Leasing sticker shock is pushing more consumers toward websites such as Swapalease.com to find the vehicle they want at the price within their budget. And as a result, credit approvals at Swapalease.com are softening. Site officials indicated vehicle lease credit applicants registered an approval rate of 65.9 percent in February, marking a decrease from the […] [Read More]

Along with announcing that it would be leveraging a tool from Dealertrack, Westlake Financial Services named its 2018 Auction of the Year winner as well as gave accolades to auctions in four other regions. The top accolade as Westlake’s 2018 Auction of the Year went to America’s Auto Auction Harrisburg. “We are happy to congratulate […] [Read More]

As Auto Remarketing continues to report on the wholesale remarketing strategy of commercial consignors, the story would be incomplete without the inclusion of credit unions. CU Direct said member auto-loan originations by the 1,100 credit unions using the CUDL auto lending platform, as an aggregate, have led the auto lending industry. (Author Disclaimer: I provide […] [Read More]

Thirty-four percent of service department customers prefer to communicate via text message, but service departments only communicate that way 9 percent of the time. That is according to the J.D. Power 2019 Customer Service Index Study, released on Thursday. The study shows that satisfaction scores usually increase when car dealership service departments use customers’ preferred […] [Read More]

Depreciation accounts for 32.9 percent of the total cost to own and operate a vehicle over the past 12 months. That is according to a “2019 Cost of Vehicle Ownership Trend Report” from vehicle management and reimbursement platform, Motus.  Another finding of the report was that in 2018, the average sale price for a used […] [Read More]

General Motors president Mark Reuss believes that autonomous vehicles “will change people’s lives forever, just as the automobile itself did more than a hundred years ago.” Leaders of The Henry Ford and its venue The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation believe that, as well. The venue has acquired one of General Motors’ first self-driving […] [Read More]

Consumers across the country are assembling their tax documents to beat the April 15 deadline to file their returns with the Internal Revenue Service. For wage earners that have not experienced a significant change in their employment status, this is also the season to begin planning how to invest their expected tax return. Meanwhile, in […] [Read More]

The partnership momentum Auto Financial Group (AFG) generated during the fourth quarter now is helping one of the nation’s leading sources of residual-based financing and vehicle remarketing for financial institutions during the opening segment of 2019. AFG recently announced that Pentagon Federal Credit Union (PenFed), the second largest federally chartered credit union in the United […] [Read More]

Of the top 10 car makes on the road in 2018, five were American, and five were foreign makes. Sixteen of the top 25 car models are sedans. Of the top car makes and models on U.S. roads in 2018, Chevrolet and Ford are the dominant automakers, combining for more than one-quarter of all cars […] [Read More]

Dealerships are likely to see quite a wave of customers coming back to their showrooms this year since leased vehicles they delivered three years ago are set to mature. Along with handling that influx of traffic, store staff also might have another challenge — explaining to the happy lease customer that putting them into another […] [Read More]