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, Wed, 3 Jul 2002 12:40:56
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It's a matter of location, number of dealerships and their volume of inventory, and availability.
For those of you who live in the Northeast, where SAAB only dealers actually exist, that should be a policy. But for a majority of SAAB dealers, they are affiliated with other franchises, (in my case, VW/Audi/Porsche) SAAB only loaners are an exception. Some states (like mine) have only one dealership servicing a large area-where the next nearest dealer may be at least 150 miles away. And there is only one SAAB certified mechanic for the dealership. When he's on vacation, you're out of luck as far as service goes-unless you travel to the next state for service. And since they're a low volume dealer, they don't have many new SAABs on the lot to begin with maybe at least a dozen or so at any given time. To use their new SAAB cars as loaners would dry up their viewable SAAB inventory. So that's out. If there are any used SAABs on the used car lot, they may use them-but they rarely have any, so that's out too. So, they would either resort to using other brand cars (in my case, VWs, since they're the most widely available) from their inventory as loaners or use a rental company (seems that Enterprise has a contract with SCUSA to provide rentals as loaners) and rent cars as loaners.
Sure SAAB is trying to compete with the other bigger hitters such as M-B, Lexus, BMW etc-not to mention Volvo and Audi-but their dealers are more plentiful and their typical inventory much larger. So it's easier to provide the same brand loaners in those cases. It's the chicken and the egg. SAAB needs more dealers, but to justify that, they need to sell more cars. But since SAAB only has annual US sales of about 30-35k, it's hard to justify more dealers. Heck, it's not even the number of dealers, but the location/concentration of dealers. I'd venture to say one fourth to one third of SAAB dealerships are located in the Northeast. That inequity leave some states with few if any dealerships. Now, one can argue that the Northeast is where a majority of SAABs are sold. But I say it should not be. If SAAB better marketed its cars in areas where it is deficient-say, the South, for example-then it could easily double its sales figures. Everyone up North knows what a SAAB is. I daresay that is not the case elsewhere in this country. SAAB needs to concentrate its sales/marketing efforts outside the SAAB saturated Northeast. SAAB has miserably failed in this regard. This is reflected by the token dealership network in the South and West (outside CA). One wonders why some on these boards advocate bringing spare parts on vacation (like engine belts or a DI cassette)-it's because the sparsity of dealers outside the Northeast area is such that one may find need (in a pinch) for these parts-especially if you were vacationing in say, Washington DC, AR, WY, ND or WV.
But enough ranting.
posted by 155.58.51...
, Wed, 3 Jul 2002 12:40:56
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