Pretoria - The National Automobile
Dealers Association (Nada) had
launched NADAdata, its new used
vehicle database which would capture
an estimated 60 percent of all
monthly used vehicle sales through
dealerships, Gary McCraw, Nada`s executive
director, said at the weekend.
McCraw said the database was
delivered via the Nada Internet site
and would make a compendium of
trading and analytical data available
to the used vehicle industry.
Derrick Dixon, the chief executive
of the Retail Motor Industries
Organisation, said NADAdata
heralded the start of a new era in used
vehicle trading. It successfully solved
concerns, such as a lack of data, that
had characterised the used motor
vehicles sales sector for many years.
McCraw said the database would
be marketed on behalf of Nada by a
newly formed business trading as
AutoData, in a joint venture between
motor industry information experts
Neal Bruton and Henni Boudjelthia.
McCraw said that from a trading
perspective the components of the
database were designed with the
input of top used car traders. The
database provided an immediate
printout of key data necessary to fully
evaluate trading risks and prices on
any used vehicle.
He said the data available in the
trading component would, for
example, contain at national or
regional level the number of cars of
a particular model and model year
sold each month for the last six
months as well as the average
number of days that the sold cars
had been held in stock by dealers.
In addition, it would contain the
low, average and high purchase and
selling prices of the cars and the
average residual value of a model
compared with its original new price,
he said.
McCraw stressed the the database
took a ``black box`` approach to
analysing and presenting the data,
and no human intervention took
place.
He said used vehicle sales data was
supplied to Nada on a monthly basis
by major motor vehicle financing
institutions and all of the large motor
dealer groups, including Barlow
Motor Investments, Combined Motor
Holdings, Imperial, McCarthy,
Supergroup and Unitrans.
The list of data suppliers would
grow as more trading and finance
companies began supplying data to
Nada.
McCraw added that a computer
tool for the estimation of new vehicle
tradein prices for up to five years
after they had been sold had also
become available through the new
NADAdata site.