"Agency is dead, finished," so said one dealer group executive privately early this year.
His tone suggested that car makers must have been mad to ever think they could take over the business of selling cars directly to customers, with dealers acting as handover ‘agents’.
In one way, he was right. Car makers have proved in the years since the Covid pandemic that they lack the ability to shift metal when markets turn tough. For that, you need a properly incentivised salesperson.
Many including Stellantis, Mercedes-Benz, JLR, Ford and Volkswagen have dialled back or abandoned plans to shake up their distribution by switching to the agency model.
But that doesn’t mean the whole idea to move from the current model of wholesaling cars to dealers was wrong. One benefit of selling direct to customers was to make the process of buying a new car a lot less painful.
How painful it can be is something I’m experiencing right now as my wife and I try to replace our family car.
If a car is sold directly, the relationship is between the car maker and the car buyer; there’s no one in the middle. This is what Tesla established and what the 'legacy' car makers then tried to copy.
In our mission to get hold of a new Renault Scenic, however, there are two separate organisations between us and Renault: Octopus EV (the leasing company) and Brayleys (the supplying dealer). This might all work fine if the process had gone smoothly, but it hasn’t gone smoothly (it’s a tumultuous world), and that has exposed the underlying problem of non-direct sales: who to blame and who to chase.
Without lingering for too long on our specific situation, the Scenic was ordered in April, then delayed from June to July to August to September or October to – current status – the beginning of November.
Every update has come via a phone call made by us to Octopus or Brayleys. Neither seem to know much, probably because they’re one of a chain. Renault also doesn’t, because ours is a fleet order and it doesn't have visibility until the car has been assigned a VIN and it begins its journey down the production line.
It might be that Renault is having trouble building the Scenic, but that’s less of a problem than the lack of information. With our current lease running out early September, we don’t know whether to cancel, reorder with someone else or hang on.
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