Seat has just opened its second retail space in the UK that isn’t a dealership.
It’s a unit in the enormous Westfield shopping centre in west London; it’s got test drives available, demonstrator cars on the shop floor, lifestyle products and merchandise on display, and product experts to explain every detail of the car to you.
As retail solutions go, it’s one of the less out-there ones; in essence, it’s a smaller version of a dealership in a shopping centre.
Not long ago, I wrote a story on the future of BMW’s retail, after an executive was bold in saying that retail would be unrecognisable in years to come. This resulted in a flood of phone calls to BMW HQ from dealers worried they'd be out of a job, and a call from BMW to us asking if we might make the story sound a little less dramatic.
But are dealerships realistic in the future of the car? The same BMW executive said that with such a large and ever-growing product portfolio, showing every product in each dealership is untenable. So what to do?
These small retail spaces are an idea. Dealership alternatives like virtual reality dealerships and ‘brand experiences’ are firmly the cringeworthy scale, and range from fairly optimistic oddities to the downright bizarre. So what’s the alternative?
Well, online, of course. A growing trend in the car industry is turning real dealerships into online ones, where you buy cars in the same way that you’d buy any other large item; specifying your wants and desires, and waiting for delivery. Takeaways have gone online, as have clothing shops, mobile phone shops and pretty much anything else you can buy. The car industry is not immune to the internet.
These smaller retail spaces like the one Seat is showing could well be the future, but it is far more likely to be a human-light, online experience, rather than optimistically hoping someone will take a break from buying a £50 pair of shoes to commit to buying a car.
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Finance not car salesmen
Typical advert in Spain:
Price: €20,500, subject to minimum financing of € 14,000
Price without financing: € 23,000
If you offer cash, or use your own financing source, there's a complete lack of interest (sic) by the salesmen
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Hyundai have done this for a while, to my disamy. Yes there are "dealers" in various shopping mall units all around London, but for servicing (if I want to maintain a full dealer history) I have very little choice and they all involve a long drive from the City of London. Next time I won't buy a niche vehicle but get something more mainstream... a Bentley perhaps
Too many muppets
Most dealerships are run with either latest buzzword/management-consultancy idiocy, 1970's and 80's throwback customer service (not in a good way), or a weird mixture of the two. The idea of a "dealership" makes no sense, but there is a need for a showroom still, so a potentially staff-free display centre seems sensible. On the other hand, I am surprised there are not more multi-marque centres, which share sales staff cost and marketing budget. In the future I think more manufacturers should openly publish the best "reverse auction price" on display boards, or be looking to sell cars at cost plus an admin-fee and bypass all the comission, pushy-sales and seasonality. I've been in a few mainstream manufacturer dealerships and seen cars adorned with the weird combination of things such as party baloons, cherry bakewells, watsits, tinsel, disco lights, emperors new clothes paint protection sales leaflets, and.... a sticker price which is somehow £3-6k more than what you could pay if you make a few phone calls. Please make this sort of madness stop.