Business View Magazine | June 2022

75 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 6 we interact with on behalf of dealers, but our primary purpose and focus is to represent the interests of new car and truck dealers.” The auto industry has not been immune to the effects of COVID, and MADA has been an important asset to dealers – helping to navigate regulations, while working to ensure that Maryland dealerships were able to continue operating. Kitzmiller recounts, “Ultimately, we were successful in Maryland, we stayed open from day one. I have to be honest, I’ve represented car dealers since the day I graduated from law school, my whole family is in the car business one way or the other, and I was certain that business was going to fall off a cliff and that our being open was really a symbolic thing, nothing more than that. Happily, I was as wrong as I could be.” He shares that although the first two months of the pandemic were “like a ghost town,” things quickly bounced back, with dealerships reporting excellent results in 2020 and 2021. Unfortunately, the summer of 2021 brought with it supply shortages, as Kitzmiller relays, “Our inventories started to dwindle, and now they are pretty much gone. I talked to one of my Chevrolet dealers that normally has 300 new cars and trucks on the ground, and he’s got 31. There seems to be indications that it’s not going to get better in 2022. The inventory is going to be very, very tight, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to get significantly worse. From a dealer’s perspective, we’ve been able to weather this very well.” On the positive side, COVID has helped to accelerate the online experience in the industry, something that Kitzmiller reports has been a slow transition until recently. “I think the pandemic sped that up by five, six years, at least. During the first summer of COVID we were doing 99% of transactions with customers online,” he reports. In order to remain open, sales departments were available by appointment MARYLAND AUTOMOB I LE DEALERS ASSOC I AT ION