Automotive machine churns on

The banking and market meltdown, the credit crisis, recession, and ‘global warming’. Yesterday’s spiraling gas costs, US automotive over production and poor product mix. ‘Dealer consolidation’. Detroit is a nervous town. The question on everyone’s mind is how much change all this turmoil will cause and which US automotive manufacturers will survive.

All three are scrambling to raise capital, talking about mergers and sell offs. They’ve already been rushing to cut inventory and produce products consumers want at competitive prices. They’ve laid off employees, outsourced, cut production, discounted, discounted and discounted even more. With all the challenges there is some normalcy, the machine churns on. A number of online initiatives have launched recently. Let’s take a look.

Chrysler LLC recently launched new dealer sites focused on driving more revenue. The refreshed sites do a nice job of repackaging existing functionality. The corporate dealer sites are fully integrated into the brand sites. You can’t ‘visit’ a dealer site, you can view inventory, request a quote, schedule a test drive etc on Chrysler.com, Jeep.com and Dodge.com. They incorporated google maps to find dealers near you.

Still missing is the ability to search inventory across dealerships and accurate pricing. Still missing is any attempt to incorporate the social sharing tools all online junkies have come to expect on every site.



Ford continues to provide store sites for their dealerships. They’re all template based, but at least Ford let’s dealers upload videos to inject some personality into the site. Here’s talking at you. Being able to search inventory across dealerships is a nice touch.


GM also provides template sites for its dealers bu even if they were links out it would be hard to tell. Competition for dealership business is fierce and owned by a few big players. The only way for vendors to make money is to resell a template based platform. Most dealer sites, regardless of who implemented them, look very similar with similar functionality. Almost all use the same data and image sources. Where are the sharing features? Where’s the conversation? Where’s the talking at you video?



There are some renegade dealerships experimenting with virtual F&I and accurate pricing. These are the exceptions; innovation generally comes from startups leveraging the lead generation model. Lead generation is the automotive retail monetization model of today. Leads and ads.

Domestic auto companies and dealerships continue to do things the way they’ve done them for the last 10 years. It’s web 0.5. Accurate pricing and a shopping cart would take them to web 1.0. Simply adding social sharing tools would move them onto the beginning edge of web 2.0. Matching the dealerships mega store business model to help them upsell and help consumers shop their entire inventory based on needs. Errr, No.

Maybe in the next few months as more dealerships go under we’ll start to see to real changes in how cars are sold. Both online and off.