Auto Industry Deets, Happiest Workers, Google AI Snapshots

May 11, 2023
It’s Thursday and we have a full head of steam as we break down the latest NADA data report, talk about a big bump in worker happiness, and discuss Google's I/O announcements.
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As a part of their twice yearly report, NADA’s most recent report reveals an increase in new-car inventory, but a decline in sales per dealership. The report also indicates varying market trends, hinting at potential improvements in 2023, and showing overall stable headcount growth

  • New-vehicle inventory rose to 1.7 million in 2022, a 50% increase from 2021
  • Avg. number of new cars sold per dealership dropped by 8.5%, to 819 vehicles from 895 in the previous year
  • Average of 102 new-vehicle and 137 used-vehicle sales per salesperson
  • Chief Economist, Patrick Manzi, anticipates less market constraint in 2023, expecting inventory to grow slowly and reach nearly 2.2 million units by year-end. He highlighted that inventory recovery was slower than expected in 2022.
  • The average new-car retail sales price surged by 9.2% to $46,287 in 2022, largely due to inflation, total sales revenue per dealership slightly increased in 2022, with new vehicles accounting for 49.7% of total sales, used vehicles 38.3%, and service and parts sales 12%. The sales of new electric vehicles also surged by 61%
  • Total dealership employment was up to 1.07 million, from 1.06 million,in 2021. The average number of employees per store was 64 last year, up from 63 in 2021


Workers are on a happiness high, according to recent survey data from Conference Board, which reveals that satisfaction in the job market is at a 36 year high. The shift in work norms during the pandemic, particularly the rise of hybrid roles, and labor are credited for the happiness bump

  • The survey found that those who voluntarily switched jobs during the pandemic and individuals working in hybrid roles are among the happiest workers.
  • Men's job satisfaction was higher than women's in every component, particularly in areas such as leave policies, bonus plans, promotions, communication, and organizational culture.
  • Despite the high levels of job satisfaction, looming concerns of a potential recession and recent layoffs at notable companies have increased anxiety about job security


Google just wrapped up its annual I/O event, dropping some new devices, AI integrations with G Suite, and a big change to search. One of the standout announcements is the introduction of AI-powered "snapshots'' to Google Search

  • AI “snapshots” will appear at the top of search results for certain queries to provide more context and users can further refine the information in the snapshot with follow-up questions.
  • The feature is powered by Google's updated large language model (LLM) called PaLM 2 which brings improvements in reasoning, coding, and translation.
  • This new model is already operational in 25 Google services, including the Bard chatbot

Paul Daly: 0:29Oh man, if you're watching the live stream, you just got to see 30 seconds of a little bit of a preview of our new show more than cars is premiering in less than two weeks. But we have auto industry details, happiest workers to talk about and Google AI, snapshots. Ai, when they see me

Kyle Mountsier: 0:48

can't wait till we get to that story because I have something to tell everyone about that. They're gonna want it they're gonna want to know about Legion posts from a buddy that you're gonna want to go see. It's

Paul Daly: 0:59

Oh, man, I don't even know what you're talking about. So I'm gonna hear about for the first time too. Well, good morning, Thursday, full head of steam. My hat was backwards before the show started because I was like, I got in the zone at home this morning. And I start my day, I wake up around five I read I eat breakfast, I start working around like I don't know, probably close to six. And like, I look up and it's like, 830 like, I'm supposed to be in the office right now. And the house ran out of propane, too. So if you live in the country, you know what that's like? Oh, no, I use the stove going on. Why? Because so little chilly up here, nightstands. Why isn't we don't do that in the city. We don't do that know how to breathe in most of the suburbs? It's just even most of the suburbs don't do that. So there's Yeah, I don't have that natural. Oh, this is

Kyle Mountsier: 1:44

crazy. You want to hear something wild? This is only the second time I've been in this seat for the podcast in the last two weeks. What is even happening? Am I oh my

Paul Daly: 1:56

gosh, well, you're gonna have tomorrow. And then several days

Kyle Mountsier: 2:01

and on a jet plane. We're going to be in Vegas all week next week crashing with some amazing people. I cannot wait to share the content and the conversations that we're going to have.

