There’s no doubt that Shared Mobility offers dealers’ lots of new customer-facing and sales channel opportunities to build on from their current retail sales operations. These can include carsharing, subscription, and extended test drives.
However, a Shared Mobility platform offers a surprising benefit for dealers – operational cost savings.
We’ve identified two key areas that a Shared Mobility platform can enable significant savings for dealers:
Inventory management and flexibility – A key problem for many dealers is appropriately managing vehicle inventory to best match demand and supply. An on-site Shared Mobility fleet allows dealers to rotate vehicles on that are old stock, both new and used, to create cash flow on an otherwise unused asset. Dealers may then decide to incur some marginal depreciation on that unit, and it can be sold later at a lower price, which may not otherwise have been cost-effective.
In the same way, a Shared Mobility fleet also enables dealers to carry an extra inventory of units that can be pulled from the fleet and sold as retail when a buyer is found.
Internal dealer fleet – Any fleet manager will tell you that a well-developed fleet management platform is key to minimizing cost and maximizing utilization. Few dealers do this for their internal fleet – vehicles are put on as needed, and not managed properly. As well, most fleet management tools are aimed at larger fleets and not necessarily cost-effective for dealers.
A Shared Mobility platform, like Ridecell, is a fleet management tool that enables Shared Mobility. Therefore, dealers have visibility over the status of all their fleet vehicles, and this allows flexibility when needed for different activities, such as parts courier, service loaner, service shuttle manager demos, and test drive demos.
One vehicle doesn’t necessarily have to be used for only one activity, creating cross-department utilization and, therefore may have the potential to reduce the number of vehicles that dealers need on the fleet without impacting operations. Vehicles can also be closely monitored for maintenance needs, accidents, or other abnormalities that need to be quickly identified, ensuring the vehicle exits the fleet in the best possible condition at precisely the right time, maximizing the sale price.
Learn how you can use Shared Mobility to strengthen your dealerships retail opportunities, download “A SWOT analysis for dealers.” Or contact our expert team at Ridecell directly to understand more.
Author: Mark Thoms, VP of Marketing and Alliances, Ridecell