Car dealers have yet to see such a crisis: buyers don’t smell

Right now, when you visit the Panevėžys car market, your eyes are dazzled by shiny cars. They are full of a guarded site and a fence behind it.

But there is almost no real life here: only one other man inspected the wheels on Tuesday morning, but he didn’t stop at any of them for too long.

Arnoldas de Panevėžys, who gathered at the Panevėžys car market, admitted that he had been selling a used Audi for three months and during that time he had no interested buyers.

“It just came to our attention then. I also allowed the price of 7 thousand. To 6 thousand. Euros, nothing helps, everything has stopped. Internet advertising costs me 20 euros,” said the guy who shaved the car.

He claimed to have sold cars more than once in the past, but has never experienced such warmth before.

Healthy patients

Marius, manager of a car trading company in Panevėžys, which has been in the car trade for 23 years, stated that he has a certificate of incapacity for work since the beginning of the quarantine, because there is no work.

“There is no other place to go down in this sector, the gains are zero, the losses are terrible.” Before quarantine, we had brought many cars and sold only a few. “It has never been so bad and it is not clear how it will end, the recovery is not even visible,” said the seller.

Arūnas, a twelve-year-old car dealer from Panevėžys, has not experienced such a painful crisis since 2008. He also claimed not to have sold any machines during the quarantine.

“It just came to our attention then. We had brought cars from abroad, but everything stopped and the trade stopped. A market full of cars, and there are no buyers, only one can be known,” says the businessman who brought five cars to the market. .

When asked if this difficulty had affected car prices, Arūnas confirmed that they remained the same as before the quarantine: that sellers have no way of allowing prices.

“First of all, there are no buyers to negotiate. And secondly, if you buy a car for 2000 euros, you can reduce it as much as possible, because it costs both delivery and taxes ”, justifies the seller.

Employees of the Panevėžys car market parking lot also spoke about bad trade.

Look for difficulties

“There are no buyers, but there is nothing to buy. The quarantine is strangling, but the sellers still don’t want to check their prices,” says Vidmantas of Panevėžys, who recently bought a work car.

He says he doesn’t want to remember how he wandered through Lithuania for two weeks, looking for new wheels. It was during quarantine that his 2008 Peugeot was involved in an accident and was worded in such a way that the ban was immediately lifted. The owner received a payment of 1,100 euros for the damages suffered.

However, finding a car to work for more than double the amount turned out to be a real challenge.

“Since I have to transport co-workers, I decided to buy a bus this time. Their prices on the Internet went up more than 2,000 euros, almost 3,000 asked the seller in the Panevėžys market. However, the image of the quantity they want does not correspond in absolute ”, says Vidmantas.

For almost three consecutive nights, a Panevėžys resident drove to Kaunas to see the cars that looked good in the photos from the online ad, but actually turned out to be grim. For a few more days, after work, he sailed to Vilnius and Šiauliai.

“It’s nice in the photos, and you’re going to see it; it’s scary what people offer for three or four thousand more.” Euros These sellers must be advertised so as not to waste the time and energy of others. Even when the scams appeared, I saw several completely different ads for the same car for an incredibly low price: it was brought from Sweden in one place, from Germany in another, “Vidmantas said.

After leaving the bus, he still bought a similar seven-seater Volkswagen car in Kaunas. The car, which is more than ten years old, cost 1,600 euros, then it turned out to be full of minor flaws, the seller did not warn about them.

“I have to admit, I drove with a depreciated car, how much did it stretch for more than a day, because I couldn’t find anything to replace it.” And then he took another registration, which had to be registered a few days in advance due to the quarantine, ”said Vidmantas.

Trade stopped

Regitra reports that it already provides many services through digital channels. You can register a previously used car in Lithuania in your own name simply online. Only a car imported from abroad cannot be registered remotely, it is necessary to enter the unit, since it is necessary to verify the identity of these vehicles.

According to Regitra, half of all new cars were registered in May and even three times less in April than in the same period last year. A quarter of used machines imported from abroad were registered in May, in April, half that in 2019. There was a similar proportion in the re-registration statistics of cars driven in Lithuania.

A total of 66.4 thousand people registered in the country in the spring of this year. automobiles, and at the same time last year, more than 118 thousand.

“After the announcement of the quarantine, in recent months there has been a decrease in the number of registered cars in Lithuania. However, growth is visible again in May and the number of registered cars is gradually approaching the period before the quarantine. In Panevėžys, the trends are likely to be similar to those in Lithuania, “says Emilija Bardauskienė, a specialist in Regitra’s Department of Communication.

Right now, when you visit the Panevėžys car market, your eyes are dazzled by shiny cars. But there is almost no real life here: only one of the others inspected the wheels on Tuesday morning, but he didn’t stop at any of them for too long.