Paul Daly: 2:13

Yes, we're gonna be at the Reuters automotive retail event. We're moderating a mainstage panel, moderate co moderating animated stage pedal then moderating side panels on our own, then we're gonna have our own workshop, which is what every dealer wishes, their OEM new, which, if you have opinions on that productive ones, please send them to us crew at a soda.com We would love to include those in our presentation. And we're doing a new podcast collaboration with Reuters called amplify, and we already have like 20 to 25 Really amazing high level guests like that show, Matt. And that's just by Tuesday. Yeah, what

Kyle Mountsier: 2:52

are you doing on Monday? I

Paul Daly: 2:54

know, one day, we'll look back and be like, How in the world did we do that? Thanks, Megan. How

Kyle Mountsier: 3:00

in the world do we do that? Whoa. Segway.

Paul Daly: 3:06

All right, as part of their twice yearly report nada. His most recent report reveals an increase in new car inventory, but a decline in sales per dealership. The report also indicates very market trends, hinting at potential improvements for 2023 and showing overall stable headcount growth. So it's a lot of information in this report a lot. So we're gonna do that. Patrick Monsey is an awesome economist, actually at Ashoka. I was thinking about this when I was reading the story this morning. We need to get Patrick and Jonathan smoke on at the same time, just line them up. They probably would really appreciate the opportunity to just be together. Right? Yeah, so

Kyle Mountsier: 3:47

we're gonna work on that about No, I'm gonna work on that numbers, lots of graphs, lots of all that type of stuff.

Paul Daly: 3:52

It'd be it'd be awesome. It'd be like watching a live stream of it's a beautiful mind, right? Like, all the numbers are gonna start floating through the sky. whiteboards, it'll be magical, it good. So So back to the report. Here's some points data give them so new vehicle inventory rose to 1.7 million in 2022, which is a 50% increase over 2021 massive jump, the average number of new cars sold per dealership, however, dropped by 8.5%. So down to 819. From 895 in the previous year. At here's here's cool average per salesperson, I like this because it's like right on the ground level. Average, sales per salesperson annually, was 102. New and 137 for used. Now,

Kyle Mountsier: 4:36

I got a question here though. Okay, because that's high nine. That's 19.9.

Paul Daly: 4:41

Seems high vehicles per person, but I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's. It can't Yes, there's no way that can be a cumulative total because we know the average is 10 to 12

Kyle Mountsier: 4:53

per average apparently has risen at Franchise dealerships. I was hearing stats around 16 for a while. I heard stat like, real stats

Paul Daly: 5:04

for but this is still closer to 20.

Kyle Mountsier: 5:06

So that's so closer to 20. So it must It must include some level of independence or maybe or maybe it includes like, I mean, gosh even your car Max salespeople, like that's not the average there so right

Paul Daly: 5:19

I mean think that stuff like that would drag the new average down. Yeah, I don't know we'll just say a little

Kyle Mountsier: 5:25

bit Hi to all of those teams out there looking at their teams going like we got people selling seven to nine cars or almost seven, nine car salesperson like the average is higher. There's opportunity out there. That's what's striking to me about those couple stats right there.

Paul Daly: 5:42

I mean, in our in our show more than cars. By the way, we mentioned it's premiering in two weeks, you should be at the live

Kyle Mountsier: 5:48

stream, by the way, definitely been in the live stream. So it's May 24. One Eastern. So

Paul Daly: 5:52

Amari, a, who was one of the people we featured in that he's at 27, after like eight months in the business. Yeah, putting there's opportunity. If you don't think there's opportunity, we'll give them a call. He'll give you a pep talk. So, Chief Economist Patrick monzi anticipates less market constraint in 23. Like a lot of people, he's expecting inventory to grow slowly and reach 2.2 million units by the end of the year. He did say that in 2022. We all were a little more optimistic than what actually happened though.

Kyle Mountsier: 6:23

The inventory is gonna come back we're gonna be good.

Paul Daly: 6:27

Lannister 21 Yeah, you remember it when we're like, oh, by by q1 by that eventually. They were like, We have no idea or no.

Kyle Mountsier: 6:36

It was 2021 when the chips shortage hits, and it's like May and everybody's don't like don't worry, I guess timber inventories back got you remember? Fall Festival? It's

Paul Daly: 6:45

coming back.

Kyle Mountsier: 6:46

Toyota is still like mad 2024 Yeah.

