Car Sales

Activities that generate new and used car sales

Spike Milligan's 1930 Austin Heavy Tourer

Spoke Milligan : The best car accessory.

As we celebrate, what would have been spike Milligans birthday, April 16^th 1918, we thought we would look at his history with cars.

The main thing to remember, was that Spike Milligan wasn’t really into cars. Possibly because, since he arrived in London at the age of thirteen – having been born in British Colonial India – he worked in and around the capital.

Working as a trumpeter during the evenings didn’t call for a flashy car. Just something you could park easily if the latest gig was too far from a tube station.

"Old Min". Spike Milligan's 1930s Austin Tourer, purchased as a gift by Peter Sellers

Only two cars stand out in period press, The first was the latest, in the 1960’s, ‘new’ Mini (Don’t be confused with the modern BMW Mini, these things were properly small, they made a loss on every one sold, but they were an icon!)

We can really ignore the Mini, virtually every celebrity had one in the swinging sixties, including John Lennon, whose was driven about by a 6 foot 6 chauffeur.

No. The real hero of this story, is the little car that Spike was gifted by his friend and fellow Goon, Peter Sellers. Sellers, unlike Spike was a serial car nut, often buying and selling a new car on the same day, as the whim took him.

The car in question was a small 1930 Austin Heavy Twelve Open Road Tourer Deluxe, that the pair quickly christened ‘Old Min’ after a character on the Goons radio show.

Don’t worry if you don’t have any idea what one was either, most under 30s back in the late sixties had no idea what one was.

Peter Sellars bought Spike the car as a gift, not a whim this time as Spike had expressed an interest on first sight.

The twist comes with Spikes preferred accessory, as per the title.

Only a few weeks after gifting the car, Sellars decided to take the car back – his reasoning, “Spike had left the car out in the rain”, an understandable sin to the international movie star who had a fleet of exotica stored in a dry garages.

But also because Spike had replaced the cars temperature gauge – commonly found at the front of the bonnet on pre- WWII cars – with . . . . a coffee percolator.

In case he fancied a cup of coffee on the way back from a gig we assume. Some people had style without shouting about it.

True to all marketing principles, the car was sold recently at Bonhams (photo above) who maximised the previous owner(s) in all their adverts. A bit like Google Reviews or web site back links? I don’t think so.

Happy Birthday Jack Brabham.

In many sports, lead participants and World Champions are routinely called ‘a gentleman’ of their chosen profession.

Reflective Jack Brabham, three times winner of the Formula One crown and the only person to do so in his own car

There are some noticeable exceptions in Motor Racing, most recently Ayton Senna or even Michael Schumacher probably missed out on that title.

But, while on the track, there was certainly someone else. Sir Jack Brabham AO OBE, (2^nd April 1926 – 19^th May 2024), he was not called Black Jack for nothing.

Even out of the car he was known for being quiet, often staring, sometimes uncomfortably so.

But I must say, I never found that. Jack Brabham, was one of my first customers. Or rather his dealerships in South London were. Normally, I would work closely with the Director of his UK garages, Brian Fowler, – who certainly was a gentleman – but on a couple of occasions met the great man himself, even going for lunch.

And, he was polite, professional and interested in what we did for his company, I was always trying to spin the conversation around, looking for reminiscences about his time behind the wheel, either in a Cooper or one of his own cars. But thanks to both Brian and Jack himself it always returned to the sales calls we were making and the present state of the Motor Trade.

In 1966, he became the only man to win the Formula One World Championship is his own car, one that he helped build with his own hands. One of three he would claim before he retired from F1.

That is certainly a huge achievement, and one that I cannot even imagine ever happening again.

If he was English, I would say he had that Bulldog spirit on the track, but he would probably hit me as a staunchly, and rightly, proud Australian. There are only two drivers remembered for pushing their car over the finishing line of an F1 race.

Jack Brabham pushing his Cooper F1 car the last 400 yards of the American Grand Prix in 1959

Brabham, in 1959 pushed his Cooper the final 400 yards of the American Grand Prix, after it had run out of petrol. One of the many steps to his first world title that year.

The eventual winner, Bruce McLaren even felt, after the race, that Jack had gifted him the win.

(The other World Champion to famously push his own car was Nigel Mansell, also in the American Grand Prix, in Dallas in 1984).

So we say happy birthday Jack. A hero when racing formula one cars needed you to be a hero, It was certainly a pleasure.

Should you teach young drivers how to change a flat tyre

Trying to be a good father.

Having driven for a lot of years, with very patchy mobile phone coverage for a lot of those years, we sometimes forget the basics for our children.

Thursday night made me think. Coming up the A1 through Cambridgeshire in the rain, I got a puncture. I won’t draw you a picture but swearing was involved and so was being soaked through as I had to change the tyre on the side of the road.

