Here’s an interesting twist on ‘demo registrations’ being used to inflate monthly sales numbers.
One of the European luxo-car companies, under a former CEO, had a very aggressive way of meeting year-end sales targets. In the last month of the year, those employees who drove company cars as part of their ‘package’, were told to leave their car keys ‘on their desk’ each morning.
During the day, the keys would be collected, and replaced with another set of keys for a new car – which would be parked ‘somewhere’ in the company parking lot, and the only way you knew what you would be driving home that night was to click the key remote and watch which car flashed its headlights!
This company would do this several times a week, during the last month, until it achieved the target HQ was expecting. My sources tell me that they are not sure the move was limited to ‘suits on a package’ – one says he saw members of the warehouse staff driving home in new cars!
The cars would be held in storage, and then metered out to dealers as ex-company demos at a rate which would not overwhelm the dealers’ financing limits.
Pretty sneaky, eh? Now one can see why the ’demo regos’ should be split out from genuine car sales data.
John Crawford
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