I’ve been reading some hometown papers from the 40s and 50s and noticed a couple of things from auto dealership ads:
–They always only mention one manufacturer, so you see “Smith Ford” but not “Smith Ford/Dodge”. Why not, and when did dealerships start handling multiple lines?
–They rarely mention used cars. Did new car dealers not sell many used cars?
Anything else you can tell me about car sales from this era is welcome too.
My Dad sold cars a bit in the late 50’s .
Each dealership was only one brand, unless the brands were closely related. So, you could see Pontiac/ Chevy, but even that was unlikely.
Used cars made you sound cheap, thus they weren’t advertised much.
Even today, you don’t see many dealers that cross over between the big 3. The only ones I can think of that mix Ford/GM/Chrysler brands are big discount dealers.
What happened is that when the Japanese imports started coming in during the 60’s, they wanted to partner with existing dealerships instead of building a network from the ground up. In the 60’s, Japanese cars weren’t really competing directly with American cars so corporate tolerated it, in a few cases even encouraging it. By the time the mid-70’s rolled around and Japanese cars were competing with Detroit, it was too late to reestablish the single company dealership policy.
Since then, what brands you’ll find sold together had more or less freely exchanged depending on the inter-dealership politics, but for the most part one domestic and one import brand (or set of brand families from the same company) still seems to be the most common. Although often the import has overshadowed the original import brand-- for example in my town the Honda dealership was originally a big Pontiac/Olds/GMC dealership that probably now sells less than 10 GMCs a year.
Can you show us an example of a dealer selling competing brands at the exact same dealership? I have never, ever seen a new car dealer sell both Ford and Dodge at the same location.
Dave Smith up in Idaho is the one that jumped to mind for me. They sell both GM and Chrysler products, but like I mentioned they are a gigantic high-volume discount dealer that does a lot of out-of-state business.
I don’t think this happened in cities or larger towns, but in the 50s in small towns there might be only a single car dealer selling multiple brands. Now it’s possible these were technically separate companies housed in the same building.
Similarly in small towns there might be a TV station that was affiliated with two of the networks, because the town didn’t have three stations.
I just picked two random names. And you’ve never seen a dealership like this?
I australia we often had one company selling lots of brands, so for example we saw and still see Klosters Ford, Klosters Holden, Klosters Toyota etc etc etc all on the same strip, with separate sales people but a shared back office.
Here’s a piece of melodramatic tripe starring [del]Beaver Cleaver’s father[/del] Hugh Beaumont on how to sell Fords. It says it’s from 1956, but the new cars appear to be only '50 or '51 models.
But watch out. If you sell Fords you’ll end up married.
I noticed an increase in dealers carrying cars from multiple manufacturers in the 70s as imports became more popular. Usually it was a single American manufacturer and one of the foreign small car imports such as Opel or Datsun.
That’s not one dealership. It’s several owned by the same company (which is common). But LOOK at the addresses. While close to each other they are separate.
That company does not appear to me to be selling competing brands on the same lot.
Opel was a bit different. It has been a 100% owned subsidiary of GM since the 30’s (except for some unpleasantness in the 40’s) and it was actually the higher-ups that foisted Opels onto Buick dealers, as opposed to individual dealers making their own arrangements.
I’ve noticed the same thing happened in the 90’s with Korean cars that happened with Japanese cars in the 60’s. Again in my town there’s a Nissan/Hyundai dealership, which picked up Hyundai thinking it would be a good bargain brand to sell along side the increasingly pricey Nissans. But Hyundai’s quality and reputation has gone up while Nissan’s has languished, so now the Hyundais and the lower end Nissans are pretty much directly competing with each other. Ironic since this was originally a Chrysler dealer that also brought in Datsun as a bargain brand.
There may be some truly same-location, multi-brand dealers out there, but I’ve never seen one in my wide travels. But then, it comes down to how you define “location.” If they’re lumped together on a single 40 acre lot, then they might look like one location, but they won’t have mixed lots – there will be separate lots for each manufacturer. Separate showrooms. Separate physical addresses. And to do a good job, they have to specialize, meaning they probably have separate sales staffs.
