In our urgency to get online inventory frontline ready, the importance of how we merchandise those vehicles can get lost. However, how you image inventory and the order in which you display those pictures online matters — especially if your goal is to sell cars, not just get clicks. In addition, also important is how […] [Read More]

After moderating a few Used Car Week conference sessions, I'm going to try my hand at moderating a webinar.  Fortunately for this first go-round, I’ve got a solid co-pilot: Tom Webb, chief economist of Cox Automotive. Tom is the type of source that journalists, particularly those of us in the auto business, love to interview. You […] [Read More]

Much like the dealer consignment side of the auction lane, you can expect commercial consignment to rise this year and next. According to a National Auto Auction Association forecast in Manheim’s 2016 Used Car Market Report, the drivers of the expected gains in commercial consignment are the spikes from prior years in new-car leases, outstanding […] [Read More]

How digital is the auto retail environment becoming? Consider this: OEMs are likely to launch approximately 100 new digital stores globally in 2016, says Lisa Whalen of Frost & Sullivan. In the firm’s 2016 Global Automotive Outlook webinar this past Tuesday, Whalen — a vice president and business unit leader with the company — shared a few trends […] [Read More]

Look for used-car sales to be well above 3 million units this month. At TrueCar, analysts are predicting a possible 3.27 million used sales for February, which would be a 4.5-percent dip from a year ago. Meanwhile, Edmunds.com is calling for 3.5 million used-car sales this month, with a resulting SAAR of 37.9 million. In […] [Read More]

Experian Automotive said Thursday it has launched a new report called the Vehicle Lease Maturity Report that aims to provide detailed information about late-model used cars coming off lease. And there will be quite a few of those this year — 3.1 million, to be precise, Experian predicts. The new report will provide industry professionals […] [Read More]

Last year was the best ever for franchised dealers’ used-car operations, and the pre-owned industry as a whole had its strongest year since 2007, according to a report from Edmunds.com. And the linchpin to these and other trends in the rapidly rising used-car market? Leasing, says Jessica Caldwell, the director of industry analysis at Edmunds.com. The […] [Read More]

If you’re a dealer, protecting your customers is about more than protecting your business; it’s about contributing to the overall wellbeing of your community. So with issues on a large scale as huge as the potential risks caused by Takata’s airbag inflator ruptures, the more you know, the more you can potentially protect yourself, your […] [Read More]

As voters are driving out to participate in primaries and caucuses, do you ever wonder what they’re driving? The folks at BestRide, a car-shopping website, and CarTalk, a nationally syndicated radio program, have done the legwork for you — and some of the results from the more than 10,000 respondents they polled may surprise you. […] [Read More]

St. Louis. Austin. New Orleans. Memphis. Nashville. Those might be pushpins on a barbecue- and gumbo-stained road map to music’s meccas, but they're also a sampling of cities where consumers are having the best experiences shopping for a car at the dealership.  CarGurus recently released a study ranking the top 10 cities with the most satisfied car shoppers, based on […] [Read More]