Simon Dixon

ROCKAR, the hugely successful new car retailing model that has UK dealers nervously wondering about future yield from their traditional car dealerships, is poised to expand to Australia.

Rockar is a marriage of shopping centre showrooms to an online car-selling back end. Its retail stores are not unlike an Apple Store or, indeed, a Tesla showroom.

Rockar founder Simon Dixon told GoAutoNews Premium, in an exclusive interview from his Dartford office east of London, that four Australian companies had approached him about opening similar stores Down Under.

“We are looking at the moment at four people who want to do this in Australia,” he said.

The Australian interest follows recent enhancements to the software that allows Rockar to be operated in other countries. Rockar’s online car-buying system allows people to buy a car online from the Rockar showrooms or from home.

“We have been developing the back end of the system just a little bit more which means we can actually take it into different countries,” Mr Dixon said. “We can format it for language, web data, specifications, evaluations and vehicle specifics.”

Mr Dixon said that the names of the Australians were confidential.

“But out of the four that have approached us, three are not even in the car business,” he said. “They are people who, like us, see the industry has to change by bringing in fresh people with fresh retailing ideas.”

The news of Australian interest in the concept coincides with the announcement that Jaguar Land Rover in the UK will join Rockar to open special car retailing stores in the same shopping centres where Rockar has experienced such massive success in its partnership with Hyundai.

Rockar’s two shopping centre stores generate the third biggest Hyundai sales in the UK and the retail model is proving to be deeply challenging to traditional dealers.

Rockar was developed by Mr Dixon, a UK car retailer who took a break after 20 years in the Dixon Motors family business – which once sold 70,000 cars a year and ran more than 50 dealerships – before selling the company. Mr Dixon was also involved in JamJar, the first online car sales company in the UK.

With his automotive background he decided to look at the car retail industry with fresh eyes and Mr Dixon said what he saw was concerning.

“Visiting dealerships to buy cars for myself was the most insightful time because I found out just how bad it was for the customer, how disconnected it was digitally and the really shocking fact that sales people just didn’t know their product,” he said.

“It was an eye opener for me. So I decided to come back into the industry doing something different.”

“Of our two stores, one gets more visitor traffic than the entire Hyundai network in the UK”

Rockar operates with its factory partner Hyundai out of two shopping malls – Westfield Stratford City shopping centre (Europe’s biggest urban shopping complex), about 12 kilometres east of central London, and Bluewater shopping centre in Dartford, about 42km from London along the Thames River with a service centre about 1.5km away.

The shopping centres are the key to success because they generate so much floor traffic from people who own cars and the only way to get to these big shopping complexes is to drive.

Mr Dixon said Rockar spends very little on marketing itself because “the attraction in our model is the visitor traffic”.

“Of our two stores, one gets more visitor traffic than the entire Hyundai network in the UK,” he said.

“So we’ve had huge visitor numbers. Westfield Stratford City is on track to have one-quarter of a million through it in one year whereas the entire Hyundai network gets 140,000 people in their showrooms in the year.

“So there’s a massive, massive difference in terms of foot traffic.”

Mr Dixon said the majority of malls are destination points so people have to drive there.

“We’re getting exactly the right type of person we want for our business walking past our stores and walking into them,” he said.

By Neil Dowling