4:18 pm, June 19, 2023
If used car dealers Cazoo and Cinch had never launched, traditional car retailers would not have realised they could sell cars online successfully.
That’s the opinion of Neil Smith, who has worked for Imperial Car Supermarkets and Cazoo, who spoke to the Car Dealer Podcast about his time with the digital start up.
Cazoo acquired Imperial in the summer of 2020, and Smith transferred across to work with the online-only car sales site.
He was in charge of converting the Imperial dealerships to Cazoo handover centres, the latter of which have mostly now closed as part of the company’s recent cuts.
Looking back he says the motor trade should not underestimate the impact the launches of Cazoo and Cinch had on the used car industry.
He said: ‘Put aside all the investment in marketing, for any company to start under four years ago, and spin up sales to 60,000 used vehicles a year, well, that’s pretty impressive.
‘Where have they gone wrong? Well, they were never going to change the model they started with, and I don’t think they ever will.
‘That was the model that was sold to the investors. And it was the model that was the disruption to the market.
‘It does make me laugh a little bit when I see comments from some of the main dealer groups saying “we’re now disrupting the disruptors”.
‘The fact of the matter is, if Cazoo and Cinch had not done what they’d done back in 2019, moving through into Covid, none of us would have thought we would ever be able to sell a vehicle fully online and have to suffer the the potential for it to be just returned to us within seven days, 14 days because someone just didn’t like the car – none of us put our head over the parapet [like they did].’
Smith was also asked whether he thought Cazoo should have used the physical sites it bought as part of the Imperial deal as used car showrooms, rather than just handover centres.
He said he had suggested it, but it didn’t fit the ‘disruptor model’ Cazoo had launched with.
Smith explained: ‘At times we did end up just banging our head on a wall there [about opening physical sites] – and that wasn’t because there was any arrogance – it was just because they firmly believed that they could hit the numbers that they wanted to hit using the model they had.
‘We obviously had discussions around that omni channel piece, but it was clear that it wasn’t the model that was going to be introduced at the time.’
Asked if he thinks Cazoo can survive, Smith said that hiring traditional used car experts in the likes of Jonathan Dunkely, former Carshop CEO, will no doubt help.
‘They made mistakes,’ he said. ‘No one can deny that.
‘But no one could have foreseen that 180-degree turn in the lack of confidence for businesses like Cazoo, and it was Carvana too, who experienced exactly the same.
‘I don’t know why confidence suddenly fell at such a massive rate.’
Smith said he didn’t think the PR message that was delivered by Cazoo when it launched helped the business either.
Boss Alex Chesterman hit out at the incumbents in the car industry and labelled their models as out of date and often talked them down in interviews with the press.
Smith added: ‘The whole PR piece at the beginning of that journey was stage managed to obviously deliver the messaging they wanted across the industry. And that didn’t help the perception of Cazoo in the eyes of the rest of the automotive dealer network.’
Smith also talked about the sale of Imperial to Cazoo and how he enjoyed his time working at both businesses.
You can listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts now, or you favourite podcast platform.
