Auto dealership construction: showroom, service drive and opening day

The manufacturer's rep walks a showroom with a binder, and the binder wins. The tile is the specified tile, the lighting hits the specified color temperature, the vehicle display pads are exactly where the program says they go, or the store does not open under that badge. Two hundred feet away, a technician needs a lift rated for a three-quarter-ton truck, compressed air at every bay and a floor drain that will pass an environmental inspection. A dealership is those two buildings joined at a service write-up counter, and the opening date depends on both being done, and being done to different rules.

The showroom is built to somebody else's standard

Brand image programs cover the exterior architecture, the signage, the interior finish palette, the lighting and the way cars sit on the floor. Most of it is not negotiable, and a variance takes longer than building it right. We put the image program on the table in pre-construction, next to the construction drawings, and reconcile the two before anything is ordered. The millwork, tile, glazing and paint on the sales floor are done by our own crews, which matters when a finish has to match a sample the rep approved rather than something close to it. The owner who prices the showroom walks the brand inspection with you.

The service side is a light-industrial job

The service department wants the structure and mechanical design of a small industrial building: lift footings sized to the actual lift models, electrical at each bay, exhaust extraction for engines running indoors, compressed air distribution and trench or point drainage designed for automotive fluids. Every one of those items depends on the specific equipment the dealer will buy, so the equipment list has to be settled before the slab is poured, not after. The workflow matters too. Vehicles move from write-up to a bay, technicians move between bays and the parts counter, and a floor plan that ignores that circulation produces a shop that jams up at eight in the morning for the life of the building.

The site is the inventory

A dealer's lot holds three kinds of parking that compete for the same asphalt: display inventory, customer parking and service customer parking, plus the path a transport truck takes to unload. Getting the circulation right is as much a site design problem as an architecture problem, and it is often solved on a parcel sized tightly against the vehicle count the franchise requires. Our excavation and concrete crews handle the site work in-house, so the paving and drainage schedule is ours to hold rather than a subcontractor's to promise.

Electrical capacity, fluids and the next ten years

Service departments store oil, coolant and other chemicals, which brings containment, storage and disposal requirements into the design of the shop rather than into an operational memo after opening. Electric vehicle sales and service are adding DC fast chargers, battery service bays and a much larger electrical service than a dealership program needed a few years ago. The right move is to size the electrical service and the conduit for where demand is going, because bringing more power to a finished building later means opening the site back up.

One opening date for two buildings

The showroom passes brand inspection. The shop passes the fire marshal and the environmental review. The FF&E, the display furniture, the parts shelving and the customer lounge get received, staged and installed by our own crews. And a principal of the company is on the site through all of it, walking the punch list with you and with the manufacturer's rep, because the date on the grand opening banner is the one we are building toward.

If you are planning a new store or an image-program renovation, send over the drawings and the brand standards package. We will tell you what it takes to open both halves on the same day.