The country's largest Chevrolet dealer just closed up. 14 locations, mostly Mid-South/Texas, Bill Heard Chevy sold TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT of all new Chevy's sold in the USA last year.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
A guy with 14 dealerships sold 1/4 of all new Chevys last year? That doesn't seem possible. Especially without a southern California location.
A little research would reveal that Bill Heard Chevorlet has been accused of shady business practices everywhere it does business. See, e.g., this article describing a recent lawsuit filed by the State of Georgia: http://www.ajc.com/business/content/business/stories/2008/08/27/bill_heard_lawsuit.html or this story from Nashville: http://www.newschannel5.com/Global/story.asp?S=5408231
Sometimes businesses fail because of how they operate, not because the economy is collapsing.
Is there a car dealer that hasn't been accused of shady business practices everywhere it does business? I tend to think it's endemic to auto sales (hence the whole "used car salesman" stereotype).
But, yeah, Heard is/was a big dealer in the Southeast in some major markets (Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta). I'd imagine SoCal is a much more fragmented market with dozens of Chevy dealers; I think metro Memphis and Nashville only have a few each. GM's trying to move SUVs off the lots probably isn't helping their dealer network much as customers switch to more fuel efficient autos where Japanese makes have the benefits of better reliability and more of a "fuel efficient" rep (even if that's no longer as much the case due to the supersizing of Japanese sedans over time).
does anyone out there in the intertubes know anyone who drives a chrysler?
You're making me nervous, going full chicken-little and all.
Where's that 25% number come from? Seems impossible, unless ALL the fleet sales in the states they were in (at least, AZ, TX, GA, FL and TN) went through them, and even then it seems way, way too high to be real.
Also, the shutdown is asserted to be b/c of problems with floorplan financing. Basically, they blamed GMAC, which is possible.
I work in an auto related industry in the south and never liked how Bill Heard Chevy did business...even compared to other dealers. Even so, I don't see Chevrolet related problems as a sign of the apocalypse. Talk to me when Toyota dealers start going belly up.
No commentary? No link? No establishment of any connection between this and the financial crisis whatsoever?
I don't think this is the time for pointless fear-mongering.
People need to work on their Google-fu.
Bill Heard Chevy got cut off by GMAC August 25th. http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/breaking_news/story/417858.html
If you're a GM dealer and you can't do business with GMAC, you're in TROUBLE. This makes the negative stories about Heard's dealerships much more believable. They had a particularly bad reputation for "shady" loan practices (mistating incomes, mistatingcar features, forging signatures... all of the worst things of the most corrupt mortgage broker).
Their destruction is a good thing.
The nail in the coffin came when GMAC cut off the Heard dealerships. Car dealers are not liquid enough to carry their own inventory financing so that closed the deal.
As a SoCal resident, I can confirm that there are, in fact, no Chevrolets out here. People will only agree to sit on the 405 in traffic for two hours a day if they can have a $700/month Mercedes/BMW/Lexus lease.
Is it just me, or does reprinting anonymous emails with questionable and/or out of context facts seem really poor form for someone who used to take pride in being a professional journalist and had expressed an interest in improving standards?
Please, Ms. McArdle, you're better than this.
Re: Talk to me when Toyota dealers start going belly up.
Exactly. American autos have been in trouble for a while. The relevant statistic here is more likely the price of gasoline not the Libor rate.
I don't think this is the time for pointless fear-mongering.
Will you let us know when the time comes?
A little more digging--Bill Heard dealerships sold about 40,000 new cars in 2007. Those weren't all Chevys, but even if they were, more than 160k Chevys were sold in 2007.
Also, GMAC pulled the floorplan in August, apparently b/c of some sales reporting "irregularities" from Heard.
Between this and bemoaning a 4% increase in the nominal interest rate faced by Honda, I'm afraid I'm with Noah. Not sure if its the B School, the NY connections or the Obama support, but it seems Megan has gone beyond commenting on or questioning the suggestion that we are on the brink of disaster and is in full panic mode.
I can has job, home and family, American dream?
Is there a source on that? It just seems so unlikely, and doing a quick internet search revealed zilch.
Will you let us know when the time comes?
Absolutely! This is but one of the many services I can offer.
Two of the dealerships were here in Houston. They supposedly sold 25% of the Chevys in the area. The head of the local BBB said the complaint files on them were thicker than all the other dealership groups in town. He cited a long list of fines and actions by state AGs against them from all over the US. He almost but not quite called them lying, thieving scum.
Perhaps they said "country" when they meant "county?"
According to Edmunds, Chevy's 2007 US sales were 2,265,641.
Meaning the Bill Heard dealership's 40,000 sales in 2007 were approximately 1.8% of Chevy's national sales, not 25%.
Megan's correspondent is off by more than an order of magnitude. More fact checking, please!
Bill Heard was a crook. But he was a crook who moved a lot of metal.
A large part of the problem GM has had is that it didn't cut off guys like Heard, who probably did more harm to the brands reputation than whatever monetary gain GM got from Heard shoveling a bunch of cars out the door. I imagine the list of people who will never buy a GM product again because of their experience with Bill Heard is shockingly large.
As a San Diego County resident I can attest to there actually being Chevy's in SoCal. Not as many as Honda or Toyota, but they are not so scarce.
Impalas are relatively common and the new Malibu has been popping up too. Chevy trucks are of course very common -- though I hear they are not selling so well since we broke $4 on gas.
I live in Houston. Bill Heard had a nasty reputation...I personally know someone who this happened to: Went in to buy a car, deal fell through, they refused to give him his car keys (on the trade in) back. He had to call the cops to get the keys back...then, they still refused to tell him where the car was, he had to walk the lot looking.
Good riddance. Incidentally, the rumor I heard on why they got cut off from GMAC was, GMAC did an audit of floorplan and they were off by 500 cars. "Floorplan" is where the car company loans you the money to buy your inventory, and it is collateralized by the auto. When you sell an auto, you have a certain period of time to repay the loan. Bill Heard didn't, over 500 times.