NEWS

The mouse. They always used to be boring little peripherals, sitting by the keyboard being dull. But not anymore, thanks to the MotorMouse! The Motormouse is car shaped, ergonomically designed, wireless, and set to 1200dpi for lovely, accurate clicking. Featuring blingtastic chrome wheels, the MotorMouse is sure to brighten up any dull office. It also [...]

  IN the run up to the election Labour invested £1.8bn of taxpayers’ money in British industry. The former Business Secretary Lord Mandelson initiated the spending campaign focusing on industrial seats in marginal constituencies.  Lord Mandelson was said to be behaving like ‘a Bourbon monarch going round in his coach throwing out gold coins’ according [...]

THE results of our Car Dealer Power survey are out – and there are some shock winners and losers! Nissan swooped to victory and was named the Car Dealer Power winner after top scoring with an incredible 91 per cent. The marque scored six Faultless averages and two Excellents in our survey that aimed to [...]

In Issue 27 of Car Dealer Magazine we looked at the Sales Process and how you can make more money our of every sale. Here’s the exact feature as it ran in the magazine. If you’d like to be involved in a feature like this you can get in touch with us by calling (023) [...]

PICTURE a car dealership in your head and, chances are, there will be a scene involving thumbing through a well-used paper valuation guide. Nowadays, it’s potentially a familiar, oft-seen one: such is the complexity of modern car ranges, getting an exact price is often not the work of a moment… All that is about to [...]

Sounds like a tough ask? You bet it is, but that won’t stop us having a good go at it. What are we talking about? Well, we plan to turn these two cars into a Porsche 911, by 2011. Simple. Ish. Here is a copy of the first feature that appeared in the June issue of [...]

CAR DEALER has recently launched an App for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Downloadable from the iTunes store now for 59p, the App digests content from our website in a user-friendly way for car dealers on the go. To celebrate its launch we chatted to the team behind the App to find out how [...]

The internet is an information minefield. It’s a 24-7 barrage of communication consisting of websites, news articles, social networks, images, videos and more. It can be daunting to look at this massive platform and grasp the overwhelming potential of any one of these information sources, but each holds value and untapped potential for the innovative [...]

JOHN Tordoff is the man in charge at JCT600, the well-known family-owned car dealer group. He’s been involved with the firm – the 13th biggest dealer group in the UK – since 1988 when he joined the team, aged 24, as general manager of the company’s Leeds Porsche dealership. In 2003 he moved to the [...]

WHAT began with a single horrifying car crash in southern California last August became a worldwide automotive incident resulting in an unprecedented recall of millions of Toyota vehicles. Strangely, the question can be posed; could such a crisis actually help a brand’s perception?  The internet and, in particular, social networking sites have reset the rules [...]

EACH year in the UK, a staggering two million cars and vans are scrapped. That’s a phenomenal total – there are as many motors crushed as there are sold new! Trouble is, not all are actually crushed. Up to half the scrapped cars each year are disposed of through unofficial means, which is bad for the [...]

Innovations in the online car auction world come thick and fast. There are no end of smart ways out there, that can either improve your profit margins or help find the particular car you’re after. Despite this, car trade expert Tony Hinkley has still managed to come up with something new. Just launched is UKCarexchange, which [...]

SOME car dealers run scared from social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook… …But Gforces Tim Smith explains here how you can use them to keep your customers in touch. WHAT began with a single horrifying car crash in southern California last August became a worldwide automotive incident resulting in an unprecedented recall of millions [...]

UP TO six metres tall and weighing over six tons with a mouth chocked full of nine-inch long bone-crushing teeth, the Tyrannosaurus was a pure killing machine. Anything that stumbled into its territory soon found its day coming to a bad end, fast. Yet, for all its power and ferocity, the T-Rex’s approach was flawed. [...]

AFTER spending big rolling out the red carpet to customers, it’s madness to the force them away again before they even get started. Yet that’s what so many car dealers are doing, says Webzation’s Richard Tavernor, by failing to fully consider their website structure and tools. It’s all down to a lack of ‘ecommerce sense’. [...]

ASK any car enthusiast what they did in their lunch hour, and chances are a big proportion will say ‘searching on aye-enn-other.com for used cars’. Let’s face it – we ALL do it. Call it window-shopping for car geeks – and it’s why car-buying portals are among the biggest websites in the country. But the vast [...]

IN 1996 Czechoslovakian javelin thrower Jan Železný sealed his place in the record books by breaking the existing world record, one set three years earlier himself. Some 14 years later and his record throw of 98.48 metres still stands and, as the holder of all top five javelin performances of all time, he’s regarded as the [...]

  What do you do when your website is already at the top of its game? Well, if you’re Really Good Domains you make it even better. RICHARD AUCOCK finds out how they did it CAR makers do it all the time: launch a new version of an existing model. Really, it’s sometimes tricky to [...]

THIS year is an important one for everyone in the car industry. We’ve seen the ‘green shoots’ of recovery, but sustaining that will be the hard part. Here, Richard Aucock chats to 10 companies that can give you a helping hand to ensure you’re adequately armed to tackle the challenges ahead…   BUILDING SIGHTS www.reallygooddomains.com, [...]

AS the world’s press gathered for the unveiling of Nissan’s new electric Leaf model, the car firm’s executives in territories around the world were still trying to work out how its dealers would make money out of the car. In fact, even now, the car manufacturer is devising a plan for its UK dealer network to [...]