I never feel at home in Main Dealers. I think the intention is good: soft chairs, free coffee and buns, newspapers in racks and key fobs in cabinets, but the welcome somehow misses the mark for me. Considering the premium one is paying – figures are difficult to source, but even two-hundred-and-something an hour is easily achieved – I feel as if I’m one questioning/cross word away from a rapid swing to stoney faces. I guess the veneer is thin.
Some are more mellow, mind, and as ever it’s purely down to the individual. For a short, expensive and unsatisfying while, I had a first-generation Audi A8. It was BRG and in Sport trim, so looked decent on its 18 inchers and had a superb inside, but it rode like garbage, was slow and had an insane hairtrigger throttle that combined with that pitchy ride to make ‘L’ Plate style jerky progress. Anyway, it was the scheduled servicing that soured it for me (not repairs; it never needed any of them, to be fair). And not the service manager. He was good. Not sure whether it’s still the case, but back then, having an A8 bumped your status to ‘Premium’ or something like that (along with bumping the bill). This meant that the manager was all yours and so was the choice of loaner. And they weren’t the A2 or 3s. The vibe throughout the rest of the glass-walled temple was cold though; certainly not an environment that made me want to hang out and buy.
That’s the point of a dealer, surely? And maybe that’s why so many buyers just kick back at home and immerse themselves in website-speccery goodness. Where next for dealers if they end up existing just to service a declining service market for EVs? Those Tesla et al ‘Experience Centres’ in shopping malls don’t look so crazy now.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1827733/12726480