CARMEL, Ind. and MISSISSAUGA, Ontario -

In what is designed to help wholesale buyers and sellers in both the U.S. and Canada, ADESA revealed this morning that visitors to its website can check out the wholesale vehicles on both OPENLANE.com and ADESA.com without ever leaving the site.

In other words, this offers ADESA customers a seamless way to tap into OPENLANE’s inventory.

“Facilitating easier access to an even larger pool of inventory is just the beginning,” stated ADESA president and chief executive officer Tom Caruso. “ADESA and OPENLANE will continue to work together to build services that benefit our customers and provide end-to-end remarketing solutions for our industry.”

ADESA acquired OPENLANE in August and now offers a single sign-on function on ADESA.com, which is the feature that allows the website visitor to see the inventories of both companies.

Officials stressed though that customers are required to have a current ADESA.com account and a current OPENLANE.com account.

“Our businesses really complement each other,” said OPENLANE president and CEO Peter Kelly. “Partnering our online offerings with physical auction locations positions us to deliver a more robust marketplace for our customers, not to mention the added convenience and enhanced services they’ll enjoy from a single sign-on for both websites.”

For more information or to create an OPENLANE.com account, OPENLANE can be reached at (866)-969-0321 or by email at  dealer_info@openlane.com

Canadian Wholesale Prices Climb

In other news from the company, the ADESA Canada Used Vehicle Price Index showed a spike in the final month of 2011 as wholesale values climbed across the board.

More specifically, ADESA’s data — powered by ALG Canada — indicates that the index showed a month-over-month gain of about 0.36 percentage points when seasonal adjustments are taken into account.

There was an average spike in wholesale values of roughly 5.5 percent from November.

Breaking it down by segment, all vehicle categories in ADESA’s data showed increases. The heftiest spike was in the minivan segment, which climbed 8 percent, followed by the midsize SUV and midsize segments, both of which were up 6 percent.

Compact SUV values climbed 5 percent and full-size pickups gained 4 percent. Meanwhile, prices for mid-compacts increased 3 percent.

Sharing some overall market analysis, officials noted: “In the final month of 2011, the Canadian economy was not in the holiday spirit as consumer confidence plummeted 6.5 points down to 69.9 —now at its lowest level in more than two–and-a-half years — the unemployment rate increased another 0.1 percentage point to 7.5 percent and national gasoline prices increased by approximately $0.02 per liter.”

They added: “In parallel, the Canadian dollar tumbled as low as $0.964 against the U.S. greenback during the month of December.”

These economic struggles, however, didn’t appear to hold back new-vehicles sales, which showed a 2.6-percent year-over-year hike. Specifically, there were 114,557 sales during the month, officials noted.

As for full-year new sales, there was 1.8-percent year-over-year growth with 1.585 million sales.

Officials did not that this was “slightly less than the 1.59 -1.6 million units forecasted at the beginning of the year.”