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GM and eBay to launch new-car sales site today
Rhys - August 11th, 2009 5:41 PM
In hope to help the company stay afloat, General Motors will be moving the sale of some vehicles online, an industry first.
California will be the first state to trial the deployment where 225 of California’s GM dealers will offer Buick, Chevrolet, GMC and Pontiac cars on a co-branded page of eBay Motors.
The auctions will be searchable and appear as normal throughout the eBay site on the start date: 8th August.
Auctions will start September 8 and vehicles will be searchable both from the eBay and eBay Motors homepages.
GM Vice-Chairman Bob Lutz says the online sales won’t cut out dealers. He states, "There is no model which can legally permit automobile companies to sell directly to the customer. That’s just prohibited by law in almost all states. But what we hope to do by this is…the dealer puts up the car on that Internet auction and then the customers can bid on them. Once the bidding is successful, the customer then contacts that dealer for the pickup…Then there’s always one issue that can never be dealt with on an Internet sale, and that’s the question of the used car that the customer wants to trade in."
"Every 10 or 15 years or so, and I’ve been in this business since 1963, in sales and marketing, some genius invents a system that’s going to eliminate car dealers. Everybody always gets excited an sometimes Wall Street puts a lot of money into it and it always fails because the franchise independent retailer is always the way to go. It always works best."
