THE REVENUE Commissioners have slammed the brakes on a website that was giving out daily car sales figures — and prompted hundreds in the industry to call for its reinstatement.
Since January Motorcheck.ie has been posting daily updates on every car registered in the country. It detailed each car’s make, model, colour and engine size, and also what county it was registered in.
Many car companies have been using the figures to monitor sales — especially those of their competitors — and saw the free service as a big improvement on the figures they pay to receive every ten days from the Society of the Irish Motor Industry.
“They were a huge leap forward on the reports we were used to getting and gave us in minutes the sort of detail it would normally take us days to produce,” a senior executive with one of the country’s biggest car importers told me last week.
But in mid-February the Revenue Commissioners demanded the website owners stop posting daily updates because they saw the information as being ‘commercially sensitive’.
They say revealing the make of each car sold in every county could indicate the turnover and sales of many car dealers — especially those who are the sole dealer of a particular brand in their county.
Motorcheck.ie managing director, Shane Teskey, disagrees with this.
He says his company’s figures show only that a particular car was registered in a particular county — not that it was sold in that county.
“A huge number of cars are bought in one county and registered in another,” he says. “A car hire company, for example, might register 100 cars in Dublin or Cork but could have sourced them in more than a dozen counties.”
Teskey believes the daily updates on Motorcheck.ie were delivering significant change in the industry — and not least for car buyers.
“One dealer principal told me that the distributor of the brand he represents increased the discount it was offering on a particular model because it could see from our daily updates that they were losing ground to rival makes,” he said.
“That resulted in real savings for the subsequent buyers of those discounted cars and, in turn, increased competitiveness — something that is good for everyone in the industry.”
Teskey met with the Revenue Commissioners last week to detail what he feels are compelling reasons for publishing the daily figures and says he is now waiting for their decision on the matter.
To reinforce his case he handed them a petition signed by more than 300 people — both consumers and members of the car industry — calling for the ban on daily updates to be lifted.
The petition states that the signatories do not believe the information published or the frequency of its update to be in any way commercially sensitive, and asks “that all data providers continue to support Motorcheck.ie in their provision of daily statistics.”
This blog has already signed the petition and urges all those interested in seeing Irish car prices drop to do the same.
You can browse Motorcheck’s website here and sign their petition using this link.