Volkswagen Brings Online Car Shopping to Denmark
For anyone who’s considered a car purchase lately, the picture is strikingly similar. While the journey may start online to find that perfect model or just that perfect price, the journey ends with walking into a car dealer’s showroom, signing papers and cutting a check in much the same way it did even 30 years ago. That’s a point that Volkswagen may be about to change, at least in Denmark.
Danish citizens, reports note, will soon be able to buy the up! minicar online directly, much in the same way Danes might be able to buy clothes or cookies. Using either a credit card or the MobilePay app from Danske Bank, Danes can pick out the car, order it, and have it delivered within a fairly brisk 10 business days.
Danes don’t have much of a history buying car parts online; only four percent of all online transactions in the Danish business-to-consumer market in 2016 were car-related, possibly owing to the fairly light consumption of cars in general in the country.
Denmark is big on biking, particularly in the cities, and for an entire country that’s not even half the size of Colorado, getting around by bike is much more possible there than in the United States.
Still, we’re talking about a minicar here, so the chances of Volkswagen actually selling sufficient numbers to make the project worthwhile could be obtainable.
The minicar itself sold 7,361 units in 2016. Opening up the market elsewhere should allow Volkswagen to at least match previous successes.
While this isn’t exactly a first, it’s still fairly innovative; not too far from where I live, there’s a car dealer that will actually deliver cars to your house on a flatbed truck for you to try out, within a certain radius.
The problem here is that we’re talking about an item that weighs several thousand pounds, depending on the style purchased, so returns will never be as simple as they’d be for anything else. If it works, however, it will likely spread in grand fashion as car dealers look for new markets.