Many of the auto industry trends that dealers feared would disrupt auto retail—autonomous vehicles, shared mobility services, electric vehicles and disruptions to distribution channels—have not come to pass. But there is one immediate threat that dealers should be worried about, according to Glenn Mercer, an auto industry researcher and long-running NADA research partner.
“Over the next year or two, there’s only one issue you should really worry about, and it’s the supply-demand balance,” Mercer said during his Live Stage session on Saturday.
Mercer gave an update on his previous forecasts and found that while the threats of most of the industry’s disruptors have leveled out or been absorbed by the industry, the imbalance between the current supply from OEMs versus customer demand is affecting pricing and thus profitability.
“Customers have been retrained over the last two years,” Mercer noted. “MSRP used to be the floor. Now it’s the ceiling. Will that continue to be the case? Can OEMs manage to restrain supply to one less vehicle than you can sell?”
Mercer’s Live Stage session was just a preview of his full workshop session, Dealership of Tomorrow: 2023 Update, which will take place on Sunday, Jan. 19 at 10:30am in Room D163.
Watch the video above to hear more about what Mercer calls “the Barbarians at the Gate,” “the Carpocalypse Deferred,” and how the digital transformation wasn’t “quite the Wild West” that dealers had feared. And catch all the Live Stage action through our livestream.
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