The Deeper Dive: How Wholesale Markets Dictate Which Brands Go Extinct, from Steven Lang.
The wholesale auto auction market.
Every year there are over 10 million vehicles that are inspected, appraised and liquidated by sellers throughout the United States. Off-lease vehicles. Repossessions. Trade-ins. Totaled vehicles, and most importantly, vehicles that simply don’t sell because they are no longer popular.
These vehicles inhabit a world we know in our business as “Wholesale Heaven”. A place where cars are stuck in limbo until someone, somewhere, is willing to buy what the dealer is asking for that car and take a chance on it.
If you want to know the difference between the winners and losers of the car market, this is where you get to see it firsthand. The recent demise of Pontiac, Saturn, SAAB, Hummer, Mercury, and Isuzu, even older historical footnotes like Daihatsu and Yugo, are usually foretold first in the wholesale markets where a weakening brand’s off-lease vehicles were going for nowhere near their past prices.
