Guest Blog

As we count down the final days to the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) Consumer Duty 31 July implementation deadline, which requires firms to act to deliver good outcomes for retail customers, the incoming regulations make it even more important for dealers to review the products and customer service processes they currently have in place. More than a quarter (28%) of ...

A leading debt advisor is reporting a ‘marked rise’ in the number of people seeking advice on motor finance debt. The StepChange Debt Charity, which has been in existence for 30 years, said that between January 2020 and March 2023, the proportion of clients accessing debt advice who have a car finance debt has risen by 14.8%. In the same ...

Ever since the dawn of the internet, dealers have been gradually adapting to a digital consumer retail landscape, but now more than ever, change is afoot. Spurred on by the pandemic, and heightened for some with the shift to the agency sales model, more people than ever are now researching, speccing and buying their new cars online. Despite this, most ...

BEV charging seems to be in the news at the moment.  The British comedy actor Rowan Atkinson attracted attention with a column in the Guardian newspaper suggesting that he had been duped into buying a BEV by incomplete environmental analyses, but also commented on unsatisfactory charging experiences. Bigger news came out of the US recently however when GM announced that ...

I’m on holiday in the Algarve at the moment, so wasn’t really planning on a blog this week, but one thing struck me on the way from the airport, and subsequently driving round in my rental car.  (Opel Corsa, very nice drive, well equipped by the way). There are many unfamiliar sights when you travel around, even within Europe which ...

Over the last three years, since both manufacturers and dealers discovered that they can make more money by selling fewer cars, we have been assured that lessons had been learned and that we would not return to the bad old days of oversupply. Pushing product drives discounts and campaign spending that amounts to billions of euros annually for a major ...

With the recent news that BT will become a ‘leaner business’ and push into artificial intelligence (AI), there’s amped up anxiety that this rapidly growing technology could take work away from humans. But where AI might replace jobs at some point, we believe this technology will not only lead to more creativity but also create more new jobs and opportunities ...

We recently held a webinar for our research programme members looking at dealer consolidation in Europe and in particular what was going on in respect of cross-border deals. The consolidation trends creating ever larger groups with a higher domestic market share is well established and in some markets like France, Netherlands and the UK, the share held by the top ...

Given the stream of negative headlines, for many people the outlook for 2023 didn’t look promising. But against a backdrop of political and economic uncertainty, the used car market has gone from strength-to-strength this year, fuelled by very robust levels of consumer demand. On our marketplace we saw a record 238 million visits in Q1, which is up 17% on ...

My blog is again a couple days late this week, but it does provide an opportunity to see the headlines from the Shanghai Auto Show with the press days scheduled on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. Whilst auto shows in Europe are in decline and looking to reinvent themselves with new formats, venues and focus, the Chinese still put on ...