8:14 am, October 23, 2026
The Car Dealer Briefing from James Baggott summarises the week’s most important motor trade headlines for you all in one place.
For this week’s edition of the Car Dealer Weekly Briefing, he looks at the fall from the top of the once best-selling brand Ford.
He asks can it get back on top in the face of furious Chinese competition or are its days as number one over for good?
Also, AI agents are now calling car dealerships, so do we need to prepare for a new wave of customer enquiries where dealers are not even talking to a human?
Plus:
- Sytner profits plunge
- Vertu boss lashes out
- Crackdown on clockers
- McPhee joins Athenea
- Hartley Jnr’s mega McLaren deal
- Citygate losses surge
- Big Motoring World decline
- Yaris fastest selling car
To read the weekly briefing, you usually need to be a subscriber on Substack, but this week’s post is free to all. You can sign up to the mailing list below.
Subscriptions to the Substack newsletter cost £10 per month, or £100 per year, and there are discounts for companies who want multiple subscriptions for their staff.
You can sign up to read your first newsletter for free today – visit the Substack website and subscribe.
There’s also a list of the top 10 most popular stories on the CarDealerMagazine.co.uk website this week which always makes for interesting reading as you can see what has piqued everyone else’s interest too.
Find it on the Substack website now.