Teaching our children how to change a flat tyre.

But it did set me thinking. So over the bank holiday (much to my wife’s amusement) I ran through the steps required to change a wheel with my two youngest children – him 17, her 23. And I can recommend it to every father.

It wasn’t raining in Yorkshire on Saturday (I’m not that nasty), but we had the usual moans of “do I have to. . ” and “I’ll get dirty“, but I think in the end, they appreciated it. Especially when I pointed out, that at best, on the Thursday night before Good Friday even the RAC will take 3 hours to get to you. AND what happens if you’re in one of the few mobile phone back spots.

So . . .

Find where they put the jack. (What is a jack dad?)
The wheel out of the boot.
The small clip to get the wheel nut covers off.
And the wheel brace / wrench.

The questions of where to put the jack I was expecting and able to demonstrate, the wonder at why we had to lock wheels I wasn’t.

Wasn’t it easier when wheel hubs had studs to locate the new wheel? And you remember to slacken the nuts slightly before you jack the car up?

But we got there. Lots of struggling to get the wheel out of the boot, and how you might have to stand on the wheel brace to undo a very tight wheel nut, but they both achieved the end result.

I had considered buying an Easter egg for the fastest time taken, but in the end they both got one.

As a recommendation. Especially if you have a daughter. Buy an 18” length of pipe to go over the wheel wrench handle to make it a bit longer. You don’t really want to be leaping up and down on the wrench at the side of the road.

Oh, and buy an RAC membership!

Does anyone remember the stupidity of certain French manufacturers who put the spare wheel outside the car, underneath the boot floor? Assuming the small latch to release the frame wasn’t seized solid, you had to try and push a deflated tyre and wheel back onto the framework and lift it back up into place while simultaneously trying to put the latch back into place, with one wet, dirty, oily, hand!

You know who you are Renault.

Electric Car, charged in less than 5 seconds.

Zap, and your gone. Really, it’s not a pipe dream.

We have had the technology to store electric car power, that charges in seconds and has 10x the power density of a lithium-Ion battery for years.

The Capacitor.

Are capacitors the real future for the EV cars. They should be.

So why haven’t we heard about it?? Well you have, and you have been using them elsewhere in the house, You have them in your refrigerator, dishwasher and microwave. But there are some limitations – but then, limitations are there to be overcome.

Capacitors, weight for weight hold 10x the power of a lithium battery.

They can charge up, completely full in 2-3 seconds (yes, seconds)

They don’t deteriorate with age like normal batteries.

So why aren’t car makes filling their electric #EV ’s with capacitors? Well Porsche tried a few years ago, but couldn’t slow them (the storage) down enough.

The problem is that a capacitor wants to give you all of its power in one go, or at best over a very short time frame. Not much good if you want it to last 3 hours on a motorway trip. So car manufacturers are looking at ways of using the superb storage and charging benefits of the capacitor while simultaneously slowing down how quickly it wants to give you that power back.

This is the real golden goose. The same power, would weigh a 10th of current EV batteries. How much better would that be to drive. How much more efficient would that be.

PLUS, the icing on top of the cake, they are not made of rare toxic metals or chemicals. A win win?

Ok, so the maximum range is probably only 15-20 miles, because it really needs to discharge that fast. So does that mean it’s a non-starter?

Lets look at the problem another way.

It takes less than 2 seconds to charge up. It can do 15 miles, conservatively, between charges. So if you needed to go 300 miles it would take 20 charges, total – 40 seconds to charge. Ok, that’s not the problem.

But slowing down, stopping etc, that’s the issue.

But what if you didn’t?

Like your mobile phone, you can have induction charging, you just have to be ‘over’ the charger for the energy to pass from the pad in the road to the car.

How about a series of pads at every traffic light, or junction? You’re bound to stop for at least a second in 15 miles!

And motorways or dual carriage ways aren’t an issue. These induction chargers can be any size or shape – they are just wires buried in the road. At 75 mph motorway speed you travel just under 34 meters in those 2 seconds.

Coils buried in the road charge the car while you drive over them #EV Induction Charging — Coils in the road charging your car

Image courtesy of www.researchgate.net / Mya Eaindra Thein

Every 5 miles you could have a string of 30-40 meter induction coils under the tarmac, you would be fully charged every time you went over them.

Major re-wiring of the roads? Well yes, but at the moment we are looking at the re-wiring of our houses and driveways, with no solution for people who live in apartments or even tower blocks.

No home re-chargers. No trouble trying to find a Tesla charging point that’s both working or free on the way home.

Technology. We love it. We just have to think about it a different way sometimes.

