Simi has some sound ideas on how to help the motor industry, but dealers need to get into gear, writes KILIAN DOYLE.
IRELAND’S MOTOR trade is, if you’ll excuse the pun, in a state of chassis.
No better men to point out that fact than those fine fellows in the Society of the Irish Motor Industry (Simi), who recently implored the Government for a rescue package.
I’m happy to admit I’ve scoffed at Simi entreaties for help in the past. But that was before the true extent of the carnage on the showroom floors became apparent. New car sales are down by two-thirds this year, meaning 2009 registrations are as rare as apologetic bankers. Simi claims 50,000 jobs are at risk – on top of the 3,000 that have already gone.
I have barely slept since Simi revealed its plight. Visions of thousands of young men in shiny suits driving to the dole office in the unsellable Mercedes S-Classes they got as redundancy payments fizz around my brain every time I shut my eyes.
At the time of writing, the Government has yet to respond publicly to Simi’s request. I suspect it might be awaiting my imprimatur. Well, chaps, for the sake of my sanity if nothing else, you officially have my permission to pull your heads out of the sand and get on with it.
Surely you can find a few bob under a sofa somewhere to help out the car industry? At a time when you were rowing back on a €9.7 million cervical cancer vaccine scheme for girls that could save scores of lives a year for budgetary reasons, you managed to find €180 million to save pig producers’ bacon and countless more millions to bail out a shower of merchant bankers. So why not the motor industry? Do car dealers not bankroll Fianna Fáil too?
Simi isn’t asking a lot, considering the stakes. It wants finance made available again. Fair enough. As long as it isn’t thrown around like €50 notes in a dockside brothel and proper safeguards are put in place to ensure the cars people buy don’t just end up joining the herds of repossessed motors already choking auction houses, I fail to see the problem.
It wants a clampdown on VRT dodgers and gougers flogging death traps on the roadside. Sounds good – as does Simi’s plea for a gentle reform of road tax and taxation on new car sales, in order to stimulate the market. The Government is understandably loath to cut taxes, but surely even it realises that a reduced take is better than none at all?
The real no-brainer is the introduction of a scrappage scheme, whereby owners of old cars are offered a voucher of a few grand for their bangers to redeem against a new or nearly new car. This can’t but work.
It would be good for the environment, good for the exchequer, good for the car dealers and, most of all, good for the aforementioned banger-jockeys. Take me, for example. If someone offered me €2,500 for my 19-year-old estate, I’d tear their arm off.
The one factor that is affecting Irish used-car sales that the Government has little control over is sterling’s downward spiral. But unless the Little Englanders swallow their imperialistic pride over their basket case of an economy and join the euro, their currency will go the way of Zimbabwe’s and Irish buyers will continue flooding into their car showrooms.
By the way, it’s not solely the Government’s job to save the car industry. Irish dealers have a responsibility too. Now is the time to sink or swim. The good ones should see this crisis as an opportunity to shine.
They could start with lighting a fire under their sales teams, many of whom were employed during the boom when cars were as easy to shift as drugs at an Ibiza knees-up. While being rude, disdainful and scoffing may have worked back then, it won’t now.
So, gentlemen, would it hurt to phone a prospective customer back? Or do you want the Government to do that for you, too?