Pub. 5 Issue 3

15 The LACarGuy dealerships pull in about $1 billion in annual revenue. Online sales “will be a fraction of our normal business, but at least we’ll be func- tioning,” Sullivan said, adding that “as the mayor and the governor start to take the restrictions off, we’ll be in a more natural, organic position to open up completely or open up more at each stage.” Although just one of his dealerships, Toyota of Hollywood, had to comply with the Safer at Home order, Sullivan closed all of them March 20, amid diminishing sales and conflicting reports on the effectiveness of face masks. “It was an easy decision tomake to close —we couldn’t put our employees or guests in a dangerous position,” he said. Each LACarGuy dealership employed between 70 and 130 workers, for a total of 930. About 630 of them were furloughed. ‘Worst month’ Sullivan took over the dealership busi- ness in the mid-1990s from his father, Wil- fred, who was better known as Sully, and nowruns them, togetherwithhis sons,Kelly and Sean, and daughter Meghan. A “high percentage”of his employees have beenwith the company for 25 years, he said, and “a bunch of them are second generation and even some thirdgenerationwith theSullivan family, and now they’ve been furloughed and on unemployment. It’s shocking. I’ve been doing this for 47 years. This was the worst month of my automotive life.” Douglas Eroh, president and general manager of Longo Toyota in El Monte, had to make similar decisions. “We completely shut down for two weeks betweenMarch 17th andMarch 31st, just tomake surewewere compliant with all of the orders and that we had the processes in place to be able to do things online,”Eroh said, adding that he also had to furlough most of his sales team. While ecommerce represents about 20% of sales on a “normal”month and home de- liveries were already offered at the adjacent Longo Lexus, the dealership had to imple- ment new procedures to keep its customers and service employees safe. The changes include home delivery of parts and shuttling customers, one at a time, for service appointments. The spacious waiting lounge, featuring a Starbucks and a Subway, is closed. The dealership is also ac- cepting drop-offs of vehicles needing repair, without direct contact with service advisers or filling out paperwork. “The most important thing right now is to limit interactions, to try to help do our part to slow the spread of (coronavirus).” Eroh said. “We’re not doing any test drives or anything sales-relatedon site.We’ve done FaceTime with customers to show them cars, and then they select something, and we bring the car to them, let them drive it, and then either bring it back, or they make a decision to keep it.” Although Longo Toyota is not within L.A. city limits, when online sales resumed on April 1, the decision was made not to serve any customers fromthat area until the order was further clarified. Sales since then have been “a fraction of what we would do in a normal course of business,” Eroh said. Sales slump Local sales were lower than the national averages last month, as several states have not yet implemented social distancing and stay-at-home restrictions. SantaMonica-basedEdmunds.comInc. projected that some 1 million new cars and trucks were sold in the United States in March, for an estimated seasonally ad- justed annual rate of 11.9 million. That’s a 35.5%decrease from the same period a year earlier, and a 23.4% drop from February. Smith said that while some dealer- ships may go out of business if restrictions continue well past April, the association remains optimistic that coronavirus-re- lated loans, such as the Payroll Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan assistance, “will create cash flow to get to places where opening for business is deemed safe.” Sullivan said he shared this view. “You can’t be a car salesman without being a huge optimist,” he said. “I know this will change, but not for April. I do think that toward the middle of May, we’ll start to see a little uptick, start to bring some people back. I don’t see it as some sort of dramatic change until we slowly work our way back up where perhaps in July, we’re in some sort of normalcy.”   GREEN LIGHT — continued from page 14