WIt is not easy for him to buy a new car at the moment. Waiting times of up to a year have to be accepted if the car is not available in the sales room and special requests are made. This is mainly due to the lack of chips, many cars cannot be produced with all the equipment or are supplied with fewer equipment as an emergency solution. BMW has difficulties equipping new vehicles with head-up displays. The customer is given the choice of either taking the car without the ad or canceling it. Looking around for year-old cars on the used car market only helps to a limited extent. In Germany, more than twice as many cars are sold used as new. The ratio in 2020 was just under three to a good seven million vehicles.
But even the used market has been swept almost empty. This is especially true for young used cars, i.e. cars that are two or a maximum of three years old. An example: The colleague wanted to buy his daughter a Mini. But instead of the around 200 vehicles that are usually waiting in the hall for new owners, there are only a good dozen left at the Frankfurt dealer. “It was even worse recently, we ran out of cars, we could have played football here,” says the salesman. That may be an extreme example, but everywhere you can see that the stocks of second-hand cars have decreased. The Hedtke dealership from Weiterstadt (Volvo, Jaguar and Land Rover) currently has only 100 used vehicles in stock instead of the usual 200. “Nothing is happening at the moment,” complains co-owner Michael Hedtke.
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