The new car business in this country is now in such sharp decline that some forecasts suggest that there will be less than 1.7 million cars sold in the UK next year, with somewhere around 20% of this potentially being pre-registered.

If the car manufacturers who serve the UK network do not change the way their profit structures are arranged the reality is that there will be many more dealer groups closing down a lot more branches. There is a suggestion, with the growing expense on which the car makers are insisting their dealers take on with showroom modernisation and an insistence to carry more primary stock that dealers will increasingly look towards developing their internet sites to retail cars in the future.

It has long been argued that the customer would never abandon the showroom experience, in favour of buying a used car on-line which they haven’t touched let alone driven, however if the dealer can no longer viably offer that experience profitably then surely he will need to look for an alternative.

The average customer looking to purchase a new car in this country would without a doubt believe that he could and should be able to negotiate at least £1,000 off the list price of a new car and when they get down to business maybe a whole lot more. The reality is that the profit centres many dealers sign up to mean that selling volume and hitting manufacturer standards is the only place they make any profit. The percentage profit from just purely selling a new car is so low that once a sales manager encourages his staff to distress sell the value in the product or the service offered by the dealer is rendered worthless.

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