Shift Magazine - September 2021 - 3

B
ack in the mid-1990s, I bought my first
new car. It was a personal triumph -
after years of driving used cars that
kept breaking down. The purchase
STAFF
also marked my first experience with anything
close to online car-shopping.
In a move that was tech savvy at the time,
I sat down at my fancy home PC and used
CompuServe and a dial-up modem to go online
and do some research. The World Wide Web
was in its early years, the interface was plain text,
and, of course, there was no dealership website. But I managed to find some
pricing information on the model I wanted, which I sent to my dot-matrix printer.
I wanted to go to the showroom armed with all the information I could find.
Fast-forward 26 years. I checked online recently and was pleased to see
the suburban Philadelphia dealership that sold me the car not only is still in
business, but it is keeping up with changing times.
At the bottom of its website is a little talk-bubble icon that invites the
visitor to " send us a text " or " chat with us. " There's another live-chat
invitation to the left, featuring a smiling sales representative. But what really
stood out was another feature on the site: a " buy online " button.
I bet that if I were in the market today, far beyond just looking up vehicle
prices online, I would have clicked on that button, lured by the prospect
of handling most if not all of the purchase - even finance and insurance
arrangements - from my home office. Perhaps I would have gone into a
physical store for a test drive, but with some dealerships, you even can do
that from home.
Of course, we do lose something when we go digital. I really liked my
salesperson from 26 years ago. She helped teach me how to drive a stick
shift as we were awaiting delivery of the car. Hugs were exchanged when
the vehicle finally came in and I arrived to drive it home.
But as one dealer said in a recent Shift panel discussion: The genie is out
of the bottle. We can't expect a full return to the old way of doing business.
(See " Thriving in changing times, " Page 20.)
The coronavirus pandemic didn't create this move to online retailing,
but it certainly has sped it up, as you'll read in " Unexpected acceleration, "
Page 8.
The pandemic has combined with other challenges facing retailers,
including an inventory shortage stemming from the chip crisis ( " The
perfect chip storm, " Page 18) and the move toward a more electrified future
( " Playbook for the age of EVs, " Page 14), forcing car sellers to adapt.
It's not just in the way they sell vehicles, which we explore in this issue
of Shift. As a recent Cox Automotive study found, it's also in the way they
relate to workers, how they use data and how they handle the service
experience.
With the help of technology, the retail world has adjusted quickly, and
many dealers, despite the challenges, are finding a way to thrive.
Editor
Leslie J. Allen
Chief of Editorial
Operations
Dave Versical
Chief Content Officer
Jamie Butters
Managing Editor
Mary Beth Vander Schaaf
Deputy Mobility Editor
Pete Bigelow
Reporters
Vince Bond Jr.
Laurence Iliff
John Irwin
Urvaksh Karkaria
Hannah Lutz
Michael Martinez
Larry P. Vellequette
Copy Editors
Amy Butters
Tim Good
Elizabeth Hardy
Cindy Orosco-Wright
Contributors
Marcus Amick
Sebastian Blanco
Alex Haslam
Jim Henry
Jack Keebler
Design Director
Steve Massie
Leslie J. Allen, Editor
lallen@crain.com
september 2021 * shift
3
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Shift Magazine - September 2021

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