I was just looking at the June sales figures for the Jeep Wrangler. Down
39% from the previous year. Yet Chrysler is offering no rebates except $500 to armed forces personnel and $400 in marketing support to dealers.So I chatted with a good friend of mine who is a sales manager at a family owned dealership in our area. His explanation is that Chrysler is just about making money and could care less about marketshare now.
Huh? - was kind of my response to him. You cannot make money unless you sell vehicles. There are fixed costs associated with production and you have to keep production and thus sales to a certain level to cover your costs. Marketshare does not matter? If you don't keep customers in your product lines, they venture elsewhere and usually never come back.
In other words, you cannot make money unless you sell vehicles and you cannot keep your customer base if you let customers go to other manufacturers - right?
As long as Jeep Wrangler, and other Jeeps for that matter, remain fuel inefficient, I don't understand why Chrysler is not offering incentives other than the $2.99 gas deal (big deal) - hey Chrysler, from looking at the dismal sales figures, it does not look like that idea worked. Try some incentives to bring the cost of the vehicles down for the buyers.
GM's 0% interest deal for up to 72 months really helped them and they reported better than expected sales in June.
Any dealers out there have any comments on Chrysler's direction with incentives? Any thing coming in 2009 product line to increase fuel efficiency to get people to buy Jeeps?
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