HELP - SEO for car dealers outside local areas - Hard or impossible?

Hi there everyone

Im cool with seo where physical location is not involved but I do have some questions about doing seo where all the main keywords are location based.

The issue is, can a car dealer rank well (above the fold) for a keywords where his business is not in that location?

Majority of my clients are ranking for the local areas but now they want to target other areas.

I give an example.

Client ranks for "used car blackburn" in Google places because his dealership is in Blackburn. All good because Google is only returning relevant results as the physical business is in Blackburn.

The client now wants to target other areas to expand the business e.g
"used cars manchester" a location about 50KM away.

We optimized a page on the site with the title tag "used cars manchester"

If I google used cars manchester, ONLY manchester dealers will appear in the Google places but there are 3 organic right at the top. Do you think those 3 top organics are strong?

Please type in used cars manchester into Google UK to see what I mean.
(3 organics)

What are the chances of rankings a page if you're business is not physically located in that area at least above the fold?

I think I'm fighting an impossible battle and the sales guys need to stop overselling.

Any advice would be great and sorry for the long post

Thanks