This year’s automotive factory shutdowns left dealerships with fewer offerings on their lots. That’s a good thing, many industry experts contend.

The benefits of leaner dealership lots have been an unexpected byproduct of the pandemic. The result has been a seller’s market, with automakers able to hold the line on discounts, driving prices to record highs.

And because of the inventory crunch, manufacturers have been giving priority to their most popular models and feature combinations, which has reduced complexity and cut supply-chain costs, they say.

Meanwhile, dealers are saving money by holding less inventory, and cars are selling faster, at higher average prices. The typical new vehicle spent about 56 days on a dealer lot in October, down 27% from the same month last year, according to Edmunds.com.

"I don’t think our dealers want to go back to historic inventory levels," Fiat Chrysler Chief Executive Mike Manley told investors last month. "What I think we see now is somewhat closer to the new normal of inventory levels."

With fewer prospective buyers visiting showrooms during the pandemic, dealers say they don’t need as many cars on the lot for test drives. There were nearly 1 million fewer cars at all U.S. dealerships at the end of October, or 25% fewer compared to a year earlier, according to research firm Motor Intelligence.

But David Hult, CEO of Asbury Automotive Group, a publicly traded dealership chain based in Georgia, said dealer inventories surely will grow when factories catch up to demand. 

"I can only assume that the supply will creep back up," Hult said. "Brand loyalty isn’t what it used to be, and when someone else has a product that you don’t, you could actually lose sales."

For decades, American dealerships have kept endless rows of vehicles outside their stores in enough colors and variations for buyers to find what they want, when they want it. Smaller inventories would result in more customers preordering their cars weeks in advance, a practice common in Europe and elsewhere. The change would have implications for dealer-owned real estate and how carmakers run their factories.