Wise County Messenger

Popular Categories

No categories found.

Dealerships move cars despite low inventory

Dealerships move cars despite low inventory

“We look like a bird with no feathers,” is how Carey Williams, Executive Manager of James Wood Motors described the thin inventory on the dealership’s display lots.

Despite critical inventory shortages, Decatur’s three new car dealerships registered 1,849 new vehicles in the first six months of 2021 – 280 more than for a similar period in 2020.

“The first half of the year was pretty normal on the GM side, even though inventory levels are very low,” Williams said. “Inventory is trickling in and customers are raising their hand for vehicles before they arrive.”

Derek Sugg, General Manager of Karl Klement Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram, said that “sales have remained steady despite inventory issues. We’re starting to see some inventory trickle in, but I believe inventory shortage is going to last through the third quarter. Demand is still very high and used cars are also in heavy demand.”

Nationally, in the second quarter, the Ram pickup took top sales honors away from perennial leader, the Ford F-Series. However, for the first six months Ford bumped the Ram down to second followed by the Chevrolet Silverado. After the Chevrolet, the remainder of the top 10 honors went to imported vehicles.

“We’ve had a few trucks come in lately, but most of the time they are gone before they are unloaded off the transport,” said Joe Redwine, General Manager of Karl Klement Ford. “The market value of some of our high-end limited trucks are selling for more than their MSRP. I’ve had some dealers call me about selling them to them or just passing their customer to me, and we get the sale and profit.”

All three dealership managers said that some customers are willing to order the specific vehicle they want and wait for it to be built.

“We are placing more sold orders with Ford in the last two months on Super Duty trucks than normal,” Redwine said. “Ford has more than 50,000 trucks built and ready to ship just waiting on semiconductor chips. I don’t see inventory levels getting back to normal for another year or so.”

Recently Ford has said it would ship the incomplete trucks to dealers to hold until the semiconductor chips are available and then the dealers would install them.

James Wood Motors sells the only imported vehicles in Wise County at their Hyundai dealership. In June, it saw record sales of 73 new Hyundais.

“Hyundai had good inventory levels at the beginning of the shortage, but with the demand in sales, we are very low there also,” Williams said.

Used car and truck prices soared to record levels during the first half of 2021. Lower than normal new vehicle inventories caused a shortage of trade-ins and auction prices went through the roof. Nationally, observers said that situation eased somewhat at the end of the second quarter.

“Fortunately our used inventory has remained fairly steady,” Williams said.

His statement was echoed by both Sugg and Redwine.

“Used cars are in very high demand,” said Sugg.

Redwine said he has seen some changes in recent weeks.

“We have seen the pre-owned market drop a lot these last few days and trucks with higher miles have dropped in value over the past few weeks,” he said.

Nationally, the first six months saw several “winners and losers” according to Automotive News. Genesis, the high-end Hyundai brand, saw sales increase almost 156 percent while Buick sales were up 61 percent from the same period in 2020. Those with lower sales included Fiat, Infiniti and Dodge.

For the first six months of 2021, Chevrolet was the top seller in Wise County followed by Ford, GMC, Ram and Hyundai.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.