Paul Daly: 6:50

Thank you. Yeah, sorry. That was definitely the keenest to just tell you the slap in the face of the truth and just move on from there. Average new car retail sales per sales price went up 9.2% in 2022. So high almost $46,000 average. Inflation, obviously inventory shortage. And total dealership revenue. Here we go. 49% new car sales 38% used car sales and the rest was service and parts. And our favorite part is the people favorite parts the people right here we go. And we're excited to know that the dealership family grew we went from 1.0 6 million people employed by dealerships to 1.07 So for us that's the more the merrier. It's kind of the opposite narrative of what's going on in every other into literally the rest

Kyle Mountsier: 7:44

of the world. If you're paying attention and you're outside of the automotive industry and you're seeing all these layoffs like Automotive is wrong this way. Come on in come on in at a place because they're making money in the guy great job. Speaking of happy people. Segue

Paul Daly: 8:04

I knew this was gonna go really well. The Wall Street Journal article today I workers are on a happiness high. According to a recent survey from the Conference Board, which reveals satisfaction in the job market rose to a 36 year high shift their credits a shift in work norms during the pandemic, particularly workplace flexibility hybrid roles. You know, credited for the happiness bump, it found that those who voluntarily switched jobs during the pandemic, and those working in hybrid roles were amongst the happiness at the happiest men still benchmarking happier overall than women with their jobs, as it pertains to leave policies, bonus plans, promotions, communication, and organizational culture. But despite the high levels of job satisfaction, the concerns and anxiety are coming up about layoffs and uncertainty in the economy, which I think automotive has found your solution if you're feeling anxious, and you want to keep being happy. Need to come least over here. You know, the largest improvements are credited to work life balance, basically. And so I think we've seen a lot of that and automotive in the last year.

Kyle Mountsier: 9:12

A lot of people have you heard moving to four day workweeks for service or sales,

Paul Daly: 9:17

already worked weeks, even like 39 adults 39 Hour Work Week, and they're figuring it out. Everybody's not like that. There's no one size fits all.

Kyle Mountsier: 9:27

And 39 Hour Workweek selling 20 Plus cars or less. That'll pencil Kyle that'll pencil all day, every day we I talked to a few people at Furman Chevy in Tampa, Florida. Like they're 30 car salespeople working 35 hours a week. Gosh, you know, but they put in the work, they go for it. They they they work hard every hour there, they're there, and I'll be willing to bet they're great processes and great technology in place. Absolutely. apps can't do that without those two. Yep. But what what we know is, and this is this is a really interesting thing, that the rise of hybrid roles is really important like this opportunity to kind of be in both spaces recognizing that it's not just the remote only workers that are the most satisfied with their job, but that that mix of in person and the ability to work remotely, yeah. So, you know, tell them on an auto, right, a tough one and auto in retail, that's very tough. But I think like, figuring out where there may be our roles in the dealership that can exhibit some of that. Maybe it's figuring out how people work in amongst the dealership and where they can work and how and how they move about the space. We give them access to kind of that like freedom, the mobility within a day. So thinking about that as like, how do we figure that out? In the retail side of auto, obviously, on the industry partner side, it's a much more accessible place to be to figure out what hybrid where we get that in person interaction, and, and remote work kind of mix actually works out. So now?

Paul Daly: 11:06

Yeah, so yeah, I mean, it's funny, like one of the things that we here's a lot of people pulling back on remote work. Right. But I don't think the pullback is nearly as strong on hybrid work. No, not right, three days a week come in four days a week in automotive, I mean, I think we've seen a lot of benefit in automotive vendors taking advantage of that flexibility. And I would, I would argue that there's more availability of of better, just better resources from the vendor community into automotive, because now companies are able to strategize, I mean, a soda

Kyle Mountsier: 11:41

soda, or like a 75 of them work 75% remote work only company, you know, only a small portion of our team actually goes into an office every day. And we just have the opportunity to grab all of these incredible people from multiple different states across the country and not have to be locked down to a single place. So there's definitely opportunities on both sides, right? Being in person or being fully remote. You know, hey, just make happy people,

Paul Daly: 12:09

making you happy people. Google made a lot of people happy yesterday. A lot of people, not necessarily me. I mean, look, that's not a lot of people, I could care less about a pixel. But you know.

