Car Lead Times Get Worse
Wednesday, 16. June 2010
We recently had the Mercedes C63 AMG on offer. If you had ordered a car, which is partly hand built, it would have taken Mercedes about 10 weeks to get the car built and delivered to you. But in one of the worst examples of long delivery of a standard car one dealer recently quoted 20 weeks to deliver a standard VW Polo. This is partly because this particular dealer had used up his allocation but even dealers with allocation available are quoting over 14 weeks. It is ridiculous and makes my job extremely hard. New cars have been in such short supply that in a recent case we had to swap one customer’s finance approval to three different cars in order to finally get a car delivered without having to wait several months. You can get a fully spec’d up Korean car in about half the time you can get a bolt standard European car at the moment. Someone needs to pull their finger out if they are not to continue losing possible sales to non European countries. By Graham Hill
