The Used Car Dealers Association of Ontario revealed two new offerings for its members this week. The association said that UCDA members can now utilize RouteOne’s online consumer credit portal, thus allowing these dealers to send credit applications to a slew of lenders, including the following: Bank of Nova Scotia, TD Financing Services (formerly VFC), […] [Read More]

This week, BMW Group Canada revealed its new president and chief executive officer to replace Franz Jung, who becomes president of BMW Italia effective Jan. 1. Stepping into this role at the outset of 2011 is Manfred Braunl. This announcement marks Braunl’s second stint with BMW Canada as he previously spent time with the company […] [Read More]

Though they showed a year-over-year softening of 6 percentage points in October, Canada’s wholesale prices moved ahead of the September level, as three of four segments showed month-over-month gains, according to OPENLANE’S latest Canadian Market Index. Specifically, the Canadian Market Index was 102 in October, down from 108 in the year-ago period and up from […] [Read More]

After gaining feedback from the industry and its Client Advisory Board, which includes a cross section of consignors and dealers, SmartAuction has launched several initiatives to enhance its platform. One of the aspects of the enhancement is ramping up communication with dealers by sending alerts about vehicles that might fit their inventory needs. [Read More]

An electric vehicle’s sustained performance for weekly shopping activity at Kelley’s Blue Book’s Kbb.com is leaving the model with momentum going into an important West Coast auto show. Leading the way on the most recent Hot Car Report from Kbb.com was the 2011 Nissan LEAF. Site analysts determined among all models, the LEAF’s activity level […] [Read More]

When it comes to how the vehicles of tomorrow are designed, consumers are most concerned with attributes regarding unintended acceleration and fuel economy improvement, according to RDA Group’s 2010 Auto-Ideation Study. The study, which was unveiled this week, delves into the top 500 needs consumers want automakers to handle as they build future vehicles. [Read More]

Automotive Resources International has rolled a new flexible closed-end leasing program that it says it geared toward executive fleets, organizations in the process of stopping a vehicle-reimbursement program and companies that want to trim their chances of unexpected lease costs. [Read More]

General Motors said Thursday that it is conducting a recall of more than 14,000 Cadillac DTS and Buick Lucerne vehicles to fix a power-steering issue. The affected vehicles are all from the 2010 and 2011 model years, and all of the Lucerne vehicles included in the recall are V8 models. In total, 14,245 units have […] [Read More]

GE made what it believes to be the largest-ever single electric vehicle commitment on Thursday — with a major component of it connected to General Motors. GE officials announced they will purchase 25,000 electric vehicles by 2015 for their own fleet and through their business at GE Capital Fleet Services. GE said it intends to […] [Read More]

Liquid Motors unveiled a new version of its OptiSite Dealer Website technology this week that incorporates significant enhancements to core search engine optimization. Officials mentioned these that technological enhancements include improved geographic and keyword targeting, sitemaps for mobile sites and videos and RSS feeds. The company explained that improvements also have been made for the use […] [Read More]