Dealer boss on the post-pandemic future for car sales

"Interestingly we’re seeing very robust demand in our Waltham Cross, Chingford Mercedes businesses to the West of London. I’m seeing no great regional variety. I don’t buy this ‘we’re all going to work from home forever’, it’s the educated middle class, which is a very specific group of people, not the bulk of the population.”

What will the next few months look like? Quieter post-summer?

“It all depends on the extent to which the country gets lockdown removed. And I’m not the man to discuss that with really. I think under the presumption that we will see progressive reducing of lockdown but there’s not going to be a mass exodus to foreign holidays, then I think you can quite clearly see a way of saying there’s going to be quite a lot of accidental savers looking to spend money, having a staycation, wanting a car, wanting a bit of excitement, and they’ve probably done everything they need to do to their house at this stage. So I still think we’ll see quite robust demand for cars.

"I don’t think it will be as rampant as coming out of the first lockdown because we went from 10% didn’t we to operating at 70-80%, so I don’t think there’s that absolute tidal wave. But I think it’ll be quite considerable. I think it’ll be noticeable. I think the April new car market will actually be quite interesting because order banks for retail I suspect are quite low compared to normal. Which would be a negative.

"Having said that, I think there’s lots of people waiting for a test drive, which will then come out of the traps on the 12th. The key issue is - having taken all those orders from the 12th - will we actually have time to deliver the new cars before the month ends. Which I suspect is a timing issue. It wouldn’t surprise me if the new car market in April retail - I’m not interested in the fleet numbers - but retail could very well be down in April. It depends on deliveries. But I could see it being quite robust for a few months, actually. We’ve got a half decent supply, I think supply of new cars is under pressure for a variety of reasons in the short to medium term, but I think we’ll be alright very short term. So I think we should be pretty optimistic, and Scotland shows the way really of why we should be optimistic.”

Is click and collect here to stay?

“It’ll have its place, it’s always had its place. I think people… as usual with these things people dive off to extremes don’t they? In terms of commentators. But click and collect existed before the pandemic, albeit it was more ‘phone and collect’. We were doing distance sales way before the pandemic. It’s fair to say the technology - which the major groups have got now - is much better than it was.

"You’ve seen some of the big groups declaring they’ve delivered thousands of cars to private customers in this last lockdown. So I think it will be more of a feature, especially given we’ve got a fourteen-day money back guarantee, free home delivery within 13 miles, all that sort of stuff. So I think it will be a bigger proportion of the business than it was prior.

"Having said that I think there’ll be a quite substantial majority of the population who will revert back to a hybrid model where they do a lot of research up front, they’ll contact us via the internet, they’ll maybe do a couple of video calls, but actually come in, test drive and buy the car.”

What does the long-term future look like for dealerships?

“We’ve made good money, we continue to make good margins. I’d turn the question on its head: if you were starting from scratch, would you have dealerships? And I’ll give you two pieces of evidence: one Tesla, which clearly has dealerships and is growing the number of dealerships. And then Cazoo, the great digital hope which again is developing sites across the UK.