Motor trade redundancy's

Hi To all I was in the motor trade repairing Ford cars for 25 years.Now I have gone in to Aircraft repairs I have loads of good mates in the motor Trade (mechanics) . During this week 2 have been made redundant both with 30yrs experiance. Is the motor trade really that bad now.

As I have heard a couple og Garages main dealers where I live in Cheltenham Closing!!.

Look on google earth, nobody can sell end of lease cars at the moment, they're completely filling up the old runways.

Hardly a reliable indicator of the current situation. Google Earth images can be two or three years old.

Peter

I'm sure they're flying off the runways now...

"Eccles" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

And the rest. I reckon the one for here's about a decade old.

Local.Live.com's Birds Eye images are about 18mo old, though.

Blame the good old British Government for putting the cost of road tax up. Vauxhall Motors can now only shift the Astra 1.7cdti ecoflex 110. That is the ONLY car they have been making when production of all others has completely stopped. The 1.4 petrol is too slow so no one buys it, the 1.6 petrol is slow and attracts a high road tax charge, the 1.8 petrol is too expensive to tax and the automatic worse. Once you go beyond that to larger engines it becomes silly. Dealerships are only guaranteed any income from mobility finance schemes, people now base their purchase on the cost of road tax and economy and Vauxhall were too slow to act so are left with a product no one wants. Put the road tax to how it used to be and the cars would sell.

It wouldn't be so bad if the governement actually reverted to the original reason for the 'road tax' - and that was to improve the roads - and not spend it on MP's wages and exorbitant expenses (amongst many other things).

It would also be fantastic if they would ditch one of the two taxes on petrol and diesel (fuel duty and VAT [preferably both]) - now that would save us some cash!

Unbeliever

No way they'll do that. They've got 'global warming' to tax us with, and the gullibles out there believe every word the scientists are paid to say.

Climate change is not something invented purely to generate tax revenue as some people do think. It *is* a real phenomena, man-made or not. It's just the polititians couldn't believe their luck in that they now had another excuse to tax us...

What about the latest sales figures then?

Pendragon shares If I recall down from around 60p to 6p over the last few years, GM shares same alue as 1946 and may not be here at Xmas without US Gov. subsidies , also a large dealership with several outlets around here gone t**s up (West Sussex)

Is the lease market also in freefall.

Ordered a "Class 2" company car today , and actually got a call to see what car I wanted out of Focus Estate , Mondeo, Astra Estate , Passat , Audi ,Octavia , Vectra and a few more.

The lady said that they cannot get shot of cars on lease at the moment.

Surely a bit unfair to blame our Government on extreme greed by a couple of hundred traders, hedge fund managers and bankers or "masters of the universe" as they used to enjoy being called?

(mind you I agree about the engines:)

The 'road tax' is only a small percentage of the overall running costs. Why would that have undue influence over fuel costs and depreciation etc when talking about a new car?

It's bad in the motor trade, I have had at least 10 fully qualified mechanics phoning for jobs in the last month. The Saab dealership in my town (Taunton) closed last week , and several others have laid off staff.