If you have that sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that you are spend­ing more time in traf­fic with more new cars on the road, it’s be­cause there has in­deed been an in­crease in car sales in T&T com­pared to last year, and the year be­fore that.

How­ev­er, lo­cal deal­ers have con­firmed car sales are still some way off from the pre-pan­dem­ic num­bers.

Pres­i­dent of the Au­to­mo­tive Deal­ers As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T, Ryan Latchu, con­firmed that deal­ers had seen an in­crease com­pared to last year, as it had done from 2021 when the in­dus­try suf­fered great­ly due to COVID-19 re­stric­tions.

“New ve­hi­cle sales con­tin­ue to trend up­wards with 2023 sur­pass­ing 2022 by 12.69 per cent for the pe­ri­od Jan­u­ary to June,” said Latchu in a text mes­sage re­sponse to the Busi­ness Guardian on Tues­day.

How­ev­er he did note that this was mere­ly a re­flec­tion of the mar­ket re­cov­ery fol­low­ing the pan­dem­ic’s im­pact.

Re­fer­ring to the first six months of years un­der ex­am­i­na­tion, Latchu said: “The lo­cal au­to­mo­tive mar­ket ex­pe­ri­enced a sharp de­cline in new ve­hi­cle sales by 27.3 per cent for the pe­ri­od 2019-2020 as a di­rect fall­out of the en­vi­ron­men­tal chal­lenges due to the pan­dem­ic. There was a fur­ther re­duc­tion in over­all sales by 8.88 per cent in 2021.

As the mar­ket con­tin­ues to re­bound, we have not­ed an in­cre­men­tal but steady in­crease in new ve­hi­cle sales amongst deal­ers for 2022 (8.61 per cent), which is still far less than tra­di­tion­al an­nu­al deal­er sales by an av­er­age of 33.62 per cent (2016-2018),” he said.

He con­firmed that sup­ply chain is­sues con­tin­ued to ad­verse­ly af­fect car deal­ers, as most are cur­rent­ly with lim­it­ed stock de­spite in­creased de­mand from con­sumers.

“Sev­er­al lo­cal deal­ers con­tin­ue to ex­pe­ri­ence a de­cline in the avail­abil­i­ty of spe­cif­ic makes and mod­els due to sup­ply chain short­ages. This has led to the lim­it­ed avail­abil­i­ty of lo­cal­ly stocked mod­els and longer wait times for cus­tomers on ve­hi­cle or­ders,” said Latchu.

The sto­ry is much the same for for­eign used car deal­ers, as sup­ply chain is­sues have af­fect­ed new and used car deal­ers equal­ly.

Vice pres­i­dent of the T&T Au­to­mo­tive Deal­ers As­so­ci­a­tion Rhon­dall Fee­les not­ed that the in­dus­try would re­main a step be­hind based on the many chal­lenges faced con­cern­ing bring­ing in ve­hi­cles.

“I mean any­thing from the past, or dur­ing the COVID time (com­pared to) this year is an in­crease. It may not mean it’s where it’s sup­posed to be. But last year and this year we com­ing off of COVID. Not on­ly COVID, but the af­ter-ef­fects of COVID, the post ef­fects of COVID,” said Fee­les.

“You are now see­ing ship­ping lines strug­gling to deal with trans­porta­tion of both new and used cars to T&T. Those lines bring both of those cars as well. So any­thing that hap­pens this year is an in­crease over the year be­fore and the year be­fore that. Those were the worst years.”

He said these chal­lenges have on­ly ex­ac­er­bat­ed pre­vi­ous con­cerns deal­ers have had with re­gard to bring­ing in ve­hi­cles.

“The year 2021 was the lock­downs. Last year and even this year, we are now deal­ing with the chal­lenges of ship­ping. We will con­tin­ue, and al­ways will con­tin­ue ap­par­ent­ly, to deal with the is­sues of for­eign ex­change avail­abil­i­ty.

“To be able to get sig­nif­i­cant forex to bring in cars even if there is de­mand, is a big (chal­lenge). There may be an in­crease in de­mand fine, but then there’s still not an in­crease to say in ca­pac­i­ty to sup­ply. Be­cause we have that forex chal­lenge. We will con­tin­ue to have it ap­par­ent­ly,” said Fee­les.

“The ship­ping chal­lenges are com­bined with the forex chal­lenges. So I mean, some­times cars here and cars get shipped out and we have to strug­gle with the banks to get forex­to be able to pay sup­pli­ers to have the ve­hi­cles re­leased off of the port. So it is a strug­gle, it’s a chal­lenge,” said Fee­les, who al­so not­ed that deal­ers al­so had to deal with pile­ups at Cus­toms, as he stat­ed many poli­cies im­ple­ment­ed dur­ing the pan­dem­ic have per­sist­ed prompt­ing fur­ther is­sues on the port.

“Then we al­so deal­ing with is­sues with Cus­toms as well. Cus­toms are still work­ing in the COVID pan­dem­ic era. Where they are telling you they are do­ing 40 cars a day, and we are talk­ing about boats com­ing in with 1,000 cars and more. And they want to do 40 a day. More than one boat would come in with this num­ber, so some­times 2,000 cars on the port and they want to do 40 a day as if they are still op­er­at­ing un­der the pan­dem­ic as well.” he said.

He al­so not­ed that the ap­point­ment sys­tem al­so proved an­oth­er ob­sta­cle to im­prov­ing sales.

“So you come to clear goods and to give you an ap­point­ment sev­en days af­ter, all these are things that are im­pact­ing sales, im­pact­ing sales in a very mean­ing­ful way,” he ex­plained.

He how­ev­er ac­knowl­edged that com­mer­cial banks have be­come more flex­i­ble with the pro­vi­sion of loans re­lat­ed to car sales, which has helped the in­dus­try.

Lo­cal banks have all not­ed in­creased loan sales in the past year, with Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Ltd not­ing re­cent­ly that its prof­it of $1.26 bil­lion for the first nine months of the fis­cal year was par­tial­ly at­trib­ut­able to in­creased loan growth.

In the Cen­tral Bank’s Fi­nan­cial Sta­bil­i­ty Re­port 2022 it was not­ed that in 2022, “Mo­tor ve­hi­cle lend­ing de­clined year-on-year by 2.9 per cent ($134.9 mil­lion), but showed signs of re­cov­ery over the lat­ter half of 2022 as ship­ping op­er­a­tions and the time­ly de­liv­ery of ve­hi­cles im­proved.”

In terms of what con­sumers have been pur­chas­ing in the lo­cal mar­ket, deal­ers have recog­nised that in­ter­est in hy­brid and elec­tric ve­hi­cles con­tin­ues to grow.

“We con­tin­ue to see con­sis­tent in­ter­est in hy­brid ve­hi­cles and oth­er vari­a­tions of en­er­gy-ef­fi­cient ve­hi­cles, such as bat­tery elec­tric and plug-in elec­tric ve­hi­cles, with each ma­jor dis­trib­u­tor (and make) of­fer­ing an ever-ex­pand­ing com­pet­i­tive se­lec­tion to cus­tomers,” Latchu told the Busi­ness Guardian.