Syracuse, NY -- The Jaguar will no longer leap at the Bill Rapp Superstore. The car dealership has sold its last Jag and will no longer perform warranty work on vehicles after July 15. It’s the end of a more than 40–year relationship between the Syracuse car dealer and the luxury car company. It didn’t make sense to continue offering...
Syracuse, NY -- The Jaguar will no longer leap at the Bill Rapp Superstore.
The car dealership has sold its last Jag and will no longer perform warranty work on vehicles after July 15. It’s the end of a more than 40–year relationship between the Syracuse car dealer and the luxury car company.
It didn’t make sense to continue offering a brand that only allotted 20 cars a year to the dealership when some of its other brands sell 100 vehicles a month, said Bruce Rapp, president of the Superstore. The allotment wasn’t enough to justify the costs of operating the Jaguar franchise, he said.
“We just can’t get the number of vehicles from Jaguar to make it worthwhile to keep selling them,” Rapp said.
The dealership on Burnet Avenue in Syracuse began selling Jaguars in the mid-1960s, when it sold that brand and others made by British Leyland, he said.
In 1989, Ford bought Jaguar to compete with Mercedes and BMW, but it never developed the factory capacity to make the quantities needed to compete with those brands, Rapp said.
Ford sold Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata Motors of India in 2008 for $2.3 billion.
“The new owners decided that they are a niche brand and they are going to compete in major metropolitan areas. And I don’t think they consider Syracuse one of them,” Rapp said.
The company pulled out of Utica several years ago, he said.
The Superstore told customers that it will no longer sell Jaguars and that, while it will maintain the vehicles, it will no longer perform warranty work on them after July 15.
“The last Jag is gone,” Rapp said.
Piehler Jaguar-Land Rover in Webster is the closest place to have warranty work done, he said.
The Superstore has franchises for Buick, GMC, Nissan and Subaru, which is its top-selling brand, Rapp said. Subaru, which had shared space in the showroom with Jaguar, will take over the entire building, Rapp said.
Subaru is doing so well that the dealership that currently employs 120 needs to add workers, he said.
Although it has dropped Jaguar, the dealership may add other franchises.
“We always have feelers out for other opportunities,” Rapp said.
Those opportunities could come in the form of new brands, such as Chinese cars that will probably enter the American market in the future, or other dealers looking to get out of the business, he said.