Toyota dealers are looking forward to a long-overdue redesign of the Tundra this year that should once again give them a worthy competitor in the full-size pickup segment, the head of the brand’s dealer council says.
Robby Findlay, director of operations for the family-owned Findlay Automotive Group, is entering his second year as chairman of the Toyota National Dealer Advisory Council. He told Automotive News that the upcoming Tundra “is the most exciting thing we’ve had in the last five-plus years.”
Findlay Automotive Group, No. 27 on the latest Automotive News list of Top 150 Dealership Groups, has 22 brands and sold 29,321 new vehicles and 20,504 used vehicles in 2019 across its 32 stores in Western states. Findlay said the new Tundra will allow Toyota dealers “to really go toe-to-toe with the domestic trucks,” for the first time in many years.
“I mean, we’ve been waiting so long for a new Tundra; we know the potential of that full-size truck market. And from everything that they’re telling us, we’re going to have best-in-class. I mean, we’re going to have a world beater,” Findlay said.
The new pickup might not have mattered much to Toyota’s dealer network last spring were it not for a broad, timely intervention from Toyota Financial Services during the height of the pandemic. Now, Findlay said, Toyota dealers are more profitable than ever, and thanks to a sped-up rollout of the brand’s SmartPath digital retailing suite, are in better shape to sell digitally.
This year, the council’s focus will be “how do we take what we learned from the pandemic, and how do we carry that forward and really just make it a better business model, where the inventory levels are maybe a little bit lower than we’ve seen historically,” Findlay said. “We’ve got to focus on selling customers cars the way that they want to buy — where it’s less face-to-face and more of an online experience, with less time at the dealership. I think what we’ve learned is customers will pay a premium for a better experience.”