Here’s a question: what does this latest news from GM mean if you’re one of the remaining stand-alone Saab dealers in the US or elsewhere in the world?
There’s reason to assume right now that your most-need model – the Saab 9-5 – is going to be postponed a matter of months.
There’s reason to assume that your Saab 9-7x replacement model – the 9-4x – won’t materialise until the back half of 2010.
Your bread and butter model – the Saab 9-3 – is already selling in lower numbers than the pre-facelifted model.
You know that the mothership is listing at best and sinking at worst and that marketing support is going to be minimal.
What do you do?
How many other Saab dealerships are going to be downsized further, or even replaced all together with Subaru dealerships like in recent dealer movements in Los Angeles and Seattle?
Saab dealers – any insight into your future would be appreciated. Remain as anonymous as you like, though please use a real email address with your comment so as to establish your bona fides. The email address won’t be seen by anyone on this site but me, and I’ll make no contact with you unless requested.
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Working in the service department of a Cadillac-Saab store, I can tell you how I personally feel. Shed weight and focus on the fundamentals. In our case, that will obviously include focusing on Caddy sales unfortunately. For standalones though, the key will be in parts and service. Keep service top-notch and make sure your customers don’t ‘forget’ about the oil change they’re due for or the brakes they wanted to wait ‘a couple weeks’ to get. Maintaining communication with your customers during the next year or two is going to be critical. Keep them coming for trivial things like tire pressure checks and you might stand a chance of salvaging their auto purchase when times aren’t as tight.
In any case, building a personal reputation with your customers is going to be crucial. Find the businesses that survived from the 1920s and follow their model. We won’t be that bad off (hopefully) but those businesses survived economic catastrophe, and they did it in a particular way.
a great deal of dealers in the uk are on the edge, many are shipping money and will not survive the next 12 months, many more will decide its time to go.
many dealers are small family run outfits and have already pulled out of the pre-reg market due to financial constraints, dealers have been propping up the franchise for 18months already and will not do it much longer
Ubermich, Your mention of brakes in your comment brought to mind an experience of mine. I needed a brake job on my 9/3 because the pads were getting too thin to pass the lease termination standards, so I asked the Saab service guy how much it would cost. He quoted me a price of $600. I also needed the tires replaced – again to pass the lease return standards – so I took my car to Big-O tires (A large US tire chain). At Big-O I was able to get four new tires and the brake job for $600. As a matter of fact, the fellow at BIG-O apologized for the high cost of the brake job, because they couldn’t get Saab pads from their usual supplier and had to get the pads from the Saab dealership. So you may not want to count too much on service and parts to save your hide. As for me, I learned never to take my car to the dealership unless the warranty is paying.
Food for thought:
A proper brake job on a 9-3 consists of replacing both pads and rotors, as they are designed to wear as an assembly. Hence the quote seeming high. Under Saab’s standards you aren’t even able to have the rotors resurfaced.
On a side note, if you are returning an SFSC lease, then yes you have to bring the car up to spec with regards to tread remaining and brakes up to par. If it is a GMAC lease, you will most likely get away with doing neither, as they have very lax lease return standards (moreso than their lease return booklet you got in the mail). The Service Advisor at my dealership turned his GMAC 9-5 lease in needing 4 tires and all 4 brakes and was prepared to owe them $1400 or so. Instead he got a check (his security deposit).
Peter: Good info, and there are several cars that don’t have enough material in the rotors to have them resurfaced. It’s an artifact of the computer age, believe it or not. Computer-controlled manufacturing processes are precise enough to manufacture a rotor that’s both thin, strong and smooth with minimal machining and computer cost analysis shows that manufacturers come out better in the end with thin rotors — lower costs and higher parts sales.
I am, of course, no dealer, but it stands to reason that each dealer will have a lot of choices to make when promoting and selling new cars in the next year or so — what to stock, how to induce people to buy, etc. It seems to me that Saab dealers will have to perhaps “locally tune” the cars that they have. That is, modify the cars to make them more desirable for the market.
In New England, perhaps a winter package will bring better sales.
In California, perhaps an aftermarket body kit or tinted glass will sell.
In all parts of the country, perhaps a faux Hirsch car is the trick.
Who knows? It’s worth a shot.
Just a technicality, but if you were alluding to my local dealer (Saab of Sherman Oaks) in with the “Los Angeles” mention, let me point-out that unless something happened I don’t know about, they haven’t replaced Saab with Subaru. If anything they replaced HUMMER with Subaru. I’m just concerned about Saab’s future at that dealer though because of the layoff of all but one Saab salesman and “temporarily” relocating the Saab sales floor to the main building from the dedicated Saab building. At the same time the dealer picked up a Subaru franchise.
I was letting my imagination run astray when I was speculating that this dealer will dump Saab in favor of Subaru. I don’t know that to be fact.
I have not been enthusiastic about the new owner speculations I have read for SAAB, but–should it be the future–has anyone suggested Subaru (Fuji Heavy Industries)? Past ties to GM, no premium car line, smaller footprint in Europe, decent dealer network in NA–even smaller towns, reputation for quality with mild premium image, interest in motorsport . . . hmmmmm. I hope it works in the GM family, but if it can’t, a dealer could make a good living with those two brands under the same roof, and it would allow SAAb to climb a bit higher on the premium scale so that even low sales are profitable. I’d buy another SAAB from a Saabaru store.
Bruce
Sam,
As was already mentioned, the rotors must be replaced with the pads. If you do not replace the rotors, you’re looking at severely warped or even cracked rotors down the road.
That being said, every time I’ve priced brakes for my ’02 93, the only places that offer a cheaper job aren’t replacing the rotors. Everyone else offers the same price our dealership does (even without the employee discount).
That’s odd. I just had my pads replaced (for $250 from my local dealer) and they said the rotors were fine and didn’t need replacing. That’s at 24K.
As I said on another post late last month, the stand alone Saab dealer in Seattle, Carter Saab, closed in September and reopened as a Subaru dealer. Now the only Saab dealer in the Seattle/Tacoma area is in Fife, WA which is about 30 miles south of Seattle.
In the letter I received from Carter, they cited slow sales as their reason for giving up on Saab.
Interestingly, the Carter dealership was located in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood which is known for its large Scandinavian population. If Saab can’t sell cars here, I don’t think it bodes well for the brand.
From my standpoint, I have a 2009 9-3 Aero XWD on order, but unless they come out with some really fantastic cars in 3 years when this lease is up, I doubt I’ll order another Saab; I am not thrilled about driving 60 miles round trip for my “free” (it doesn’t seem free when it will take several hours out of your day for service) scheduled maintenance or warranty service.
Uber,
Your explanation reminds me of the explanations you get of why Whole Foods is so much more expensive than a regular super market. And not much more convincing.