Toronto's downtown car shoppers are losing their Volkswagen store. Volkswagen Downtown Toronto, the dealership on Dundas Street West that has served the city core for about a decade, will close its doors on October 31, blogTO reported Tuesday.
The closure marks the end of a retail experiment that put a full dealership in the middle of the city at a time when most auto retail had long since migrated to suburban auto malls and highway corridors. Downtown locations face a punishing combination: expensive land, tight lots with little room for inventory, and customers who increasingly research and even buy vehicles online.
For the store's staff and customers, the practical questions are immediate — where service appointments, warranty work and existing orders will be handled after the end of the month. Volkswagen's remaining Greater Toronto Area dealers are the obvious destinations, all of them outside the downtown core.
The Dundas West site's next chapter is unwritten, but the pattern in Toronto is familiar: low-rise auto retail on valuable downtown land rarely stays auto retail for long. What replaces the showroom will say as much about the city's land economics as the closure itself does about selling cars downtown.