This of course is the same as making event marketing calls – It all happens in one week, for an event this weekend – But it can be compared to a steady, week by week, set of marketing calls, that give you a number of solid leads every week. You get the same leads, they are just spread out so you can manage and cope with them. (Plus you don’t need the attractive, ‘huge discounts’, of an event weekend.)

Have a look at our showroom log / enquiry page – Enquiry Maximisation

Apparently AI is already with us. Everywhere.

Do you have an AI Kettle?

Ok, I understand. AI is the latest buzz word.

But do we really need every minor technological introduction or update to be ‘AI controlled . . .’

I was surprised how many mainstream news feeds commented on the Princess of Wales ‘AI manipulated family photo’. What ever happened to the derogatory term – ‘photoshopped’.

Is everything with a computer AI nowadays - what do you thnk

The same applies with cars.

Hardly a week goes by without the latest AI update to improve battery life, charging time, air-con efficiency or route to the pub.

And most of it is basic mathematics. In a little equation. Opps sorry, ‘in a little algorithm,’ my mistake.

We didn’t shout in wonder every time the sat-nav software updated and gave us a different route because the A34 was blocked. No, why? Because it’s not AI. It is created a different result from a predetermined set of parameters, that happened to change.

And that’s what 90% of these purported AI advances are. “The machine has worked it out. It learned!, ooooooh”. Er, no. The parameters of the equation changed that’s all.

AI has to learn the parameters and the initial question. Not just calculate.

But then it does sound good in marketing terms. Something new and shiny to shout about 🙂

We have done a number of campaigns this year where the customer can – “come down and, in addition to the £4,000 discount we’re offering, see the latest AI on the new XYZ EV rocket”

I’m not really moaning. But it does make me smile. As they say, “nothing is new under the sun”, and AI is just the latest way to make something sound ‘new’, and therefore attractive, and therefore worth buying.

Interestingly – If you forget the early paper based systems, would you say the 1987 Toyota CD driven sat-nav, or the 1990 Mazda GPS sat-nav was the first ‘production’ satellite navigation system? What do you think?

I hope you’re all having a busy March.

You’ve never had it so good!

And that’s not just a flippant statement. As you may be aware Cymark has been going for nearly 30 years, and have some pretty long standing retailers within the Motor Trade. So I am being honest when I say that our clients are seeing more new and used car enquiries, per month, than any time in the past 10 years.

So, why are manufacturers throwing lots of money at the job?

We are all familiar with the various brands getting behind the dealer network when we are working our way through a recession or an economic slump. But why are they chasing registrations today?

Well the answer may be slightly more than bragging rights this time.

SMMT figures are really strong on car sales at the moment, but a good percentage of those registrations are from orders taken 6, 9, 12 months ago when cars weren’t available and the electric vehicle world in particular looked slightly brighter.

So while overall enquiries are up hugely, the percentage that are new car enquiries is falling.

I don’t want to be cynical and say its because people don’t like EV’s, but perhaps people don’t like the price they are being asked to pay for a cleaner ride?

Have we just moved people from being consistent new car customers to repeat used car customers?

But is that a problem?

Our enquiry follow up team have been really busy this year, making sure that retailers get the most from their enquiries, with a number of sites saying they were concerned that – if they left it to their own sales team – they would miss opportunities. They just didn’t have enough hours in the day to sort through a mixture of tyre kickers and genuine buyers.

Check for yourself. How many overdue contacts do you have in the DMS. Are they all these used car enquiries or are they new car enquiries chasing the big discounts being offered?

Does the UK get the same EV deal as Europe

Will the UK get a raw deal with EV subsidies?

Depending upon where you are sitting, the amount of subsidy provided by the government can vary enormously.

For a few years EV drivers have been smiling broadly at the £5,000 grant provided in the UK as they glide quietly about in the latest EV. But are UK drivers going to get a raw deal.

Are UK drivers getting ripped off. Does all of Europe get twice as much subsidy as the UK

France in particular, right down to where you live in France and how much you earn can offer the driver over £11,000. There are even subsidies for nearly new cars. (Seeing how much residual values are dropping for EV’s even a considerably lower subsidy is probably worth it.). The whole system is supported by the European Carmakers association the #ACEA.

They are also supporting the process at the other end with thousands of scrappage subsidies. Again depending upon which region you live in.

But aren’t they trying to push French (or European, the Italian and German governments are looking to implement the same EV subsidy model).

The short answer is yes. Of course they are, they would be foolish to give state money away to a foreign manufacturer.

But to do that when the Chinese models are expected to be so cheap is looking difficult. How do you square that circle.

The current guidelines do a couple of things, including an upper level £40,000 on the price of the car. OK for France certainly, an a few German models. Tesla and Porsche miss out, but China should, almost certainly, slide under that bar.

