Scion Aims for the 1-Hour Deal

SANTA MONICA, CA – Buying a car in one hour is seen as the Holy Grail to some auto brands, impossible to others. Scion is on the former team.

As the Toyota youth brand continues to set its sights on making the buying process more streamlined, it has a pilot program going dubbed Pure Process Plus that is targeting the 60-minute sale.

“We know a lot of manufacturers are working on this, but we think we’re pretty close and we’ve got a pretty good solution on it,” Doug Murtha, Scion vice president, tells media at an event for the upcoming iA and iM small cars.

The program, in a pilot phase at 16 of Scion’s 1,004 U.S. dealerships but which will roll out nationally early next year, “enables a customer to bring as much as much of the purchase process into their living room as they choose,” Murtha says.

By going online customers can build a vehicle, search local inventory for that vehicle, fill out an online credit application and secure a price from a participating Scion dealer.

When the program rolls out nationally, Murtha says the only reason to visit a dealership would be to pick up the car once it arrives, although that isn’t even a certainty as some dealers may agree to deliver a vehicle to a buyer’s home.

Results of the pilot program show customer satisfaction to be high and time savings significant.

“Right now it takes customers a little over four hours on average to purchase a vehicle,” Murtha says. “Through this process we’ve been able to get over 50% of the sale under two hours.”

While he considers that a step in the right direction, Murtha says customers who participated in the pilot program want the process shorter.

“They still came back (in a survey) and said, ‘I should be able to buy a car in under an hour,’ so we’ve still got some work to do to meet their expectations.”

In an interview with WardsAuto, Murtha notes Pure Process Plus will be voluntary and that dealers participating will not be held to the 1-hour target.

Issues that could pop up and prevent sales from being done in 60 minutes include a customer factoring in the shopping and building process, and discovery of a buyer’s poor credit history.

“(People with poor credit) are going to get diverted to a little bit more massaging on the finance side, and that’s going to take a little longer,” Murtha says.

He understands dealers concerns with 1-hour car-buying by noting, “This is much art as it is science.

“(Dealers will say), ‘There is some skill in getting certain customers financed, and if you guys try to digitize this too much there’s the risk we’re going to lose a deal that we could probably find a way to fund.’”

He calls getting those who may otherwise be put on ice quickly financed “one of those soft things we need to work into the system.”

After 12 years since its June 2003 launch in California and 11 years since its national rollout, Scion’s fundamental mission hasn’t changed, Murtha says. It’s still targeting buyers under 35 years of age who have an experimental, individualistic streak with distinctive vehicles and a unique purchase process.

But 2015’s under-35s, who’ve been through the Great Recession and suffered the aftereffects of high unemployment, high underemployment and hefty amounts of student-loan debt, are more practical, pragmatic and self-reliant than the under-35s of 2003 and 2004, he says.

Contrary to their grouping, today’s individualists tend to be more collaborative than the against-the-grain audience Scion was targeting more than a decade ago, 

“Surprisingly, given what they’ve been through, this is a pretty optimistic generation,” Murtha says. “They’re glass-half-full (people).”

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