EVs Taking Ground, Hacked Teslas, Apple Pay LATER

EVs Taking Ground, Hacked Teslas, Apple Pay LATER

Wed, Mar 29, 2023 9:17AM • 16:09

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

evs, tesla, people, pay, apple, hack, running, vehicle, evie, questions, week, eevee, called, gasoline engine, hear, segue, linkedin, skepticism, soda, consumers

SPEAKERS

Kyle Mountsier, Paul Daly

Paul Daly  00:33

Welcome to Wednesday, it feels like we've already done a week over solely Wednesday. We're talking about EVs making up ground, Tesla's being hacked. And Apple pay later.

Kyle Mountsier  00:46

You pay later, Apple Pay.

Paul Daly  00:49

Apple used to be like you pay now.

Kyle Mountsier  00:53

Pay later on that's good. It's a good morning, I'm telling you what this is like, I started off with just a solid run this morning. You know, and I know you're not a runner,

Paul Daly  01:06

and I Oh, I trust me. I get what that does. I've run in the morning before,

Kyle Mountsier  01:11

when when you get through the run and like there's a certain, you know, some runs like you get through and you're like, golly, I'm glad that was, you know, there's those mornings where it's like, this just feels good. And you know, your body's feeling good and you're gonna hit the ground running for the day and and that's just what did they. Oh, man, you just put me in a place because it's like beautiful mornings right

Paul Daly  01:31

now in upstate New York. It's sunny. The birds are out every day. Right Amy here with a thought the thought of like going outside and running on a country road even for like 15 minutes. Sounds amazing right now. You just you just put me there in a mental place. So

Kyle Mountsier  01:46

there you go. You contribute a little bit too. Good to see Paul in his flat mill just doing a jog in his I'm running back. No, no, no, I have real

Paul Daly  01:55

running shoes in the hat would be backwards. Just to clarify, we have some fun stuff going on today. Actually, we have a pretty busy day that is so diverse at 10 o'clock. We're doing pitch tank on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn audio, so if you're around and if you want to hear some great pitches, and some great judges asking questions that you wouldn't know to ask, but you really need to know join us for pitch tank, you can just go how we get into pitch tank this week, just

Kyle Mountsier  02:19

head to our LinkedIn hit the little bell to make sure you get you get hit up on it, but it's on the asoto LinkedIn this morning. It's my first time ever a little bit of a switch. LinkedIn give us a little love there. So

Paul Daly  02:31

good. Also at two o'clock today, we have a fun, fun webinar with our friends at car review, driving customer loyalty through service. We happen to believe webinars should have little energy and be a little fun. You know what to expect from the team at asoto. Kyle and I will be hosting the webinar with our friends there. So that's at two o'clock Eastern today, you can just go to a so to.com Scroll down a little bit and you can register we hope to see you there got a lot of people signed up. It's gonna be a good time. Good time.

Kyle Mountsier  02:57

When we're only one week away from a soda wax in Arlington one week. Today on the live tonight, that is going to be a fire show. You should be there. If you're not there. It'll be live streamed Whole Nine Yards go to a so two x.com and you'll find all the deets. Yeah, and

Paul Daly  03:15

you heard it here at first two. We're planning a premiere during digital dealer in May. So we travel a little thing that we need a premiere premiere for a TV show type thing we may or may not be filming next week while we're in Arlington, Texas, follow our social accounts. We'll definitely be doing a lot of behind the scenes. Again, trying to bring the industry together trying to be in the dealerships with the practitioners with the industry partners saying like this is how we collaborate together it's by being together right so we're going to try to be there in person and bring as many of you in person and virtually as we can all right today we have some news there's always thinking of practitioners let's go segue now okay, a soda investor and our dear dear friend David Long executive GM of the San Francisco area Hansel Auto Group was quoted in an automotive news article pretty extensively today and he's calling the Evie demand in that area, quote, insatiable extend. The timing is good as JD Power just released their latest e vision intelligence report that they do monthly in the report, they predict that three in four consumers will be able to choose a viable Evie option by 2026. It's really close due to falling prices. And just like the robust selection of vehicles that is coming out. Right now about 8.5% of new vehicle sales are EVs in the first two months of this year, which is a record high and it's tracking even more growth. He continues. David Long continues in his quote he says there's so many questions about charging and the things that consumers just really want to hear another human being tell them so it's he's saying it's not about them just reading the info. There's like a skepticism where you Need to look another person in the eye and have them be knowledgeable and confident? In giving you the answers to show you he says we we've had to become really, really good at being able to provide customers with information. And the more we can communicate to our customers, the more comfortable they will be, and the easier it will be for them to make that decision. And that transition from Evie ice to evey. It's also noted that the $26,000 Chevy Volt is really an example of a pricing parity means inequality to a gasoline engine, meaning there's an Eevee option that's the same as price and equipment. And you know, stuff as gasoline ended. So bad EVs are for upscale buyers only anymore, it seems. Yep.

