Lancashire DAF and Lothian DAF are new truck sales heavy-hitters

There are just two DAF dealers in the portfolio of the Marshall Family, owners of Mercedes-Benz dealer Mertrux, but Lancashire DAF near Preston and Lothian DAF near Edinburgh could possibly be the two best performing truck dealers in the country. You could argue the toss over how best to come to that conclusion, but to loosely take on the terminology of the boxing ring, pound for pound these dealers punch hard, and are real heavy-hitters, with a staggering 2,734 sales between them last year.

Located just a few miles from DAF’s Leyland factory, Lancashire DAF does the bulk of the sales, with around 2,000 units coming through the gates, but its Edinburgh counterpart also pulls in close to 800 sales per year. Combined, the two locations are the best performers among all of DAF’s 31 main dealers, but it doesn’t just stop at truck sales.

There’s a service and parts location in Bathgate that has six bays and Lancashire DAF also manages to shift more than £1m in parts per month, which means its workshops are also exceptionally busy too. That’s part of the reason why the 10-acre site, nestled next to the junction for the M6 and M65, is also the only DAF dealer to have a dedicated drivethrough PDI centre on-site with four bays, manned by 11 technicians working two shifts, to handle the enormous number of checks and pre-delivery work needed to get the trucks out to its customers.

The main workshop has a further nine drivethrough bays, and having been an early adopter, there’s also an ATF lane that is operational five days per week and saving a lengthy 1.5-hour round-trip towards Blackpool and the previous testing centre at Kirkham.

“I think we’ve got the facility to cope in every eventuality,” explains Paul Entwistle, Lancashire DAF MD. “If the market is busy, we’ve got the footprint to cope and we’ve got good people in all areas,” he explains.

Entwistle has been at Lancashire DAF since 1985, so is well placed to comment on the state of the transport market and the growing success of Lancashire DAF. 

“The good thing about this business is that we trade in different sectors. Although we’re split roughly 70% national fleet business and 30% retail, we sell to everybody. We trade in most of the industry sectors in the UK, which keeps us busy all year round,” Entwistle says.

“The ethos here is that we look after our employees. I refer to this business as a corner shop – we don’t make anything, we buy and sell it, but we’re very passionate about the people we employ and the customers we serve. Without customers we’ve not got a business, and every area of the business is focused on the customers. We’ve got an excellent brand and products. DAF has really done well, I think it’s the best range we’ve ever had,” he adds.

Describing the XB range as the heartbeat of DAF product line-up, Entwistle explains how the company has traditionally sold hundreds of LF (and now XB) models per year, but that there’s normally around a 50:50 split between tractor units and rigids. The last year, however, has seen it sell far more tractor units. Entwistle puts this down largely to the growing popularity of the new range of XF, XG and XG+ vehicles, while also citing the trend for customers to specify XF over CF cabs for the benefit of better residual values. As a result, the most popular model coming out of Lancashire is an XF 480 FTG 6x2 with a midlift axle and twin steer, while in Scotland the Lothian dealer tends to sell more XG+ 530 FTS with a tag axle.

All these sales led to more than 18,000 hours of PDIs in Lancashire, which is comfortably surpassed by the 55,000 hours carried out in the workshop on repairs, warranty work, servicing and other requirements.

Looking at the judges’ score cards, there’s no doubting the performance level of these two dealers is elite level, and were there a commercial vehicle dealer Hall of Fame, they’d surely be among the first to be inaugurated.