Essentially the Car Service and Repair Trend Tracker Update 2010 combines three longstanding research reports into one. First, and perhaps best known, is the Service Trend Tracker. Published since 1995, this report is based on extensive consumer surveys. Every month, 1,000 motorists are asked about where they last had their car serviced. The result is ‘servicing retention’ by make of car and provider of servicing – dealers, independents and DIY – a measure we have always found to mirror, very closely, the industry standard ‘service retention’ that includes all types of mechanical work including routine servicing.

The second report is the Repair Trend Tracker, run since 2005, and based on consumer surveys too. The third report is the UK Car Service and Repair Market report, published every two years since 1994, looking at market size and trends and the garage supply structure in the UK.

The USP of this body of work is the trend data reaching as far back as 1987, crucially before the recession in the early 1990s, which enables us to produce the forecasts going forward five years to 2015 contained in the new report. We shall not bore you with the details of the econometric model utilised, but suffice to say it has produced surprisingly accurate results in the past.

Of the various inputs to the forecast model, the effects of each vary and can be interdependent. This time, as in the recession of the early 1990s, the dominant variable was the fall in new car sales leading to changes in the age profile of the UK car parc. Of course new car sales have been falling since the peak in 2003 and thus the number of cars up to four years old, so essential to dealers’ service departments, had been falling for a while to stand 15% below its peak at the beginning of the recession. By the end of next year the four-year car parc will be 25% lower.

The recession of the early 1990s resulted in similar falls in the four-year car parc, and the effects on the servicing and repair market this time will be the same, although ameliorated by longer new car warranties. Quite simply, the ups and downs of each car parc age segment affect, in turn, the market providers. Thus franchised dealers draw most of their work from the four-year car parc, as the new report illustrates, and therefore a 25% fall in this segment obviously reduces the potential customer base for dealers’ workshops. In other words, the changing car parc age profile, and the number of cars in each age segment, effectively transfer work between provider sectors. So with such concrete historic trends available to us, the forecast was relatively easy, and we trust accurate.

Written by Trend Tracker director Chris Oakham, this piece first appeared his column in the subscription monthly Auto Retail Bulletin in June 2010. (See //auto-retail.co.uk
for subscription details.)

Chris Oakham

Trend Tracker Limited

0870 421 4350

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