New car inventory has taken a huge hit on the lots of new car dealerships around the country, and people are talking about it from Automotive News to NPR.
We’ve been collecting new car dealership inventory and inventory movement on a daily basis for the past two years, so we ran our own analysis at the end of October to find out how the chip / material shortage is affecting the inventory on the ground at new car dealerships across automotive brands.
More specifically, we ran an analysis to take a look at the similarities and differences of new car inventory levels on the ground across General Motors (GM), Ford, and Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram (CDJR) new car dealerships within the contiguous United States.
Here’s what we found.
Highest VIN Count
Based on our research, it looks like the lack of inventory may be affecting the way that each brand is distributing VINs to their dealerships.
For example, the GM dealership with the most VINs on their lot has just under half the VINs of the top Ford dealership, and under 1/3 the VINs of the top CDJR dealership.
Top GM Dealership
401
Top Ford Dealerships
885
Top CDJR Dealership
1371
A CDJR dealership has more VINs than the combined VIN count of the leading Ford and GM dealerships.
Percentage Dealerships with 10 VINs or Less
One thing we have noticed anecdotally, is an uptick in the number of dealerships sitting with just 10 VINs or less on their lots. So we wanted to see the answers to the following questions:
- What percentage of dealerships have 10 VINs or less, by brand?
- How does that compare across brands?
GM Dealerships
30
Ford Dealerships
19
CDJR Dealerships
19
GM dealerships are more likely to have 10 VINs or less on their lots.
Percentage Dealerships with 1 VIN
Finally, we noticed that there are quite a few dealerships with a single VIN on their lots.
So we wanted to take a look at the percentage of dealerships with only a single VIN on their lot, by brand again, and then compare those numbers across brands.
GM Dealerships
3.7
Ford Dealerships
2.3
CDJR Dealerships
2
GM has a higher percentage of dealerships with a single VIN on their lots.
