Vauxhall Motors is pleased that the Department of Trade and Industry Order into the sale of new cars in the UK has been finally published. This ends many months of uncertainty for customers and the industry.
Vauxhall will need to study the full detail of the Order, but it is already clear that several of the elements of the Order reflect Vauxhall’s existing practices.
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The Competition Commission set the objective of seeing a 10-12% fall in new car prices. Much of this has already been seen in the market-place, as studies such as the independent surveys from the Alliance and Leicester have shown.
Vauxhall has responded to the market with initiatives such as Value Pricing. This has taken many hundreds of pounds, in some cases thousands, off the price of many popular retail models. Vauxhall dealers have also been supported with new deals to offer value to customers to compete with anything from Europe, and other new ways of buying a car.
Another example has been the launch of the dot.com range of cars, for sale through the internet, priced to take on, and beat, those of similar imported models from abroad.
Vauxhall will immediately respond to the Order on fleet discounts for dealers and is working to put in place a structure to allow dealers who buy cars outright equivalent terms to those offered for an identical deal to fleet buyers.
The company has already strongly supported a number of points in the Order, including dealers being free to advertise and sell cars at whatever price they wish.
Vauxhall is happy to comply on the issue of cars obtained from authorised dealers in other EU countries.
Looking to the future, on the specific issue of Block Exemption, consumer surveys have consistently shown that customers have been well served by, and prefer to deal with, franchised dealers working in partnership with manufacturers.
Whatever the outcome of the review into Block Exemption, Vauxhall wants to see a regulatory framework which enables us to work with our retail network, protect our brand and, most importantly of all, meet customer needs of safety, reliability, value and service.