Kyle Mountsier  05:45

No, it's not. And I will say like the the thought process behind just needing a lot more education from a customer in order to move people into this is absolutely valid. I mean, anecdotally, back when we were selling the leaf and 20,011, you're on the front line of that. Yeah, every single early adopter has more questions, they got spreadsheets, on spreadsheets, they got things printed out everywhere, they're trying to make sense of the whole thing. And this is going to continue to be a thing for the next three to five years probably where we're still in a very early adopter phase as as we just talked about the breadth, the depth of the market. And so keying in on like my employees, if we have EVs, whether they be new or used need to be extremely knowledgeable about just everything that comes along with that all of the questions that could be asked not just about vehicle specs, but more importantly ownership. And that's that's

Paul Daly  06:41

the big deal. Right? The ownership experience is what people are really, am I gonna get stuck? How am I going to charge this thing? How do I find chargers? What happens when the cold weather, right like that's, those are the practical things that people think at first, other than zero to 60 in however many seconds, right? But here's the deal that's only going to happen if what the managers and the GMs make it a priority to drip feed Evie education to their team, even though it's a small percentage of sales. But when that customer they talked in the article a little bit more about like he they have a lot more traffic and interest on EVs actually, he said than gasoline engines, which was crazy to me. But he said the closing ratio is super low, because people are in fact finding mode,

Kyle Mountsier  07:25

right? Yes, that makes a ton of sense. Absolutely. Like, hey, I don't know if this is something I want to do. And so actually, you're getting showroom traffic. That's high funnel, which is nuts. That's why it was the last time that happened. Yeah, showroom traffic. That's high funnel. That was like the 80s when you got people stopping by to get the brochure, you know, gosh, oh, when I first started in the car business in 2009, we had people looking for brochures left and right, like the internet was not a thing

Paul Daly  07:56

back then I'm telling my gosh,

07:59

oh, it's so funny to that.

Kyle Mountsier  08:03

That's what it's for. But people were still like, the automotive websites were pretty rough. I mean, but they were really rough. A

Paul Daly  08:12

different standard, though.

08:15

Speaking of rough Technology and Standards, okay.

Paul Daly  08:19

I think we both had a valid segue there. That's definitely the first time we both spit out an actual valid segue at the exact same time on the split up the audio afterwards, it just roll each of them. Well, Tesla's cybersecurity team might have a little bit of work ahead of them as a French firm, skin, skin, skin inactive, easily hacked. A Tesla Model three at a security conference, these are white hat hackers, the good guys gaining access to the system in under two minutes. In order to do that. Well, from doing that they actually won $350,000 and a brand new Tesla. And the hack was a complete full compromise to the system, they actually went through the infotainment system, and should instead of trying to access the main system, you know, they were able to do things like open the trunk and the doors while the vehicle is in motion. This was all simulation. Of course, the team did replace typical hacker fashion, the Tesla logo on the infotainment with their logo. That's like so boss.

Kyle Mountsier  09:19

Smart, so smart. And the hacks like genius move. Oh, it's unbelievable.

Paul Daly  09:24

Let's pay people to see how we can make our stuff better.

Kyle Mountsier  09:27

But like in an r&d in a very r&d PR, like all of the things that you get from earned media. Don't tell me Don't tell me. Tesla doesn't market.

Paul Daly  09:39

They got Oh yeah, right. No, they were there on on site Tesla engineers to verify that it was definitely hack and that was definitely a vulnerability. They did say you know, they are going to fix the bugs over the air update. Great. Thanks for showing us that it's not there anymore. Like sounds

Kyle Mountsier  09:59

unreal. I mean, like you think about this, and this is kind of a cool thing, you know, and we've had, there's a lot of questions around, you know, EVs and over the air updates and connectivity and whether or not you know, they are, they're secure from hackers and things like that, not just the information, but the ability to drive the vehicle and autonomous situation. So there's all of that, which is a really just interesting developing story when we're talking about these vehicles, and again, to our first storage point, being aware of that, and the Eevee marketplace. But the bigger learning here for me is actually for every business, any dealership to not just think about their their people, their processes, the way they do business, the way that they integrate tech from an internal perspective only, but start to get external perspective on that. Because you're always people are always going to find holes and gaps that you're never going to see because you're just so used to seeing the same things over and over. And that's what Tesla did so beautifully. So any business can take that and run with it.

