OTD Goes Bad to Worse from Pre-Pandemic to Pandemic

摘要

The 2020 model-year will be remembered as one of the most complex order-to-delivery (OTD) cycles in the history of fleet. In retrospect, the 2020 model-year really divides into two segments: the pre-pan-demic period from Oct. 1,2019 to Feb. 28, 2020, and, separately, the March 1 to Sept. 30 period, which included the economic shutdown and temporary closure of all vehicle assembly plants in North America. In many ways, OTD in model-year 2020 in the pre-pandemic period was very similar to what the industry experienced in model-year 2019, but that's not saying much because 2019 was not that great a year for fleet OTD. "As is typical every year, we see some OEMs and specific models perform better while others declined.We continue to see consumers move away from sedans and this put pressure on some of the popular SUV and crossover models. We are seeing a similar trend with fleet customers as well," said Tim Cengel, senior procurement manager for Wheels Inc. "There was still a high demand for pickup trucks in both fleet and retail markets and this pushed truck OTDs higher. We also saw a sharp increase in demand for hybrid models as our customers look to improve their performance on green initiatives."