The Local Car Dealer Is a Car Manufacturer’s Greatest Asset

The big question this week on the news is “should GM be forced into bankruptcy?” While this may seem to be GM’s best bet to get a better labor contract, absent from the discussion is the affect it would have on dealers. Many people don’t recognize that dealers are independent businesses that put their own capital at risk. The following is part of a response to an article in the Washington Post:

NADA Letter
The Nov. 20 editorial “Detroit at the Brink” makes some good points about the Detroit Three’s current predicament. But to group the dealership network in the same sentence as executive salaries and labor costs is just plain wrong. It is not the number of dealerships that General Motors, Ford or Chrysler have that is forcing them to seek government loans to weather the current global credit crisis.

What’s not widely known is that dealers are independent business men and women who invest millions of dollars of their own money in land, buildings, improvements, personnel and advanced tech equipment to sell and service vehicles. It is the dealer who buys the vehicles and the parts from an automaker in the first place. Without the revenue that dealers provide to their automakers, the factory assembly lines would screech to a halt. Dealers pay their manufacturer for just about everything, even including the signs out in front of their stores.

Moreover, we should not be too quick to want to arbitrarily lower the number of dealers that any manufacturer has. Beyond creating good jobs for over a million Americans – jobs that cannot be sent overseas – dealers also provide great value to consumers in terms of competition and convenience, not to mention their charitable and other contributions to the community. If there is an overabundance of dealers, the market will address it, as it has over the past 60 years when we have seen market forces reduce the number of dealers from 50,000 to the 19,700 we have today.

So, the question is not whether the domestic dealer network is overgrown. The question is whether dealers are a cost center to the automakers. And they are not. In fact, the dealer network is the manufacturers’ greatest asset, providing customers with convenient and competitive sales, service and financing. And this is all done at minimal cost to the manufacturers. Dealers represent almost 20% of all retail sales in this country. It is their recovery – not their demise – that is essential to the survival of the overall U.S. economy.

ANNETTE SYKORA
Chairman
National Automobile Dealers Association