Wessexboy

Fitting in to cars is a terrible idea. You know how we all moan about 'elephant racing' lorries where one doing 56 mph is trying to overtake one doing 55.9mph, just imagine 4 lanes of cars on the M25 all doing a speed between 69 and 71mph. What about when I pop over the channel and the speed limit is nearer 80mph?

Interviewing can be made more complicated than it needs to be. In reality all you need to know are three things: Will the candidate be able to do the job, will they enjoy it (i.e do they want to do it) and most importantly, will they fit in with the culture of your organisation. A positive answer to all three and you have a winner.

Well, I hope the above example is the norm and my experience was a one-off. We tried to put a plate on retention and got a message come up saying 'our records show this plate cannot be transferred'. We rang the DVLA who told us: 'it's a new system, we don't expect it to work properly yet - just send in a form like before'! To be fair, once the forms were sent in we did get back the new V5 in about 5 days - a big improvement on the 3+ weeks it used to take.

Autotrader 'best online advertising' -really???? and Carwow, just another parasitic broker destroying dealer profitability.

Couldn't agree more GG. The public don't need much of an excuse to assume the Motor Trade is full of dodgy practices and this just feeds their prejudices. I assume the bean counters at the top of the tree are responsible, the sort of people that have never had a face to face conversation with a customer in their lives and are therefore completely oblivious to the bad feeling this causes. I think that adding an admin fee reflects poorly on these businesses' ability to manage their processes to ensure a sensible profit is made in the margin.

Some nice stock but:....."Hartley puts his success down to a willingness to do a deal for 5% profit rather than the 17.5% he says other dealers work on" I think he has been drinking too much champagne!

So the previous keeper will have paid tax to the end of the current month and the new keeper will have to pay tax back to the beginning of the current month. The dear old DVLA will therefore get paid double bubble for the month. Perhaps they could invest some of their windfall into the shambolic mess that is the cherished transfer process...

Just read this interview and I have to say I was somewhat agitated by the end. I think you would have had more luck getting some straight, honest answers out of a politician.

These sort of threads crop on Pistonheads on a regular basis and the posters immediately fall into one of two camps - dealers/salesmen or people who hate dealers/salesmen. Some valid points occasionally get raised but it's hard to pick them out from all the drivel.

My understanding is that any vehicle that is registered without a genuine customer, and which the dealer intends to sell within 3 months must be declared as a pre-reg. ThIs of course means the car doesn't count towards targets which defeats the object of the registration in the first place. I have every confidence that all 2,264,737 cars registered last year went straight to an end user, or sat in a storage compound for 90 days - I'm sure none were resold within 3 months, or the manufacturers would have to act....wouldn't they??

GreenGiant - just because something has been going on for years doesn't make it right. The problem is, many manufacturers use the previous year's stats as a basis for setting targets. So, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, last year's figures are artificially inflated by self regs meaning the new year's targets are set at higher levels than the true market can achieve so guess what happens - more self reg, and so it goes on. Dealers end up with fields full of cars, either paid for, or on expensive funding plans, whilst the manufacturers pat themselves on the back and congratulate each other on their market share.Then the next quarter starts and the whole farce begins again with dealers trying to liquidate stock and manufacturers wanting to know why the new car sales for the quarter have started so slowly. It is short-termism at its worst and the sooner dealers have the balls to say no to the manufacturers the better, unfortunately whilst the manufacturers dangle the carrot of huge bonuses it is unlikely to happen without some serious rattling of the SMMT cage.