You need to move quickly if you want a new car

Yes, output will be defined for some time by social distancing protocols and the number of staff volunteering to work, but the wheels are in motion to get the factories running again - and once they do, they're too expensive to keep stopping. Once new cars start rolling off the line, the industry has to get back to work, marketing, selling and more to ensure that the vehicles quickly find new homes rather than depreciate in fields and car parks.

Will there really be enough eager buyers, though? The answer is emphatically yes, at least for the short to medium term, chiefly because so much of the UK market is dominated by regular renewal cycles driven by the mass uptake of PCP finance deals, but also because there's now a significant backlog of pent-up demand from would-be buyers who have been unable to complete their orders for months.

This in itself is a risk for the manufacturers, who will have restarted their factories as soon as morally feasible at least in part fearing that large numbers of people will switch to nearly new or used alternatives if demand isn't met in a reasonable timeframe. Already, a typical 12-week waiting time for a factory-order car pre-crisis is being talked of in terms of being a 26-week order. If that's true, it’s not hard to imagine why many buyers might see what’s in stock for immediate collection instead, And while it’s also true that many manufacturers operate nearly new schemes, and profit handsomely from them, it's also an immovable truth of the industry that those shiny new cars rolling off the production lines need shifting.

But with supply still expected to fall short of demand quickly (a recent survey revealed that almost one in five visitors to whatcar.com, a heavily car-buying focused website, were planning to buy within a month of lockdown ending), this desperation among manufacturers and retailers to shift cars isn't expected to last long.

As a result, it's widely expected that previously negotiable discounts will rapidly be reduced, and the hard-hit car makers and sellers will look to recover some of their lost trading year by shoring up profit margins, at least until the balance shifts.

Pat Hoy, who analyses market pricing for What Car?, says he has already detected that discounts are contracting. “While the market is frozen, most dealers that are open have been nurturing leads, making it harder to get a clear indication of what their plans are for when business opens up again,” he says. “But the clear expectation is that, as soon as demand outstrips supply, they will look to reduce incentives and discounts and focus on profitability.