Some 21% of automotive retailers have shifted their focus towards online sales, and a further one-in-six (16%) plan on following suit to make savings by reducing staff and premises costs according to...

With the new car market having found a small sweet spot of pent-up demand, the SMMT has raised its forecast for the year to 1.86 million units by the end of the year, up 13.9% on the end of the year....

Dealer balance sheets have been, tested but they are proving resilient. Listed dealers have significantly reduced debt over the past decade and several leading dealer groups have strong net cash...

There is great quotation, often attributed to Ronald Reagan: “It’s hard, when you are up to your armpits in alligators, to remember that you came here to drain the swamp.” Our industry is facing...

Consumer appetite for increasingly sophisticated automotive technologies offers a huge opportunity for growth, but the use of complicated marketing jargon, unclear pricing and a lack of frontline...

Global automotive M&A deal value reached $59.3bn for the year in Q3, resulting in the highest year to date value in the last 10 years. Deal value for the quarter came in at $18.3bn, marking a 17%...

Fully autonomous driving technology is not yet popular among a broad audience, although there are some technologies that consumers would be willing to pay for in their next new vehicle purchase....

Those of you who bother to read my ramblings will know I am often critical of the pace of change in automotive (not of the products, though, which continue to evolve beautifully), and the willingness...

The National Body Repair Association (NBRA) has been unveiled as the UK’s trade association for vehicle body repair sector. Formally known as RMI Bodyshops (NAB and VBRA), the new brand is the...

Digitisation is transforming car retailing, delivering an enhanced customer experience. But just what will the future look like, and how do we benchmark the effectiveness of in-store digitisation and...

The US auto retail industry is bracing itself for some serious challenges in the used car market as a flood of vehicles come down the ex-lease pipeline over the next few years. So far, values have...

Controversial lead-generation website TrueCar is still working hard to convince auto retailers that it is “on their side” as it rebuilds its business model. The company claims it has added more than...

We are at the threshold of unprecedented value creation for industry and society, driven by the accelerating pace of change enabled through digital technology. And these digital technologies can...

The ever growing trend of automotive “pop-ups” in retail malls is both a good thing and a bad thing. At its best, it shows brands are beginning to think about retailing cars rather than selling...

Trust and transparency are what today’s car buyers are telling us are important to them. But what actually do we mean by trust, why is it so important, and how can automotive retailers respond? A...

Technology has had an impact on every area of the car buying process, altering what people expect from their cars, inside and out, and arguably even influencing how they expect to buy them. After all,...

Motor finance in the UK has grown to become a £37 billion industry, and the market has changed significantly over the last decade, as Adrian Dally of the FLA explains. “If we look at how automotive...

European automotive retailer networks will shrink faster and further than we have seen over the last several years since the financial crisis of 2007-2009, and changes towards a new model will happen...

Across the world of journals, conferences and internet portals, there is an increasing level of ‘chatter’ predicting the future of retail in automotive. From the gloomiest, apocalyptic scenarios to...

As summer finally arrived in the UK, markets seemed reluctant to spoil the mood. In a third straight month of gains, the FTSE 100 index of blue chip stocks closed 1% higher, while the more...