Now I don’t mean Buick/GMC dealerships (same manufacturer), but combinations between foreign/domestic brands (e.g., Ford/Mazda, despite the previous ownership situation).
Besides wanting to make money selling new cars instead of used cars, planned and functional obsolesence were both bigger problems. Cars didn’t last as long (I’m old enough to remember 5 digit odometers), and you didn’t want to to be the only one on your block seen driving a 4 year-old car.
My hometown has a Ford & Chrysler dealership that has competing vehicles sitting right next to each other - they have a couple of Dodge Darts they just got in sitting right next to a line of Ford Focuses & Fiestas, and they have a row of F-series pickups tailgate to tailgate with a row RAM trucks, and so on. I have seen plenty of dealerships like this throughout smaller towns in the upper Midwest.
My dad still calls auto dealers “agencies”, a term that fell out of favor in the 1950s.
I remember in the 1970s in the US, there were many small dealers of British, French and Italian brands that operated almost an aside to some garage that specialized in in European cars. Almost literally, someplace like, oh, “Bill’s Foreign Car Repair”, with a Lancia or Citroen shingle on the sign, and a few examples of machines destined to a quick fate of iron oxide parked out front.
Here’s an example of a 1970s-style European import dealer in the US, original signs and all: Google Maps
I also remember each GM brand having its own used car dealer brand. For example, Chevrolet dealers used to all have an “OK Used Cars” dealership.
Going WAY back to the 1920-30’s or so, If you bought a Ford, you could become a “dealer” more of a sales agent really, taking orders and passing them to the factory. This is from family lore, as I am told my grandfather was such…second hand, as he died before I was born. The most memorable story is that in the winter, upon arriving home, he would drain the coolant into a bucket, and the oil into another bucket. These would be placed on the (coal) stove in the morning. Grandpa would then pour the hot liquids into the car, leave early, and offer rides to anyone he saw trying to start their non-Ford cars, and waving merrily to everyone he saw.
I agree that multiple brand dealerships as we know them today started when foreign carmakers partnered with existing ones, both to get around the huge expenses of starting their own systems and because no individual dealership was likely to sell a sufficient number of cars to make it through a year.
But for the same reason you would see small town and rural dealerships selling several individual marks which were technically different brands. Usually one was a luxury brand, for the same reason: a small town couldn’t support enough sales of a luxury car to make money. There were more brands in the old days, too, even the 50s. GM had five: Cadillac, Buick, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Chevrolet; Chrysler had five: Imperial, Chrysler, DeSoto, Dodge, and Plymouth (Valiant was a separate brand for a year before being folded into Plymouth); and Ford had five: Lincoln, Thunderbird, Edsel, Mercury, and Ford. You’d see ads for your local Ford/Mercury dealer or the Chrysler/Imperial. Putting the middle ones together wasn’t uncommon.
Whether they all had to have separate places on the lot or other internal separation I don’t know and don’t care. Brands are brands. People went to a dealership to view brands. Sometimes they were from the same company, nowadays they may be from many different companies. (Quick: who owns Land Rover? Tata Motors of India, but it’s been through British Leyland Motor Corporation, Rover Group, British Aerospace, BMW, and Ford Motor Company in the past quarter century.) It makes sense to have a range of models in many price categories and no one brand offers everything.
I’m surprised no MST3K fans have posted about Hired! yet - a 1940’s Chevrolet sales film. Joel and the ‘bots’ performance of “Hired! The Musical” is still one of my favorite host segments!
To get slightly more back on topic - the linked film suggest that door to door sales were somewhat common, which seems odd to modern-day me.
I did a Job Corps internship with Ertley Motorworld about 20 years ago…they claim to have 14 brands under one roof. I have to admit that it’s been so long since I was ever even on the property, let alone “worked” for them, that I don’t remember how things were set up, but I don’t really REMEMBER separate areas and salespeople for each brand.