Car Dealer editor-in-chief looks back on a year of headlines he says surprised the auto industry the most
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Covering the car sales business is never boring.
2022 has been a year full of stellar stories, smart and bad, which saw our traffic skyrocket to nearly 6. 5 million exclusive users.
Although we bring you many amounts of content every week, every once in a while, a story even surprises me.
So for this festive article, I’m going to go over a bit of the headlines of the car dealerships that surprised me the most.
It was one of those stories where every paragraph I wrote, I didn’t really do what I was writing. It could be recent, but it already became my most shocking story of the year. Hit by transportation problems from ports, Stellantis struggled to get new cars to dealerships.
But, while trying to “secure factory production for next year,” the automaker forced its dealers to rate consumers for cars they had not yet delivered. Some consumers had paid 3 months of monetary payments, insurance, and taxes for a car they hadn’t even seen. They risked wasting them if they didn’t agree. I still can’t get them to do it. Or you’re allowed to get away with it.
It was an eventful year for the Pfinishragon-listed car dealership. Although its monetary functionality has improved, it has been the subject of takeover bids through the United States and Sweden, neither of which constituted an agreement. Although it is very likely that we did not realize In the end, it is a hacker story that surprised me the most.
In October, Pendragon was forced to admit that it had been the target of a cyberattack through an organization called LockBit 3. 0. The hackers intended to pay a £54 million ransom or threatened to leak the data they had stolen on the dark web. Pendragon said it wouldn’t pay and two installments came and went, but the attack showed how vulnerable car dealerships are to those hackers.
Online used car dealership “disruptors” are never far from making headlines, and this year saw the collapse of a giant number in the industry it supported as the winner: Carzam. The online used car dealership featured through Big Motoring World’s Peter Waddell and Hendy shareholder John Bailey. In June this year, the company was placed under voluntary administration due to almost £19 million.
While no one needs to see a business fail, especially because of supplier money, Waddell’s comments blaming Cazoo’s rival boss, Alex Chesterman, at the door raised eyebrows. “If he had done his homework correctly, we were lucky enough to get money,” Waddell told The Times.
Here’s the story that stunned the auto industry in late 2022: Marshall Motor Group pulled out of the stock market through Constellation, owner of We Buy Any Car. The company took a break from organizing car dealerships by offering to buy a majority of the Marshall family’s shares.
The cunning move caused the team to go private, and soon after, the charismatic boss Daksh Gupta also left. What surprised me the most, however, was the great value Constellation paid.
At £325 million, this represented just over £215 million of assets held through the group, £27 million of money in the bank and just after a 15-month “year” that generated £92. 5 million in profit.
This was a story that ran and ran for us. Sophisticated scammers have created a variety of car dealership online pages, spoofing idle valid businesses to scam car buyers out of money. They have created an online page that looks completely like a genuine car dealership, say they are situated in the darkest part of Scotland, and then promote the cars to London buyers.
They suspect that those buyers probably wouldn’t travel to see the car first and convince them to prepay for used models (which are strangely cheap). Of course, cars never existed and they look for borrowed money.
The car dealership reported three nearly identical scams, adding JDM Cars, Millers Car Sales and AD Car Sales. The ultimate surprise? Police, social media platforms, and online page hosting corporations seemed to do very little to prevent them.
Talk to someone privately in the automotive industry and they will tell you “I already told you so” when you mention the problems of the online used car dealership Cazoo. The company, founded by Zoopla founder Alex Chesterman, has posted losses of £329 million in 2021 and is desperately looking to get back on its feet.
In June, the company revealed its plans to “resize” the company with a drastic action plan that saw site closures, task cuts, and removal of classified ads. He also withdrew from Europe, just months after spending around £100 million on business in Italy and Spain.
Too bad for Cazoo, however, has been sparse on the floor since Chesterman called car dealerships “elbows” and flagged his promotion of obsolete cars when he arrived on the scene amid a barrage of publicity.
We look at many monetary effects from car brokers every year when accounts are sent to Companies House, but to me there is one that is more impressive than all of them. Tom Hartley Junior, son of supercar racer Tom Hartley, has managed to make an impressive £11. 3 million in 2021.
It’s not that impressive figure, however, it’s the fact that he managed to do it by selling only 102 cars. Those seven less than the previous year, but still managed to earn £4. 8 million more. The luxury dealership and vintage cars do know your business and its effects like this that make the auto industry feel up and take notice.
Imagine you’re going on a holiday and your boss calls you to tell you that you racked up roaming charges of almost £200,000. . . in 4 days! Well, unfortunately for AAA Performance’s deficient John Nisill, that’s precisely what happened.
On vacation in Turkey, the salesperson received a call from his manager to tell him that he was worried that his phone bill was “a bit high. “BT claimed it used 43GB of data priced at £192,000. After considering the matter, to his relief, BT waived the bill. Heart attack averted.
Selling cars for profit is a kind of gambling call in car trading, but it does not seem that it is the visitor who makes a profit. This year, Land Rover began forcing its dealers to do “due diligence” on their consumers and get them to sign contracts stipulating that they will not resell their cars for six months.
With Range Rover’s costs skyrocketing, due to the inadequate source of new models, some consumers were touting their cars for up to £30,000 in premiums. Land Rover has made the difficult resolution to avoid them. The distributors were even “fined” if they did not bring the mandatory controls. I don’t know about you, however, when I buy something, I would like to think about what I will do with it next, it is up to me. I wonder how enforceable those contracts would be. . . .
No one likes to foot their tax bill, but believe how painful it would be if the percentage they owe HMRC were £64. 8 million. No, we are not talking about a company’s bill, but Arnold Clark’s largest percentage shareholder, Lady Philomena Clark.
He named the eighteenth contributor via the Sunday Times this year along with Sir James Dyson and Lord Sugar. Lady Clark is the chair of the runners’ group. If you think this bill is bad, wait for your accountants to prepare the next one. The most recent hundred car racers show that Arnold Clark achieved EBITDA earnings of £398 million in 2021.
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James is the founder and editor-in-chief of Car Dealer Magazine and CEO of parent company Baize Group. James has been an automotive journalist for over 20 years and has written about automobiles and the automotive industry.
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