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- Newsgroups: rec.autos
- Path: sparky!uunet!scifi!watson!
- From: mike@schleppo.bocaraton.ibm.com (Mike Dahmus)
- Subject: Re: Selling Saturns in Japan (Re: Politics of car buying(Buying a Japanese car))
- Sender: @watson.ibm.com
- Message-ID: <1993Jan24.192240.60812@watson.ibm.com>
- Date: Sun, 24 Jan 93 19:22:40 GMT
- Distribution: na
- News-Software: IBM OS/2 PM RN (NR/2) v0.17c by O. Vishnepolsky and R. Rogers
- Lines: 26
- Reply-To: mike@schleppo.bocaraton.ibm.com (Mike Dahmus)
- References: <80930@hydra.gatech.EDU> <1993Jan20.221143.9065@oakhill.sps.mot.com> <C17Hnq.4KC@watcgl.uwaterloo.ca>
- Organization: IBM T. J. Watson Research
-
- In <C17Hnq.4KC@watcgl.uwaterloo.ca> lhclin@watcgl.uwaterloo.ca (Louis Lin) writes:
- >
- >Here in Canada (or Ontario to be more specific), I do not notice that many
- >Saturns are running on the streets. My suspicion is that they are not selling
- >that well. In the US, the strongest selling point of Saturn so far I can see is
- >extremely good dealer service, which is not available here (Saturns are sold
- >through Isuzu/Saab/Saturn dealers), thus the mediocre sale. So when Saturn is
- >to hit Japan in 1994, in order for it to be successful, not only the product has
- >to be right, good service must also be there.
-
- First you need to make sure that your dealers are in fact stocked with cars!
- Down here in South Florida, few dealers have many cars on the lots - so I
- would assume that if the Canadian dealers are relatively new to the market,
- they haven't been able to get many cars. (Here in Florida, they've been on
- sale for a couple of years, so many people were able to get the cars before
- the supply shortages).
-
- >I may be pessimistic, but if Saturn is to be sold through Toyota dealers in Japan
- >(correct me on this), it will certainly lost its strongest virtue.
-
- I don't see as how they have any choice, since it's extremely difficult for
- a foreign automaker to set up a dealership in the country. I guess GM'll have
- to hope that word-of-mouth spreads in Japan like it did here in the U.S.
- ---
- Mike Dahmus PenPM Development
- mike at schleppo.bocaraton.ibm.com Not an official IBM spokesman
-