General Motors says it can save $2,000 per vehicle as it expands its digital retailing platform and shifts to a regional fulfillment model for its electric vehicles.
Through the company’s regional fulfillment model, dealers will receive electric vehicles to use for test drives and immediate deliveries but rather them keeping stock on hand, GM itself will hold EVs at its regional centers. This will reduce floorplan costs and the likelihood that unpopular vehicles will sit on dealership lots for a long time.
“We’ll use cloud data and machine learning to continuously scan the order pipeline and available dealer and factory inventory for the best fulfillment option,” GM president Mark Ruess said. “We know how this works because we know what vehicles move in certain parts of the country and at certain dealerships.”
Speaking during GM’s recent investor day in New York, Mark Reuss said that the company has opened three centralized EV fulfillment centers, with two in California and one in the Southeast. The company believes these centers will speed up delivery times to as few as four days while also increasing efficiency and reducing distribution costs.
“The biggest enterprise-wide cost savings will come as we and the dealers change how we handle inventory, which means we’re reducing how much we’re … incentivizing vehicles that were ordered that aren’t popular,” Reuss said. “At the same time, we’ll improve the customer experience by delivering the exact vehicles our customers want quickly and efficiently.”
On the digital retailing front, GM has launched a tool for the Chevrolet Bolt EV and will soon expand it to include Cadillac models in 2023. Approximately 80 percent of GM’s network of dealers in the U.S. are already enrolled on the digital retailing platform.
