WHY CAR BUYERS LEAVE LOCKDOWN AS WINNERS

CAR DEALERS OPENED again this week off the back of a better-thanexpected March for new car registrations, when close to 300,000 cars were still sold across the UK.

That so many deals were done in March shows how successful online tech has been in keeping sales ticking over and how resilient dealers and the wider industry have been in adapting.

Dealers expect a few busy weeks now, but because of that rise in online sales, click-and-collect and home-delivery fulfilment methods, there won’t be the same level of pent-up demand as last summer after the first lockdown, when sales really did grind to a halt.

Before the pandemic, there were predictions that the car dealer could be an endangered species, with manufacturer direct sales to be done solely online in the future. But customers are always going to want and need someone local to speak to, and what has quickly emerged instead is the evolution of the car dealership away from pure bricks-and-mortar ‘you come to us’ to more accessible and modern digital businesses, complemented by showrooms.

It’s great for dealers to futureproof themselves, then, but even bigger winners in all of this are car buyers: it has now become easier and more convenient to buy a car, and there have never been as many ways to do so.