Kyle Mountsier: 12:25

Me too. Google wrapped up its annual i o event dropping summit new devices, AI integrations with G Suite, and a big change the search, one of the standout announcements in the introduction of the AI powered snapshots to Google search, essentially, what's gonna happen is you're gonna search, and then you'll have all of your organic search results below a little snapshot at the top of the search results, that will have a little bit more human language, it'll refine the information to give you the ability to go, Hey, you might want to follow up that question with XYZ, this is actually really just an advancement in some of the things that they've done with Featured Snippets, drawing it up into an AI language model that will allow you to kind of like take the next step. The other interesting thing is they're bringing in the the all these integrations into G Suite. So things like all of your like Docs and Sheets and anything like that will have the have emails in Yeah, and your emails will be right in there. So there's a lot of like, you know, highs and lows, people that love the idea hate the idea. Basically, all of the features are, are powered on Google's updated language, large language model called Palm two, which is really funny. We're just talking about Paul home yesterday, different Paul. So it'll bring out improvements in reasoning, coding, and translation, which if you're Google makes a lot of sense, because they are in so many languages, across so many countries, I can't imagine building a language model for that many nations languages, languages are unbelievable what they're what they're able to accomplish.

Paul Daly: 14:11

There's, I mean, the biggest impact is for sure going to be the search experience, once they roll it out broad scale, which I haven't checked today. I don't know if it is rolled out. But it's like, it's pretty much done and ready to go if it's not already live. I'm just thinking about, like, in the screenshot that they showed, it's like, somebody searched something and there was a paragraph and a pretty long paragraph, you know, like, it took up the freeway. It took up three quarters of the screen. And the only other thing you could see on the screen was the first sponsored result. Ah, on the whole fold of the page, the whole fold on a desktop

Kyle Mountsier: 14:47

on a desktop to on mobile. That's I know, all the way out. Yeah.

Paul Daly: 14:51

And so like, it'll be this is gonna just obviously change the ad model. Right and Google's always intention to get you to the information. I wonder if they're There's going to be like, cited sources at some point in the AI language model, like, hey, here are three of the three most relevant sites, we think, right and go 123 Right at the bottom of the paragraph, instead of you know, I don't know, but it's changing everything, even from organic, you try to build a site that ranks high. And if when you search something, Google's gonna be like, here's our, here's our opinion, or here's the language models opinion on what you're looking for. It just iterates the fact that relying on your website just to get to the top of the results, it's like, that's not the game anymore. It's important, but it's not the game, like all of the other marketing channels, all the other community building channels is going to be really why people get to your site. That's exactly it's all I could think about.

Kyle Mountsier: 15:40

Yep. So just like some anecdotal stuff in today, I can remember as China, Japan, the first arrest was made for an incorrect news article that was written entirely by GPT. Do you say the first arrest? Yeah, for one arrest because it was like a big news article that got shared everywhere. Now that's in a country that I get it but like,

Paul Daly: 16:06

right, but still don't I was the subject of the article.

Kyle Mountsier: 16:09

I don't know. I it was I was literally this is super anecdotal. This morning, saw it on the TV. The second thing is, if you know who George Jones is, and maybe yeah, I've been waiting for this. If you know who George Jones is go find his LinkedIn profile. His most recent posts this morning was the most beautiful, exquisite jump cut of the IO event yesterday. It jumped to like a three times where AI was said, like, introducing Google's new ai ai it's amazing. It is and he made this like, ya know, I don't know if it was him or someone else but like, it got jumped cut. And it's like a buffet the buffet. It's unbelievable.

Paul Daly: 16:51

The coffee. It's hilarious attention dealers, in case you missed it. Here's a summary of the keynote from this year's Google I

Kyle Mountsier: 16:56

O. It's just gonna be cat Z and ai 100. Navy, it's just AI over and over and over. It's, it's wild. Like the trends that we follow in any industry is just that is the closest and nearest thing. There are so many more things that Google could and I think should be talking about. And even as dealers don't fall in the ditch, right? Whether it you know, like we fell in the digital retailing ditch, we're falling in the AI ditch, we fall in the EV ditch. Don't fall in the ditch today. Your people are still extremely important you're doing on ground work that is important to your business. Forget the keywords today. Care for people care for consumers and that I promised will keep you in business a long time from now. Let's go

Paul Daly: 17:40

That's it, man. Mic drop.

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