Limit production / manufacturing CO2 emission levels to 14.75 tonnes CO2.

Ok, a few people are looking lost here. We know that the CO2 emissions that the government talk about, for the vehicles running costs. So that they can be compared, mile per mile, to petrol or diesel models.

So what is production CO2. Simply put it is how much it actually costs to manufacture the car. (and the French model is also looking at including the cost of getting that car to the country it is selling it within). The French guide lines have a 14.75t of CO2 limit.

This rules out a lot more models. For example Tesla batteries vary from 2.5t to 16.5t depending upon the model. Add that to the steel costs for the rest of the car and it’s easy to trip over that limit.

A lot of the Chinese models from BYD don’t make it. Even the Chinese manufactured BMW iX3 fails to meet the limit.

Cars transported by sea from manufacturers in Asia

So, are the French pulling up the draw bridge, emphasising the benefits of a small Citroen or Renault (still part state owned). Of course, but then they would be foolish not to.

It might be cheap to manufacturer batteries, or produce adequate steel in China, but aside from the labour rates, they don’t always use the most ecologically sourced materials. Plus you have to transport said car via a costly shipping route, or overland by rail. Both of which have rising costs due to war torn areas of the world.

So what should Brit’s do? We can’t buy small cars made in Birmingham any more. Our best hope is that China builds factories here and uses UK steel.

At the moment the picture is very unclear. But it would certainly help if we had over £11,000 from the government to play with and a few grand subsidy for those nearly new models that are clogging up retailer forecourts.

Your comments would be appreciated.

Cymark, supporting the Motor Trade for 29 years

Cymark. 29 years young

Cymark celebrates 29 years providing no commitment telemarketing and email campaign support to the Motor Trade.

‘My god, you made it to 29 years.’ This has happened a few times this week. Not quite as catchy as 25 years, or 30 years, but 29 years is a long time supporting one industry.

A great thank you must go to everyone who has worked for Cymark during that time. Lots of late nights and hard graft. You laid the foundations for today’s company.

In those decades, we have worked for numerous manufacturers and hundreds of individual retailers, providing successful and cost effective telemarketing and e-marketing for retail sales, local business and LCV sales and database building, aftersales service bookings and post service follow up.

The pandemic brought a lot of changes. Cymark streamlined its processes (we got rid of the big white binders so many of you remember). It’s all online and easily accessible. We still make on-site visits, we want to make sure we are doing it right for your retailer.

Successful industry marketing and comments are included within other blog pages. Make sure you subscribe.

Guy Winter

01423 501234

07711 978908

Have a look at the links across the top of the page for Retail / Service / Sales Conversion information.

The Winner – 12 / 12 Cars of Christmas

We got to the end of our list of 12 Cars for Christmas., these were based upon a combination of style, ‘coolness’, driving pleasure and sheer personal preference. If you have a better list or just one model you want to add the list, let me know

Some great design points. Great performance. Really great performance even winning at Le Mans first time out. And the winner is . . .

Our festive 12 cars of Christmas concludes with a fantastic road and race car. Unbeatable in its day, and certainly hard to match even 30 years on. Now you feel old.

Our previous nomination in 12 cars of Christmas. Who came runner up.

The top four cars are pretty much inter-changeable all of them could have got first place. It would depend upon the day, the journey I had to make and . . . . . well, it had Countach doors and it won Le Mans.

McLaren F1

Built as a road car, that competed at Le mans. Not unusual, but winning first time out with the designer wising he had driven the car to the track to prove its road worthy credentials is.

Phenomenal performance. Uncompromising design and manufacturing. And a cool central seating position cemented its place at the top of our 12 Cars of Christmas. Everything else faster is either a special or heavily overweight.

You need to see one. Compared to many modern hyper cars, the F1 is tiny. You really can chuck it down a B-road. Not something I would think of doing in a Lamborghini Aventador or Ferrari F90.

And you can take TWO friend. Gordon Murry, the designer though that sitting in the middle was the best place for a driver to be. Who am I to argue.

The heat shielding in the engine bay is gold foil. Real gold. Because that was the best product for the job. No compromise. No turbo’s. Apparently better response from a naturally aspirated engine, in this case a 6 litre V12 courtesy of BMW motorsport with 618 bhp.

A bit late to be a poster on my wall. But a 241mph top speed. It certainly ended up on lots of you car fan’s walls.

The list is the personal preference of our Director, Guy Winter. A car fanatic since the 1960’s, he eats’, sleeps and dreams everything Motor Trade. For the past 25 years he has worked for Cymark providing digital and telephone marketing support for individual retailers, groups and manufacturers alike.

If you want to stay on top of the latest Motor Trade chat either subscribe to this blog or find Guy on Linkedin.

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