While new vehicle sales continue to plunge, OEMs must look for other avenues to recover their losses. Could the parts and service divisions be the answer? In part, yes. Shoppers are looking for their next new vehicle less according to Compete’s monthly “in-market shopper” metrics (down 15% from April last year, not shown), but evidently, are researching parts more. Compete analyzed the number of prospects researching for automotive parts and found that year-over-year, 36% more consumers are visiting parts websites, suggesting they may be looking to replace the parts before they replace the car.

What does this translate to for vehicle manufacturers? $$Opportunity$$. But where do manufacturers stand today against independent parts retailers – their direct competition for parts sales? Unfortunately, not very well if you measure it by the % of prospects that look for parts on manufacturers’ parts brand websites versus leading independent parts supplier websites.

Compete chose to look at Dodge, Ford and Chevy in this study. Autozone.com appears to be stealing opportunity from all three manufactures. Dodge prospects are more than twice as likely to look for parts at Autozone.com as opposed to Mopar.com. For Ford, it’s worse – consumers are more than three times more likely to look for parts on Autozone.com; and for Chevrolet – it’s simply dismal. Chevrolet prospects simply are not using ACDelco.com as a resource to find parts.

However, OEMs do not appear to be using key tools to drive traffic to their parts brand websites. Table 2 identifies the top 10 domains referred by key part search terms that logically, should drive traffic to Mopar.com, Genpt.com or ACdelco.com.

Compete’s Keyword Destination Search Analytics identified that all three searches on branded parts resulted in referrals to independent parts websites. Nowhere in the top-10 are each manufacturer’s branded parts websites.

It is evident that OEMs are losing parts sales opportunity to key independents – opportunity that may help relieve some of the pain of lost profits from declining new vehicle sales. The challenge: how to capture or recover the lost opportunity from the independents. OEMs have work to do, but it can be done.

How green are you? My personal answer to that question is, not very. I took the “Green IQ” test on greeniq.com and scored 23 out of 100. I guess simply changing to energy efficient light bulbs and appliances are considered baby steps. I really need to start leaving my V8 in the garage and start walking or pedaling to the grocery story with my eco-friendly reusable grocery bags in tow…or….perhaps I could consider one of the many new hybrids several manufacturers have made available to ease my “not-so-green” mind.

Import manufacturers made it possible for consumers to purchase their green auto as early as 2000 – it has taken a bit longer for the domestics to catch up, but they are here and they include Large Pickups and Full-Size SUV’s. The question is, are they succeeding at drawing environmentally conscious consumers to their websites? We took a look at the 7.6 million visitors in the month of January that we categorize as “Environmentally Conscious” to see which brand websites they were most likely to visit and here is what we found.

On average (among brands shown below), each of the brand sites only had 97,000 consumers among the 7.6 million actually visit in January. If you are looking for a rich concentration of these environmentally conscious consumers among those brands, Saturn wins. You are 2.5 times more likely to see a green consumer on Saturn.com as you are the internet in general. However, if you measure success based on the “number” of unique green consumers that visit a brand website – Honda takes the prize. In January, among the 7.6 million consumers, 238,000 of them also visited Honda.com. Falling short among the competition was Chrysler, Nissan and Dodge – coincidentally newcomers to the hybrid arena.

So what does the reverse look like? Which environmentally conscious websites are automotive prospects most likely to visit?

One site stands out among all brand browsers: fueleconomy.gov, where consumers can coincidentally get the entire list of available hybrid vehicles by manufacturer and determine if there is a tax credit available should you make the investment.

Browsers from the majority of brands visit hybridcars.com – Toyota leads the pack for this particular website. GMC browsers are more likely to be found visiting treehugger.com; Chrysler browsers, though few in number that actually visit an environmentally conscious website, will more likely be found on motherearthnews.com.

Overall, automotive browsers do not generally visit Environmentally Conscious websites – out of the 106 tracked by Compete, browsers of the brands shown above visit an average of only 7 sites. I, with my poor Green IQ score of 23, have visited none of these sites… until now. As car manufacturers offer more choices among vehicles that have a hybrid option beyond that of compact or mid-size cars, perhaps more consumers will jump on the green bandwagon. Time will certainly tell.

Are consumers ready for the next 100 years? Perhaps, but it seems that Chrysler is. In very short order, Chrysler managed to become privately owned, recaptured its Pentastar image under the new “Chrysler LLC”, launched an all-new Lifetime Powertrain Warranty and surprised the industry with the announcement of its new “non-automotive” leadership. Initial consumer reaction was captured by Compete in its Velocity metric that measures change in daily attention. Velocity on Chrysler.com increased over 100% around the announcement of the new Powertrain Warranty and kept climbing through the period of time when the new Chrysler and its new leadership, CEO Robert Nardelli, were introduced.

If attention is the measure of success, we can call this one a success.

So…..where did this attention come from? Has Chrysler managed to capture interest from consumers that visit rival websites? One way to answer this is to look at the “overlap” of visitors who went to a rival site and also visited Chrysler, Dodge or Jeep.com.

Compete specifically looked at key rivals of interest, Toyota and Honda, and found positive results for the new Chrysler. An average of 16% more visitors to Toyota.com also went to Chrysler, Dodge or Jeep.com from June to July; the increase from Honda visitors was even better – 20% month-over-month.

The next logical question is will it inspire these consumers to actually consider purchasing a vehicle from the “new Chrysler”? I guess the next “100 years” will tell.