Auto Customer Satisfaction: Discountinued Pontiac And Saturn Do Well

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 25, 2:32PM EDT · Published Dec 8, 1:50PM EST

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J. D. Power and Associates released its new 2009 sales satisfaction index. The survey covers responses from 48,000 people and “is measured for five factors: dealership facility; salesperson; paperwork/finance process; delivery process; and vehicle price.” Of the 38 brands included in the study, 29 have improved from 2008.

Ford’s (NYSE:F) Mercury division won the “mass market” car category, but ironically GM’s discontinued brands Pontiac and Saturn did very well. Pontiac ranked at the same level as Buick.

Among other mass market cars Toyota (NYSE:TM) got relatively poor ratings as did VW and Nissan. The Ford brand and Chevrolet did well.

Among luxury cars, Jaguar, which Ford sold to Tata Motors, ranked first. Cadillac, Lexus, and Lincoln did well. Infiniti, Volvo, and Audi got worse ratings.

It says something about the judgment of car company executives when many of the most highly rated brands are being closed or have been sold.

One of the elements of the car sales process that can be controlled by dealer management to help sales is service. It turns out that impressing customers is not a strength of most dealerships. Powers reports that “automotive brands, on average, are losing 12 percent of buyers to competitors due to poor customer treatment.” This means that manufacturers are doing a mediocre job controlling the enviroment at the locations that sell their products. “The study finds that more than one in five shoppers who leave a dealership without purchasing a vehicle do so because they experienced poor treatment or dealer performance issues such as pricing games, sales pressure tactics or discourteous treatment.”

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.