Welcome to Saturday, Friend!
If you don’t think people shop with their feelings, you’ve never tried to talk a 6-year-old out of picking lunch based entirely on which cartoon characters are on the package.
We’ve come a long way from Paw Patrol sugar water and Care Bear crackers, but it’s absurd to think we’ve outgrown those whims. Our emotional filter just has a lot more history, pattern recognition, and responsibility running through it now. We still want doing business to feel good, and we’ll go out of our way to avoid it when it feels bad.
Every one of your customers shops that way too. This week proved it, from a coffee shop that remembered a kid’s tea order to a trade value that changed somewhere between the service drive and the showroom.
Keep Pushing Back,
—Paul, Kyle, Chris & Kristi
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ICYMI
On Monday, a little department rivalry fed a lot of families.
Greenwood Chevrolet’s sales, service, and body shop teams are competing to collect the most for the Extra Mile Food Drive, after helping serve more than 130,000 meals last year. We also covered New York City’s lawsuit against CarGurus, which alleges its deal ratings and AI chatbot hid dealer fees. And TrueCar CEO Scott Painter predicted that AI agents will end price arbitrage on new cars.
Your price shows up in places you don’t control, so check every one of them.
On Tuesday, Ford called CPO a bridge, and we asked to see the blueprints.
Ford’s Blue Advantage passed Toyota as the top certified pre-owned brand, with Q3 sales up 44%, and it’s pitching certified as a path to new-car sales. If your store tracks how many CPO buyers come back for new, hit reply. We also saw the typical new-car payment climb to $776, and Carvana put $200,000 into youth soccer scholarships.
A good theory gets a lot better once someone measures it.
On Wednesday, a local drive-thru out-hustled Starbucks.
We told you about a little coffee shop that remembers a kid’s passion fruit tea order. That same day, Starbucks’ COO said technology should unlock the experience. GM’s core profit rose 22% to $4.1 billion on pickups, but GM warned of a lean fourth quarter for trucks and possibly bigger price increases next year.
People remember how you made them feel, and they come back for it.
On Thursday, a dealer group’s signs turned up “everywhere.”
Johnson Automotive was recognized as the nation’s largest highway cleanup sponsor, and it was refreshingly honest that the investment gives back and builds its brand at the same time. NADA named Sandy Fitzgerald Angello its next chair, just the second woman to hold the role. A survey also found that 71% of borrowers can’t recall whether they bought a service contract.
Customers can’t value what they can’t remember buying.
On Friday, we gave you homework: call your own store.
A guest reminded us that two teammates giving different answers to the same question is enough to sour an experience. Meanwhile, the RAV4 is down 29.2% this year as the CR-V and Tucson posted record quarters, and we unpacked how AI is squeezing the middle of the workforce.
Consistency might be the cheapest customer experience upgrade you’ll ever make.
The #1 Point of Friction in Car Buying (And How to Fix It) | Auto Collabs
Why does the same trade get two different numbers?
In 1998, Dan Gaughan mailed 100 paper résumés and landed a credit analyst job at Toyota Motor Credit. Nearly 30 years later, after time on the automaker, dealer, and vendor sides, the AutoHub GM has a clear read on where car deals get stuck: the trade.
He’s never heard a customer say their trade came in higher than expected, and it gets worse when one store gives two numbers for the same car. A husband gets a value in the service drive, then his wife hears a different one in the showroom two days later.
On this week’s Auto Collabs, Gaughan walks through how stores close those gaps: one appraisal process across service, web, and showroom, cross-training new hires in every department, and leaders who spot the wreck three miles ahead.
The write-up maps exactly where a customer’s trade value should match, and the full episode has the rest of Dan’s story.
“A Band-Aid on a Bullet Hole” - Why AI SEO Pitches Keep Failing Dealers
What should you check before signing the next AI SEO pitch?
Brooke Furniss sits in on dealer and vendor calls every week, and she keeps hearing the same promise: a new acronym, an AI visibility dashboard, and rankings that show up overnight. Her read on this week’s Dealer Playbook is blunt. If your SEO was weak before AI arrived, a new tool on top is a Band-Aid on a bullet hole.
She hands dealers three checks they can run this week:
Put any page your agency says it optimized into the schema.org validator. The dealers she works with carry 50-plus schema markups on the homepage and another 30 to 40 on SRPs.
Pull your Google Search Console click-through rate. Brooke’s automotive benchmark is 3.5%, and a number around 1.2% raises real questions about your agency.
Ask whether that AI visibility tool is white-labeled, and whether it can tell a shopper in Chicago from one in Naperville.
The episode covers why “50 AI pages a day” is a shortcut Google will eventually catch.
Who’s ready to bid on the Hoff’s own K.I.T.T.?
If you grew up yelling at your bike to turbo boost, this one’s for you. Broad Arrow Auctions is selling a 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am Knight Rider Tour Car, with an estimate of CHF 250,000 to CHF 500,000.
This one has real Michael Knight credentials. It was first owned by David Hasselhoff’s Profile Promotions and served as his actual tour car, built as an exact replica of the TV series car. Plenty of fans have built their own K.I.T.T. over the years, but this one matches the star car’s specification and comes with a deep archive of documents and photos tracing its time with the Hoff.
The gavel drops Saturday, November 7, at the Dolder Grand Hotel in Zürich. Scanner light not guaranteed to talk back.
1901: Annie Edson Taylor becomes the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. She was also born on October 24, 1838, so she celebrated her 63rd birthday by plunging over the falls.
1931: The George Washington Bridge opens to public traffic over the Hudson River, giving drivers a direct crossing between New Jersey and Manhattan.
1946: A camera aboard the V-2 No. 13 rocket takes the first photograph of Earth from outer space. Humanity’s first selfie with the planet came from a camera bolted to a rocket in the New Mexico desert.
