TOGETHER WITH:
Howdy, Fam!
On Saturday episodes of the show, we love celebrating dealers who do good in their communities, especially the ones who let their team or their town help decide where that good gets done. Matthews Auto Group just gave us one of the clearest versions of that I’ve ever seen.
At its eighth annual Walk-a-Thon earlier this month, Matthews let every walker pick which children’s charity their miles would fund, then asked them to put boots on the ground to earn it. A record 3,027 people showed up. At $10 a mile, plus matched cash gifts, they raised $126,466 for 14 children’s charities, bringing the eight-year total to $720,209.
Here’s a Monday challenge: ask your team where they’d want your store’s next donation to go. You might be surprised how many of them want to help carry it there.
In today’s email...
Payments are headed for an October record of $823, and $952 if the trade is underwater.
A $28,995 Bolt crossed the Deep South’s charging desert
Audi picks Georgia, and young adults are short on mentors
Keep Pushing Back,
—Chris with Paul, Kyle & Kristi
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New-Car Payments Are Headed for an October Record of $823
October’s new-car shopper is walking in with a bigger monthly number than any October shopper before them. JD Power and GlobalData project the average finance payment will rise 2.6% to $823, the highest on record for an October, while the average transaction price slips 0.1% to $46,329.
Rates explain the gap: average new-vehicle loan rates are projected to climb 19 basis points to 6.81%.
What happens when the trade is underwater?
The payment climbs to $952. Edmunds found that buyers who roll negative equity into a new loan finance an average of $57,235, carry an average deficit of $7,107 and pay an average APR of 8.1%. That’s $165 a month more than the average new-car buyer, and 91.2% of them finance for 72 months or longer. JD Power expects 29.6% of October trade-ins to be underwater.
Manufacturers are giving dealers some room to work:
Incentives: up 13.1% to $3,304 per vehicle, the biggest jump in four months
Hybrid share of retail: up 4.0 points to 18.6%
EV incentives: down 42.0% to $7,531, from an elevated base last October
Pull last week’s underwater deals and see which ones had an incentive or hybrid option that could have brought the payment down.
Cut Your Turn in Half
Drive Point Auto Group cut average used-car turn from 42 days to 21 after changing how it handles pricing.
In our latest webinar with vAuto, Kyle Pisani and Josh Gonsenhauser get specific about what changed.
Cars enter the pricing process on day one. Each store sets its own strategy. Automation reacts to market and shopper activity, while managers can step in whenever a unit needs a different approach.
The result is a pricing process that moves every day and gives managers roughly 38 to 45 minutes back to spend elsewhere.
A $28,995 Bolt Crossed the Deep South’s Charging Desert
Jeff Cheetham rolled into a Target parking lot in Bossier City, Louisiana, with 6 miles of range left. He had left an Atlanta rental counter in a Hyundai Ioniq 5 without realizing it was electric, then spent about 600 miles finding chargers his car couldn’t use. The Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims met him there while driving a 2027 Chevy Bolt from Nashville to New Orleans, a trip we broke down on Friday’s show.
What did the Bolt prove in the states with the fewest chargers?
Mississippi and Louisiana have the fewest EV chargers per person, and Mims still found the trip only a little less convenient than it would have been in a gas car. At 75 mph, range fell from the 262-mile EPA rating to about 200. The Bolt’s built-in Google Maps planned every stop and warmed the battery on the way in, which cut charging time by about a third.
Cheetham made it to Dallas once someone showed him a route-planning app. Your salespeople can be that someone.
With gas averaging $4.27 a gallon, up 39% from a year ago, and payments at $823, a $28,995 EV belongs in every $20,000-to-$30,000 conversation. Make sure everyone on your floor can explain how charging works on a road trip.
Only a third of young adults have a leader who excites them about the future
Gallup found that 33% of adults 18 to 29 say a leader in their life makes them enthusiastic about the future, down 14 points since 2019.
Their thriving rate has fallen from 64% in 2010 to 44%, while adults 65 and older climbed from 43% to 53%. We broke down how dealerships, with their long tradition of mentorship, can help close that gap.
Audi picks Georgia for its first U.S. plant
Audi plans to invest about $4 billion in a Georgia plant that will build the Q7, Q8 and Q9, with capacity for up to 200,000 vehicles a year and 4,500 jobs.
Construction starts in 2027, and output begins in the early 2030s. Audi imports every vehicle it sells in the U.S., and tariffs cost it $1.4 billion last year. VW’s supervisory board still has to sign off.
🚘 Car Stuff
Diesel averaged $6.31 a gallon Thursday, up 74% from a year ago, according to AAA, and farmers are paying it in the middle of harvest.
Volvo Cars shares plunged 24% Friday after a bigger-than-expected Q3 loss and 2,500 more job cuts. Only about 5,000 of the 40,000 EX60s planned for this year have been built.
1825: The Erie Canal opens, linking the Great Lakes to New York City and the Atlantic.
1958: Pan Am flies the first U.S. transatlantic passenger jet service, a Boeing 707 from New York to Paris.
2012: Microsoft releases Windows 8.
