Dealership adoption of tools to help consumers complete more of the vehicle purchase online has been an emerging trend for years. But the virus outbreak quickly catapulted the industry into a digital future that will require a deeper study of the way dealerships operate, they said.
“Fortunately, we were working on advancing and enhancing the digital retailing process pre-COVID,” TrueCar CEO Mike Darrow said. “COVID’s certainly been an accelerant to that. In my many years in this industry, it’s proven over and over again to be an amazingly resilient industry. That’s truly been tested in the past 90 days.”
Post-pandemic, dealers will embrace technology more than they have before and adjust processes to new consumer trends — “things that we probably should have been doing in the industry more aggressively before,” Darrow said.
