Stellantis is forcing some UK buyers to pay up to three months’ worth of finance installments on vehicles that are stuck in ports.
Dealerships have revealed that the car manufacturer is forcing them to register new cars ordered by customers despite them not reaching showrooms. Sources claim that some cars have even been taken off customers who have refused to pay before taking delivery.
“This is all down to logistics and not being able to get the cars to dealers,” a dealer group boss told Car Dealer Magazine. “They are forcing us to register cars that we know are going to be three months away and it’s a very awkward conversation to have with customers. We had one customer who had paid three finance installments on their vehicle and they still haven’t seen it.”
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Some dealers even claim that Stellantis has told them to go to ports and collect newly-arrived vehicles themselves. One car dealer boss has even revealed that Stellantis threatened to remove bonuses and lose allocation of cars if they don’t agree to the company’s demands.
Speaking with Car Dealer, Stellantis UK senior vice president and group managing director, Paul Willcox, admitted the carmaker has caused “frictions” with its dealers and said a shortage of transport trucks meant many vehicles were stuck in ports.
Willcox acknowledged that Stellantis has indeed asked its dealerships to register vehicles stuck in ports and still on cargo ships.
“The reason we’ve done that is we’re pushing hard to get more supply within the overall production portfolio because we want to get a bigger slice of cake for our UK retailers,” he said. “If you have lots of stock on the ground, then there’s less chance you’ll get more supply in the future because the view is you have got stock. So we’ve put a lot of pressure in our organization internally on trying to improve their [dealers’] stock velocity.”
Willcox also noted that dealers had indeed been told they could collect vehicles from ports themselves but said they will be “offered a financial incentive” to do so.
“If dealers want to self-collect, we can arrange that kind of deal, but in limited numbers,” he said. “We can’t have 500 single trailers coming up to compounds as that would be chaos, but we did give that opportunity to retailers to do that, rightly or wrongly, and we thought it was a positive thing.”
