Carmakers to sell vehicles online

Taylan Özgür Dil- ISTANBUL

Türkiye’s first homemade electric car brand Togg, Tesla and Mercedes-Benz are set to go online next year to sell their vehicles directly to customers.

Many carmakers are shifting to online sales to have larger control over sales and determine the price of vehicles they sell, which will probably leave car dealers to engage mostly in after-sale services and second-hand car sales in the future.

Some carmakers will launch the online sale model, which is already in use in Europe, next year in Türkiye.

Togg will collect pre-orders for its C-SUV model in February online, and all sales will be made on the internet. Potential buyers will be able to see the Togg cars at the “experience centers.”

The number of those experience centers will increase from 12 in 2023 to more than 35 in 2025.

Electric car giant Tesla is also expected to launch online sales in Türkiye next year. Tesla had hoped to enter the Turkish market but delayed plans for 2022.

Mercedes-Benz will be another carmaker that will adopt the online sales model in Türkiye.

The company will unveil its new sales model in January.

“We will employ one of the three models currently in use. Togg and Tesla go for direct sales without dealers. In the second model, dealers are the delivery point, but carmakers set the prices. The third one is that dealers deliver the cars and set the price. We will choose one of them,” said Şükrü Bedikhan.

Passenger car sales increased by 38 percent in November from a year ago to more than 59,000, the Automotive Distributors’ and Mobility Association (ODMD) reported last week.

In the first 11 months of the year, the passenger car market contracted by 2.4 percent compared to the same period of 2021. From January to November, nearly 506,000 passenger cars were sold on the local market.