Since Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley gave the green light to mo­tor ve­hi­cle sales com­pa­nies to op­er­ate from Mon­day, car deal­ers say they have been prepar­ing for some time now for the mo­ment and are ex­treme­ly hap­py to be able to serve their cus­tomers once again.

Speak­ing to the Sun­day Guardian, Massy Mo­tors Se­nior Vice Pres­i­dent Jean-Pierre Du Coudray said "We've been pre­pared a long time. What we learned from the lock­down in 2020 was that there were no guar­an­tees that it wouldn't hap­pen again, so we start­ed to pre­pare from then.

"We in­vest­ed a lot of re­sources in­to so­cial me­dia and a vir­tu­al plat­form in the event there was an­oth­er lock­down and our show­rooms need­ed to be closed; we could still con­tin­ue to sell cars on­line as was done every­where else in the world.

"We've put that in­fra­struc­ture in place, aligned our­selves with fi­nance hous­es and in­sur­ance providers who had the ca­pac­i­ty to put sim­i­lar in­fra­struc­ture in place."

He said the whole process could have been done on­line and he hoped that the Li­cens­ing Of­fice would al­so have been able to im­ple­ment their on­line reg­is­tra­tion plat­form by now.

Du Coudray ob­served that peo­ple be­came more con­scious of the en­vi­ron­ment dur­ing the pan­dem­ic and as peo­ple were en­cour­aged to go "green", the im­port tax­es on hy­brid and elec­tric ve­hi­cles in T&T should be re­viewed.

T&T Au­to­mo­tive Deal­ers' As­so­ci­a­tion (TTA­DA) pres­i­dent Visham Bab­wah said "We're ex­treme­ly hap­py that we're able to open. It was get­ting very dif­fi­cult for us and the small­er deal­ers in par­tic­u­lar and their em­ploy­ees.

"We had to close down for three months, we were able to con­tin­ue to pay salaries but it was be­com­ing stren­u­ous on us now."

With the open­ing up, he said, they are ad­vis­ing every­body that they are op­er­at­ing by ap­point­ment for view­ing ve­hi­cles.

He ex­plained that it would not be an open shop, al­though there would not be large gath­er­ings,. All COVID-19 pro­to­cols such as so­cial dis­tanc­ing, wear­ing of masks, and wash­ing hands will be ad­hered to by deal­ers and their cus­tomers to pre­vent an­oth­er lock­down, he added.