A recent video of a car salesman claiming that auto companies are shorting the market has gone viral. Here’s what it means and what you can expect from dealers.
In the realm of automobiles, it’s a well-known strategy that exclusivity drums up hype and converts into sales. So far, it has mostly been observed in the case of luxury labels such as Ferrari, where a few dozen units of a certain model often get enthusiasts lined up with top dollars. That’s not something you would associate with a mass market label such as Volkswagen, which began its journey as a maker of „the people’s car“, and follows that trajectory to date. But it seems the company’s apparent supply issues with the popular Tiguan model are raising suspicions of an artificial shortage to build up the public demand around it.
Just give the people what they want @volkswagen. We need more SEL’s asap lol. #carsales #autosales #vwdealership #vw #vwdealer
♬ original sound – Teddydautomotive
In a TikTok video, a Volkswagen dealership salesman expressed discontentment with the extremely tight availability of the 2025 Tiguan SEL R-Line, while highlighting its impressive feature set and attractive asking price. In the video, Teddy Delgross from the Sendell Volkswagen dealership in Greensburg mentions that „literally everyone“ wants the aforementioned Tiguan model, but the German automaker is only providing them one unit in a span of three months.
„If they send us 30 of these, they’d be sold within a week“, he says in the video, adding that he’s convinced carmakers were intentionally „shorting“ the market. Now, this is not quite the „shorting“ or short-selling situation for stock trading, but just a crude way of describing an artificial shortage created around a hot product to drive its demand.
