This afternoon, the government has just announced a rescue package for dealers who have ‘floor plan finance’ (ie they run off credit securitised by their vehicle stock) with GE and GMAC.

As everybody in the industry knows, when GE Money & GMAC announced a few weeks ago that they would be calling in all their debts, there has been a frantic struggle by dealers attempting to refinance before the debts were called in – expected to be Jan 2009.

Of course the credit crunch has ......

Official figures out today show that just 71,647 cars, trucks & light buses were delivered last month.  That’s down 20,434 vehicles on the same month last year.

As mentioned in a previous post these deliveries probably reflect consumer sentiment in October, allowing an average of around a month between sale commitment and delivery.

The big question is how consumer confidence in November itself will affect December sales.

But again, reiterating the silver lining – these sales scare the hell out of the car companies who have ......

Despite all the doom and gloom in the automotive industry, we’ve just recorded a very strong month in terms of enquiry.  In fact for the first time since 2003, last week we actually deliberately put the brakes on some of our online activities to ensure that service levels didn’t drop due to us being too busy with fresh enquiries.

Unfortunately sales have not quite kept pace with this flood of enquiries.   Whilst they are up around 20% on this time last year, enquiries are ......