Lidl to sell discounted cars - The begining of the end? #
Posted by Mark Murphy on March 10, 2009, 9:44 pm Message modified by board administrator March 11, 2009, 1:32 pm
Lidl’s website offers cars at 25% off suggested price.
DISCOUNT supermarket Lidl began selling cars in its native Germany yesterday.
Its website will offer the Opel Corsa for just under e11,000 and the Volkswagen Cross Polo for e14,000 — a discount of about 25% off the suggested price.
Lidl is launching the sales with German car distributor ATG-Automobile.
Germany’s economy is in recession and unemployment is at 8.3%, but Lidl believes it can turn a profit in an industry that is bucking the economic downturn.
New car sales were up 21% in February year-on-year, largely because of a government stimulus plan that pays people e2,500 to replace cars that are at least nine years old with new ones.
Spokeswoman Petra Trabert said: “Lidl and ATG-Automobile GmbH work with the same target audience,” Trabert said. “We are geared toward the customer who seeks quality in conjunction with a favourable price.”
But Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, the director of the Centre for Automotive Research in Gelsenkirchen, said previous efforts to sell cars online and through supermarkets have faltered.
“I think it will be very difficult for Lidl,” he said. “People don’t want to buy high-value products from a discount grocery store.”
Mr Dudenhoeffer said that Quelle, a German online marketplace, tried to sell cars five years ago.
“It didn’t work, even though their site was visited fairly heavily,” he said. He said Germans might be unwilling to abandon haggling over the price of a car.
“Germans like to go to the dealership,” he said.
Re: Lidl to sell discounted cars - The begining of the end? #
Many years ago, when you bought a new car from a dealer, they would often give you a tank of fuel, mudflaps and floormats. Perhaps lidl, when you buy a diesel, will fill it up with cooking oil and give you a couple of packets of cornflakes. Andy
