dealers Association and a board member of the National Automobile Dealers Association at the time, had an extensive career in the auto industry by the time the recession hit. As a senior vice president for her father's dealerships, Darvish, 54, had her hands in many aspects of the group's business.

DARCARS lost several franchises when General Motors and Chrysler Group terminated hundreds of franchises during the recession. Darvish channeled her energy and frustration into advocacy for dealership groups beyond her family's.

At first, unity

"Dealers never really want to believe that there's a dark cloud coming," Darvish said. But this downturn was real.

In October 2008, Darvish organized a rally in support of the auto industry at one of DARCARS' D.C.-area dealerships. She was joined by dealer association leaders, other dealers and even some notable automaker executives, including Jim Press, then a senior executive at Chrysler.

"We were together. We were partnered with the manufacturers," Darvish said. "It was about jobs. It was about the impact it would have on the economy overall."

"It was so ironic that we were there together," Darvish added. "Later it became ironic — at the time it was natural."

It was only later that automakers began trimming their dealership counts by sending termination letters that cancelled dealers' franchises. The claim was that having too many dealers cost the automakers too much money.

In May 2009, DARCARS received a termination letter for the first dealership that Darvish's father bought on his own, a Chrysler store.

"It was a very sentimental hit more than anything, but so many dealers — that's all they had," Darvish said. "You could see the damage that this [was] creating and the pain and the suffering and the job losses."

Dealerships were stuck with inventory that couldn't be sold as new after the franchise was taken away. Many dealers couldn't pay their mortgages and lost their homes.

Spurred to action

Darvish geared up for action. First, she made sure DARCARS would be stable. Second, she brought the voices of many affected dealers to Washington. She teamed up with dealers Jack Fitzgerald and Alan Spitzer to form the advocacy group Committee to Restore Dealer Rights.

Darvish said many of the franchises that were taken from one dealer were subsequently handed over to another, with little transparency or explanation. Throughout this process, Darvish and her fellow dealers lobbied for legislation that would help dealers in what she called the "relentless pursuit of fighting for democracy."

The legislation passed, buried in the appropriations bill. That forced then-President Barack Obama to approve it or delay passing the federal budget. Though many of the franchises had already been parceled out, some dealers were able to get their franchises back through arbitration, or at least settle with the automakers.

In addition, the legislation prevented a second round of rejections. "Not only were we fighting for the rejected dealers, for me we were fighting for our industry," Darvish said. "It can't just be the dealers' fight. It can't just be the manufacturers' fight."

Darvish's book on the downturn, Outraged: How Detroit and the Wall Street Car Czars Killed the American Dream, was published in 2011. Darvish wanted to create a historical account of the initial anger and fear that stemmed from the rejections, lack of transparency and having to renegotiate nearly every part of the auto group's operations.

Darvish, who was named to Automotive News' list of 100 Leading Women in the North American Auto Industry in 2010, stepped back from her 30-year run with DARCARS a few years ago. The group ranks No. 38 on Automotive News' list of the top 150 dealership groups based in the U.S., with retail sales of 21,953 new vehicles in 2018.

But she hasn't left the industry completely.

"I love the automotive industry. It is an industry that drives the American economy," Darvish said. "It's so important for the dealers and manufacturers to continually be as aligned as possible because that's how we thrive most."