Car sales remain steady despite election chaos

By John Aglionby

SALES of new vehicles have remained steady in the lead up to the general election, in contrast to earlier predictions of significant falls.

Despite vivid pictures in the media of vandalized vehicles and horror stories of election campaigners clambering all over cars during rallies, the general election campaign and the ensuing fears of political instability have not affected car sales in the last month as much as dealers had anticipated.

All companies contacted said they had projected a drop-off in sales but few said the downturn had been as large as they had expected.

Bintoro Tjitrowirjo, general manager of PT Tjahja Sakti Motor Corp which distributes BMWs in Indonesia, said: "We are glad that the campaign ended yesterday but it did not have that much of an effect on sales. The figures compare well with the same period last year.

"And we offer fully comprehensive insurance when we sell a BMW so, people buying our cars do not have much to worry about anyway."

Mitsubishi's vice president, Herman Latif, said the company's sales have also held up well. He said that sales in the last three months were 16 percent up on the same period last year.

"We had anticipated a slight decline in sales but there was almost no significant effect," he said.

Toyota's marketing executive, Darmadji, said his company had expected sales to dip during the campaign. "From our experience of previous campaigns, people tend to postpone activities such as buying cars until things have settled down again, but as far as we can tell our market share is still stable."

Lela Pello, of Mercedes Benz, echoed Darmadji's sentiments. "If you look at our business from an overall perspective we do not seem to be affected by the election.

"However, there does seem to be a bit of a wait-and-see attitude among buyers. Some people are postponing buying until after the election but we expect any decreases to be only very temporary in nature."

This was confirmed by a couple coming out of a South Jakarta BMW showroom. Arief Widianto said: "We have been planning to replace our four-year-old for some time. However, we thought it would be safer and less risky to wait until next month.

"It's not that we live in a violent neighborhood but one just is never quite sure what is going to happen at any time."