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Roughly 15,000 car dealers—including some in Baton Rouge—lost access for a second day to software that is essential to their day-to-day operations, stopping some dealers from being able to sell or repair cars.
Nick Pentas, general manager and co-owner of Mercedes-Benz of Baton Rouge, says the local Mercedes dealership has been impacted by CDK Global’s shutdown of services.
“I’ve been here 23 years, and it’s the first time I’ve seen something like this,” Pentas says. “This has never happened before.”
CDK Global is a dealer management system, allowing dealers to calculate payments for a car sale and build the sale. The local Mercedes dealership also uses the system to help track parts in the repair shop’s inventory.
With the system offline, Pentas says the dealership can still execute a sale but that it can’t write a buyers order or certain financial contracts. People who come in to buy a car at this time will have to finish the paperwork once the systems go back online, he says.
“They have not given us any estimate [on when the system would be fixed],” Pentas says. “Last update we received was that it could take several days.”
Eric Lane, president of Gerry Lane Enterprises, says his company’s dealerships were not affected—General Motors-affiliated dealerships switched to a competitor’s system, Tekion, a few years ago.
“Thank God we don’t have CDK, the other dealers are dying right now,” Lane says.
CDK told The Wall Street Journal that it didn’t have an estimated time frame for a resolution.
