What Drives Women as Car Buyers

When women are in the market for a car, what’s the most important factor influencing their choice? Any men tempted to say “color” should sign up for a thought-rectification course. The correct answer, according to a newly released Ipsos Public Affairs survey of women conducted for CarMax, is “price.”
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October Auto Sales

October’s lackluster sales results contained surprising signs of a fundamentally healthier market.
Transaction prices rose dramatically, incentives dropped and too-tight inventories became more comfortable. Most analysts are projecting continued improvement from the dreadful sales of the past 13 months.
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Marketing ops for African-American new car buyers

(October 18, 2009) At the recent Rainbow PUSH Tenth Annual Automotive Symposium held in Detroit, industry executives engaged in a series of panel discussions that examined how the economy affected African-Americans’ roles as customers, dealers and suppliers.
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Dealer Extends Service Hours, Wakes Up New Business

When Bill DeLord extended the 6 p.m. closing time of his service department to 11, he sought business from fleets that need service after normal business hours.   But in just four months, Bill DeLord Autocenter Inc. in Lebanon, Ohio, is attracting increased business from regular customers, too. DeLord has added an average of $20,000 to [...]

US Auto Makers Score Most Wins In Meeting Consumer Expectations

TUSTIN, Calif. (June 29, 2009) – Porsche and Ford Motor Company earned top honors in the 2009 Ideal Vehicle Awards (IVA), announced today by automotive research firm AutoPacific. The IVAs are based on owners’ ratings of their new 2009 model year cars and trucks across 15 key vehicle attributes. The cars or trucks that owners [...]

New Cars Not on American Shopping Lists

Nearly six in 10 (59%) Americans say they do not plan to shop for a new car for more than four years, a significant increase over the 46% who said the same thing in 2005, according toa survey by automotive research firm AutoPacific.
At the same time, the number of people intending to replace their vehicle within the [...]

Ford Posting Better Results Than Toyota In June

These are weird times for anyone who has watched the auto industry for, say, the last decade. The last few months have been something like culture shock for those who have come to accept it as natural law that the Japanese automakers would indomitably wear away Big Three market share as surely as the rising [...]

Become More User Friendly

As consumers, we all set a level of expectation of how long something should take. In some cases, our expectation is altered. The expected time for an oil change is a great example. The quick-oil change industry — using words such as “express,” “quick,” and “jiffy” — has raised customer expectations on how convenient an [...]

Ford Wins Nielsen’s Auto Ad Of The Year Award

Ford Motor Co. was the big winner at Nielsen IAG’s 3rd annual Automotive Ad Awards, presented Wednesday, April 8 at the opening breakfast for the 2009 New York International Auto Show.  The automaker took home the prize for Most Effective Auto Ad of the Year.  Congratulations to Hub City Ford and all the Ford dealers.
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Bad Times Reduce Dealership Count

On May 1, 30 years after joining his father’s dealership, Carl Shetler plans to call it quits.
Shetler Lincoln-Mercury in Lake Charles, La., will close. The property’s new owners will sell generators.
The past two years have been tough for Shetler. The dealership’s new-vehicle sales tumbled by more than a third, to 12 to 15 units a [...]