Electrifying start to Remarketing Forum
Take it from someone who’s been to all of them: this was the biggest and best Remarketing Forum yet. Snappily titled ED2, the event on Wednesday in Dublin, on the first day of the Fleet Europe Summit, attracted close to 200 professionals. They listened and learned in the conference room. They talked and networked in the Remarketing Village. And we’ve never seen so many smartphones take so many pictures of so many interesting graphs.
No, ED2 is not one of the greenhouse gases. It stands for Electrification, Distribution and Digitalisation, the three trends doing most of the shaking-up in the vehicle remarketing industry.
In an opening interview, conference host Johan Verbois (Fleet Europe’s Remarketing Expert, pictured left) asked Martin Forbes (President of Cox Automotive, pictured right) where he thought the industry was going. Wherever it was, it was going there faster than before the pandemic, which has speeded up existing trends, Mr Forbes remarked.
Opportunity or threat
Some of those trends would recur throughout the day. “There’s the agency model of distribution, with many at the moment wondering whether it’s an opportunity or a threat. Actually, I think it can be both, for remarketers.” And then there’s new car supply – or lack thereof. “That’s the most important metric in the industry today. It’s pushing vehicles from just one life cycle into a second or third one.”
Bertrand Donck (CEO of Macadam) opened the segment on electrification, listing the various challenges this paradigm shift will pose – or rather: is posing. (One of the things this event made clear, is that electrification is well and truly here, also on the used-car market).
Mr Donck listed the various challenges, adding that “EVs are changing the way we redistribute used vehicles across borders.” He also mentioned the risks that formulas like second lease pose for cost management, because “it can be a challenge to keep non-utilisation under control: cars sometimes simply get lost on compounds.”
Pig in a poke
He concluded with a bit of yin and yang: “if you add it all up, the remarketing process for EVs will be costlier than for ICE vehicles. But on the other hand, maintenance costs will be much lower.”
The second presentation of the day saw Markus Gregor (Project Manager Battery Evaluation at TÜV Süd) and Günter Kaufmann (CEO of Autobid.de) present the CARA-approved Battery Health Check (the CARA General Assembly got the scoop a day earlier).
“To be quite frank, EV battery health is a bit of a black box, and nobody wants to buy a pig in a poke.” And that uncertainty is exactly what the CARA-approved State of Health check is designed to eliminate.
Lots of smartphones went up in the air for the data-rich presentation by Julian De Groot (Head of Sales, Product and Marketing at Dataforce), who unpacked the Return to Market (RtM) method as a way to measure future supply of used EVs.
He demonstrated that the wave of EV RtM will have a four-year delay, predicting that “by 2028, more EVs than diesels will come back onto the market from True Fleets – even though the current ratio is just 1 EV for every 20 diesels.”
Click here for more on the second segment of the Remarketing Forum about Distribution.
Click here for more on the third segment of the Remarketing Forum on Digitalisation.
The Remarketing Forum concluded with a gala dinner and the Remarketing Awards - more here.
Image: Benjamin Brolet
