Tuttle Click Ford, a Chatsworth offshoot of an expansive Orange County automotive group, has closed just 14 months after opening. The dealership at 9210 Topanga Canyon Blvd. ceased business last month because of poor sales, said Chris Cotter, president of Irvine-based Tuttle Click Automotive Group, which owns 17 dealerships in the Southwest. Cotter said the dealership, which opened in October 2005 and sold new and pre-owned vehicles, struggled from an overall softening of the auto industry and tough competition from other area dealers. Chatsworth alone has at least two dozen licensed car dealers, according to the state Department of Motor Vehicles, with the Valley number totaling thousands. “As we’re seeing in most of the automobile business, sometimes there’s too many franchises in a given market,” Cotter said. “Particularly in the Ford world.” Among the most competitive for Tuttle Click was Vista Ford in Woodland Hills and Galpin Ford in North Hills, Cotter said, which sold a combined 14,850 used and new cars in 2005. “They’re wonderful dealers and they’ve been there a long time,” he said. But they also made it difficult to do business. Over time, Chatsworth became the lowest performing of Tuttle Click’s 17 DaimlerChrysler, Dodge, Ford, Jeep, Lincoln and Mercury in Arizona and Southern California. Company officials decided to pull the plug this fall. “Business conditions didn’t warrant an additional Ford store in that market,” Cotter said. Changing market The end of the Chatsworth Tuttle Click was one of several shifts in the Valley-area automotive scene in 2006. In August, the family-owned Encino dealer Auto Stiegler Mercedes-Benz was sold to a partnership headed by an owner of Calabasas Motorcars. Lancaster and Santa Clarita, meanwhile, have also mounted efforts to create auto centers in those North L.A. County areas. The closure is also a barometer of the current state of the American auto industry, which has been hampered by lackluster sales, a slowing market and a summer of high gas prices. Indications are this year won’t be much better: a study released last month by CSM Worldwide predicted U.S. auto sales would dip to a nine-year low for the year. With such a wobbly market, the Big 3 have all announced plans to severely scale back production for the first quarter and are poised to further cut. But Charlie Gill, executive director of the Greater Los Angeles New Car Dealers Association, said the diminished sales are not severe enough to be felt by dealers quite yet. One indication: Of the group’s nearly 300 members across L.A. County, just five were sold or closed in 2006 and none was in the Valley. “Dealers are hanging in the there,” Gill said. “Sales have steady.” He said there are plenty of consumers in the car-buying market, although not as many in previous years. How long that will last is largely unclear. “We still have a strong buying public,” Gill said. “It’s pretty stable.” For now, Tuttle Click still owns the Topanga Canyon property, although the glass-lined showroom has been emptied and its asphalt lot cleared of inventory. Cotter said state law and agreements with Ford Motor Co. prohibits Tuttle Click from switching the dealership to another brand. For now, officials have not decided what will happen to the property now that the dealership has been shuttered. “We’ll either use it ourselves or sell it,” Cotter said, although no timetable has been set. “We don’t know.”
