No one at the smooth-running and forward-looking Fletcher Jones Toyota dealership in Las Vegas thinks the days of F&I are numbered.

Sharply diverging from a recent trend to rely again on showroom staff to sell extended service contracts and basic financing packages, the Fletcher Jones store is supporting a top-performing F&I department working closely with the sales staffs at its own location and at the new Fletcher's Used Car & Truck outlet nearby.

As the top seller of Toyota extended warranty agreements in 1995 and 1994, manager Jeff Petersen's F&I department upholds a key Fletcher Jones premise:

"We assign our best salesmen to F&I," says Fletcher Jones Toyota general manager Jim Shelton, "because the payback will be consistently top-notch. Ted Jones (owner of the 11 dealerships in the 50-year-old Fletcher Jones group in California and Nevada) prefers strong-selling F&I staffs, unlike many dealers who put their worst salespersons there."

With new-car and truck volume flat for Toyota last year, Petersen and F&I assistant manager Peter Moneo actually raised their extended warranty sales from 2,015 in 1994 to 2,167 in 1995 while holding lease penetration at a 50-55 percent level.

"There's no big secret as to how we keep the penetration numbers on top in extended warranty sales," says Petersen. "It's a team thing, since we find that resistance to an extended contract first can be overcome at the sales desk by mentioning it as an option like a CD player or sunroof.

"We then list for the customer the advantages of an 'extended' when we review the financing or leasing. We make the experience non-confrontational, not like the high-pressure bunker mentality that exists in so many dealerships between sales and F&I.

"And we're applying the same approach to the new Fletcher's used-car outlet, which offers quality pre-owned units from all seven of the Jones dealerships in Vegas."

Shelton, a hands-on general manager who personally gives each of his 150 employees their paychecks every other week for non-salespersons and weekly for the sales staff, believes that downgrading F&I and returning the function to salespersons "threatens to harm CSI ratings and risks violations of disclosure provisions of finance laws."

Petersen advanced to F&I manager at Fletcher Jones Toyota, which retailed 2,121 new cars and trucks and 1,160 used in 1994 to rank No. 253 on the Auto Age 500, after joining the dealership in 1988 and becoming its top salesman a year later. He had been general manager of the northern California Val Strough group of 12 dealerships before Strough retired and sold the group to megadealer Rick Hendrick.

Shelton expects the used-car store, housed with a state-of-the-art collision center in a renovated former Volkswagen dealership, to generate at least 75 vehicle sales a month and add substantially to F&I business at Fletcher Jones because of surging demand for late-model used units.

Keeping ahead of the curve with a used-unit superstore that also boosts F&I sales and penetration has become a priority for many farsighted multi-franchise dealers with the advent of CarMax-type outlets built by independents.

Meshing with the strategy of "CarMaxing" by dealers themselves is development of sub-prime credit resources to help reach out to more late-model used-vehicle customers. Both franchisers and dealers are entering this sideline to bolster F&I volumes.

Among major financing institutions which have established their own sub-prime subsidiaries are Ford Credit and J. D. Byrider Systems, a used-car franchiser whose new division is called CarNow Acceptance.

Ford Credit has assigned veteran senior executive Jerry Heimlicher to head the unnamed affiliate, which will specialize in high-risk buyers, but proceed on a gradual expansion basis this year, pending a national rollout by the end of 1997.