With A Little More Help...They Will Put Us Out Of Business!

[JKcars]

Just returned from a vacation with a good dealer friend of mine on the West Coast. He has two GM stores. With all this IDMS stuff swirling around, he decided to do a little investigation on his own. He called in Reynolds and had them do the full dog and pony and then received his IDMS quote.

The quote was for $8,000 MORE per month than he is paying for a fully functioning competitive DMS today. Over a 5-year period this equates to nearly $500,000 in additional fees. He told me that once he picked up his chin from the floor and inquired why so much more...the Reynolds guy told him that GM negotiated this rate and there was nothing he could do about it. He then offered him a non-IDMS bid for the same stuff at 75% of the cost (wink, wink).

I would like to know if any dealership out there has bought this IDMS thing? Is this just some type of bait and switch game that GM and Reynolds have cooked up?

What was GM thinking when they did this deal?

Between this and the RIM 5% fee, maybe GM thinks the dealers can afford to bail them out of their financial mess.

And by the way, if I hear one more GM person tell me about the great Solstice and Sky, I am going to scream. These are wonderful cars, but we only have a handful to sell over the next year...come on - we need high volume vehicles that people stand in line to buy, not a unit whose production volumes I can count on my hands and feet.

General - stop screwing with stuff that ads no value and pour your efforts into great cars and trucks!

[chevytech]

These look pretty hot. I bet they will sell. http://www.zlx.com/musclecars/camaro_concept.htm

[JKcars]

Did you see this weeks auto news? Some dealer group seems to be pushing on Saturn about the decision to change systems Page 6). in the article it says GM says the reason we must switch is the billing is to confusing, too much manual data entry, support is bad, and we don't use all the features???...are these guys talking about my Saturn business?

The bill is real simple, it comes from the parts statement open account, we do way less manual data entry in the Saturn stores than in our other GM stores, the service is good by EDS or ADP - whoever it is today, and I think we use most of what we've got, but if we don't isn't that my problem?

Is this really why they are going to throw our stores into chaos by switching systems?