Automotive News - October 21, 2013 - Supplement - S36

36 ❙ OCTOBER 21, 2013
S H A M M A S A U T O T O M O T I V E G R O U P, L O S A N G E L E S

Shammas Automotive Group's projects on Figueroa Street just south of downtown Los Angeles include, from left, new homes for its Porsche and
Audi stores and an overhaul of its Mercedes-Benz store, expected to be completed next year. Its dealership projects will total almost $80 million.

Historian-songwriter-developer leads
revival of legendary L.A. auto row
Printed in Automotive News May 27, 2013
Ryan Beene
rbeene@crain.com

n a mile-long stretch of Figueroa
Street just south of downtown, a
former history professor is rebuilding part of Los Angeles' automotive heritage.
Long before L.A. became a skein of freeways, Figueroa was the city's Automobile
Row. As far back as the mid-1920s, the street
was chockablock with dealerships for such
brands as Dodge Bros., Buick, Flint Motors
and Hupmobile.
Nearly a century later, Darryl Holter, the
onetime academic who heads L.A.'s Shammas Automotive Group, is putting the finishing touches on a $30 million overhaul of his
Downtown L.A. Motors Mercedes-Benz
store. The new building is the latest in a series of dealership projects that will total
nearly $80 million and will have helped reestablish Figueroa as an auto row in the
heart of Los Angeles.
Since the plan got under way in 2004,
Holter estimates the group's sales have
grown from about 250 a month to a record of
more than 1,700 new vehicles in March. The
project also has yielded new or renovated facilities for Holter's Volkswagen, Porsche,
Audi, Nissan and Chevrolet dealerships.
Next up: a new $20 million dealership one
block away for the Toyota franchise recently
awarded to the Shammas group. "That's the
last parcel that we have that isn't fully utilized," Holter says. "In that sense, I'll feel that
I've satisfied my goal."
Yet at age 66, the CEO shows no signs of

"Historically, Figueroa was auto row. It
was auto row in the beginning because
it was the main drag, and you wanted
to be on the main drag," says Darryl
Holter, head of L.A.'s Shammas
Automotive Group.

slowing down. He is chairman of the California New Car Dealers Association, where he's
lobbying for legislation to help clarify state
franchise laws and help dealers handle factory-set performance standards. He's also an
adjunct professor and occasional lecturer at
the University of Southern California and a
singer-songwriter who has released three albums. In his latest project, Holter is writing
the music for a collection of song lyrics written by Woody Guthrie in the late 1930s.

No matter what happens, he says, "it's not
like I'm going to sit around and do nothing."
Holter, a former labor activist and academic with a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, came to California in the early 1990s, never intending to
be in the car business.
He was working as a history professor at
the University of California, Los Angeles,
see SHAMMAS, next page

Automotive News - October 21, 2013 - Supplement

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