Hurricane Milton is bearing down on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Folks all over the state are preparing to get absolutely slammed by the Category 4 storm, and that includes car dealerships. There’s a lot of prep work that needs to be done before a major storm hits them. Now, we’re getting a closer look at just what goes into preventing as much damage as possible to dealership inventories.
Courtesy Toyota of Brandon – located in Tampa – took us behind the scenes of what that whole process looks like in a TikTok video posted to their page. The three-minute-30-second video first shows dealership employees clearing out as much furniture as possible on the showroom floor to make room for a whole lot of cars. A line of Toyotas drive into the showroom and are parked so tightly you can barely walk around them. It makes sense. You want to put as much inside as possible. GR Corollas, Supras, Land Cruisers, 4Runners, RAV4s and Camrys. They’re all in there now. It’s certainly stressful, but from the looks of it, the dealership employees are having a good time.
Pretty quickly, the small-ish showroom floor fills up, so employees begin moving larger cars – like Tundras, Sequoias and Tacomas – and used vehicles to their massive workshop. They even stack cars on top of each other using lifts. It’s a really wild sight to behold – that many brand-new cars hunkered down in a building.
Still, it’s not enough. Courtesy Toyota apparently has 98 new vehicles in stock and a further 18 used cars on their lot. That’s a lot of cars, people. Because of that, not every car makes it inside. In a separate video, we get a look at the outside of the dealerships, showing dozens of (mostly) trucks still sitting outside in the parking lot. Some are being used to block the entrances to the lot. The rest are “moved closer to the building and away from the trees” according to the video. That video ends with an ominous “Now we wait” as the person taking the video drives off.
It’s not a good situation at all, but it’s interesting to see how people deal with stressful situations like this and get prepared for the worst.