Bye-bye buy-back the discount and buy-back deal rocivhem that has
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bedevilled the truck market in recent years could be coming to an end, reckons George Alexander, Glass's Guide's commercial vehicles editor.
"The buy-backs being offered are not quite as silly as they were," he says. "Discounting is under more control and manufacturers have put their price lists into some kind of order. lveco Ford did so only recently, for example. The market is coming back to reality and residuals are starting to firm up." That said, Alexander contends that manufacturers are still too quick to offer some of the bigger fleets over-generous terms. "There's no logic to what they are doing there," he remarks.
Longer-term, he predicts that the various initiatives being taken by truck dealers in the used market—lveco Ford's Mega Dealers concept, for instance—will lead to more late-registered vehicles being sold by franchised dealers, at the expense of independent traders. "Sometime ago the manufacturers lost the plot and walked away from the used business," he says. "Now they're going to try to win some of it back."