Holden posts lowest sales ever! (+ Sept new car sales market wrap)

You can help support the channel, securely via PayPal >> Or Paste this link in your browser: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=DSL9A3MWEMNBW&source=url ‘Holden posts lowest monthly sales since 1948.’ Kinda says it all, really. Just 2863 sales in September - lowest result in 71 years. And that’s after Detroit disinterred and re-animated Dave Buttner - it was all very ‘Frankenstein’.  Incidentally, February, April and July this year were also record monthly lows for Holden. I’m sensing a pattern. And that pattern would be that not even Deadpool’s dad, the former boss of Toyota Shitsville, can pump water out of the bilges fast enough. The iceberg was just too big... Expect more Holden dealership closures in coming months as the brand continues to slide further into obscurity. And whatever you do, don’t buy one - in an environment like this, you’re setting yourself up for a resale disaster. Tung Nguyen. And the Academy award for best male porn star name ever by a motoring journalist, goes to the Carsguide news editor, Tung Nguyen - yesssssss! Anyway, Deep Tung (as I would call Mr Nguyen if we shared an office) Deep Tung went on to transcribe Holden’s bullshit excuses for dropping the ball so badly in September. According to a Holden bullshit excuse monger, there was a delay selling some Colorados to fleet and rental customers. Deep Tung also transcribed this epic bullshit excuse: “...and a significant sell down of dealer demonstrator inventory as a result of our demonstrator clearance sale.” If a Holden bullshitter had ‘explained’ this to be, I would have retorted with ‘How ill-informed do you think I am?’ See, sales figures don’t actually track sales. Of course. The car industry is in fact a movie I would call ‘Bullshit Inception’ - it’s bullshit inside bullshit inside bullshit - little Russian dolls carved out of bullshit - all the way down to the quantum level. Sales figures actually track registrations. So, when a month looks like going bad, for a carmaker, the mother ship tells all its dealers to go out and register, like, 10 cars.  If you’ve got 200 dealers, that’s 2000 additional registrations that get chalked up as sales, and they go on the books as demonstrators even though most never get driven. Then the mother ship pays the dealer a back-hander to sell the demonstrators at a discount, seeing as it’s no longer worth as much as a new car. So, essentially, that makes the carmaker look better in that month, but it engineers an even bigger slump the next month, potentilly, and it is therefore a very short-term sales strategy. So, if you’re a proper journalist, the pro tip there would be to call them on it. Because this is what happens when you cook the books in August and it bites you on the arse in September. Because the fundamental problem is the cat’s out of the bag on Holden’s appalling conduct vis-a-vis the factory closure almost two years ago today. Clever advertising can’t right the ship. I know this because Holden even released a brand new advertising campaign at considerable expense, detailing the joys of Holden SUV ownership. A Holden Heist, they called it. ‘This is how we SUV.’ (As if ‘SUV’ is a fucking verb…) Very nicely shot. Expensive. Stabilized rigs on cars. Couple of nice drone shot inserts. Wouldn’t be surprised if they dusted off three or four Arri Alexas or the Red Weapon Heliums. (It’s very good, production-wise. Almost Hollywood. But, at the same time, nauseating.) It’s a bullshit concept. They’re selling vehicles nobody wants. Under a brand they burned. Most of us know the real Holden heist involved the Australian taxpayer - and not even the most accomplished ad agency in the world could shove that down my throat and make it taste like fois gras…