Quote Originally Posted by circmand View Post
if they approached existing dealers of other cars and said order what you want and sell them with the requirement of having trained mechanics for their car and honoring warranty work I bet they could beat the number of dealerships they had under GM
That's an interesting idea, getting away from dedicated dealerships with lots of stock sitting on the lot and going towards having a representative number of vehicles on the lot and letting dealerships order them "on-demand" when customers want to buy them. Only problems I could see are that existing dealerships would have to have space on their lots and it would be difficult for Isuzu to determine how many cars to manufacture each month. As I understand it GM and other manufacturers set a factory production target and "push" those vehicles onto dealer lots for them to sell. That way they don't have to produce more vehicles in the summer than in the winter, which allows them to keep a stable workforce throughout the year. Predicting demand is always the major obstacle in "just-in-time" distribution models.

Agreed that it could be a good way to get back in the market for a reasonable cost though. I'm pretty sure that's how exotic car manufacturers work...