Remarketing
Over the airwaves
Over-the-air updates can retrofit new features to a car without it having to visit a workshop. Jack Carfrae asks if they can also add value to a used vehicle.
A
lloy wheels, an upgraded sound system, a panoramic roof – you can see and touch all of them. There is a palpable distinction between a car that has them and one that does not, which is easily observed and marketed at every stage.
Not all specification is created equal in the eyes of a used car buyer, though. A piece of equipment can be as clever or as expensive as you like, but it is incredibly difficult to put a monetary value on something invisible.
Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), such as automatic emergency braking and lane- keep assist, have long had this problem but it is even more acute with over-the-air updates. Often instigated via apps, they could be anything from connectivity upgrades, to safety features, to autonomous driving functions (we are excluding rudimentary software updates), are applied long after the car has left the factory, and could be a one-off purchase or a subscription. The manufacturer may record them, but there is no established method by which the remarketing industry can keep track.
32 | September/October 2024 |
www.businesscar.co.uk
“If you’ve got two like-for- like Teslas, and you’d put the same value on them based on their condition, you could have one that has had no updates at all.”
It is arguably easier to market any item of equipment – even the invisible stuff – when a car is new. Brochures and online configurators can be tailored to draw attention to and explain particular features, while sales staff dedicated to a single brand – or small number of them – can be trained. A certain amount of that trickles into the used car market when vehicles are still in the main dealer network and sold by those familiar with the kit, but multi-brand, independent retailers are entirely reliant on the information they receive from their remarketer.
“From an aftermarket perspective, there are challenges, because how do you as a remarketer know what updates are or aren’t on that vehicle?” says Cox Automotive’s insight director, Philip Nothard. “We come from a world where, when cars left the factory, the specification was fixed,” adds Matthew Freeman, managing consultant at cap hpi, “now, there’s a question alongside that, which is, ‘how do you know?’
“What you then rely on is that whoever is selling the car – be they private or fleet – is aware that changes have been made.”
Couple that with the industry’s preference for clearly identifiable trim levels and option packs, each issued with their own code by RV setters (Freeman points out that they are linked to factory build codes and can only illustrate what was there when the car was new), and that even visible individual options habitually fall through the cracks, and the prospect of monetising over-the- air updates seems like a pipe dream. They are proliferating, though, and it begs the question as to what effect, if any, they could have on the used car market – whether values could
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