The Car Dealership Is Shrinking And Being Reimagined For The Future

What if selling cars didn’t require so much space? With the amount of research that you can do online today, dealerships don’t need the same footprint that they once did. Honda announced a new dealership design that is modular, flexible and far smaller than traditional dealerships. As most major car makers pivot to making more electric vehicles, the lucrative ongoing maintenance deals that dealerships rely on will decrease while the buying process for cars increasingly moves online.

So what will this mean for the dealerships of today? Already industry reports show a “historic” 383 dealerships change ownership in 2021, with most of them being small family businesses acquired by larger dealership groups. This consolidation will likely continue, along with automakers pushing those larger dealers to retrofit more of their older locations to a new sleeker (and smaller) location optimized for how people buy cars today. All of which means the overall experience of buying a car should get less stressful, more transparent and something consumers might actually look forward to instead of dread.