Paul Daly  10:57

This goes back to our idea from yesterday of a life mystery shop show. It's gonna be so good. Oh, no, it's like, you gotta give the people what they want. It's actually help a survey. If you want public mystery shadow store, let us know we'll try it on maybe. Me, I'm trying to think of a way we could do it and hide the identity of the store. Right? We should figure out a way to do that. Because I think this would be a real show. It's gonna be a real show.

Kyle Mountsier  11:27

I mean, you'd have to, we'd have to pre record it bleep out the Hi, welcome to oh my gosh, alive mystery shop. Oh, my mystery shop would be nuts on a stage at a soda con.

Paul Daly  11:37

Wow. Yeah, it's gonna be glued to that session, everybody's lit. Well, that's a wrap up the Tesla story on it, I couldn't really figure out and find, but I'm pretty sure that you actually have to be in the vehicle and plugged into it in order to hack it. So this isn't something that you know, like the Blackhat is going to pull up and like over the air hack into your Tesla if you have one, but I don't know. I'm sure they're working on that, too. Speaking of working on things, segway car. Cow, you one of the

Kyle Mountsier  12:11

biggest Apple fans, is getting into the buy. Now pile pay later game. Letting select Apple Pay users, they've only rolled it out to a few swallow the full purchase price of online items one bite at a time, it's called Apple Pay Later, the most ingenious title that we've ever heard in our lives, basically, what's going to happen is users will be able to apply for quick Buy now pay later loans from anywhere from 50 to $1,000. And repay them over for payments without interest fees over a six week time period. So it's a quick short term loan, they've created a new subsidiary called Apple financing LLC, they are responsible for the credit assessment, but then they partner with MasterCard card installments, to make sure that the service is active and running, you know, because they got MasterCards doing a thing. No credit check required. Loans and payments, though will be reported to credit bureaus. So you know, you know, people gotta buy them purses.

Paul Daly  13:11

Well, like they gotta buy own shoes. When I was, you know, so Apple has been has been really an advocate their whole brand positioning behind Apple Pay in the Apple card when it came out was financial health. Right? How do you stay financially healthy? How do you make sure your credit card bills paid on time? How do you do all this. So there's definitely a little skepticism in the market that this might be going against, you know, what their overall brand is for the financial sector, you know, by now pay later has become very, very popular starting in the pandemic. And there have been some massive acquisitions of companies working in the thick of karma, karma,

Kyle Mountsier  13:46

karma. And then afterpay also got acquired,

Paul Daly  13:50

so karma got acquired for like 60 billion, and now is only valued at like 6 billion. So like, there's a point six, so there's this rush to to like this market, and then it's kind of drawn back. But now apples getting in the game, obviously, the ecosystem. Ease of it makes a lot of sense. However, the question of like, hey, is this actually good for consumers? Does it doesn't hurt spending discipline? You know, I think the way this kind of boils down to dealers, I mean, look how there's a lot of, you know, systems in place to pay for your auto repairs later. I wonder if Apple is going to, like, target that or make that available as part of it.

Kyle Mountsier  14:24

Why? Why Why wouldn't they right? Because why wouldn't why when all of our service MPI and scheduling tools and things that have payments, start looking into making sure that they're connected to Apple Pay options to pay, just to like, I mean, it's just a it's just a service that's available to customers, but

Paul Daly  14:43

they did have an interesting stat in the article that talked about how adoption pre COVID was like, like 10 to 12%. And now it's like almost 90% of terminals accept Apple Pay, right? I mean, what would we do without Apple Pay when we're on the road?

Kyle Mountsier  14:57

I would be so mad, frustrated. First I was just angry at life.

Paul Daly  15:01

I was just I mean, like, their whole goal is right. They want to they want to replace your wallet. Right? They want to make it so that you don't need a wallet. You just have to have have that. I've even seen I think it was one airport where we in wasn't Chicago. But basically it was like, apply for a digital. Id like a digital life driver's license. Oh, yeah, no, that's definitely yeah. And so maybe that was

Kyle Mountsier  15:30

Arizona might have been in Arizona. They in Phoenix do things a little faster. Yeah, it's a little they got wobble around. Yeah, the whole nine yards. Yeah. Hey, interesting times, that's for sure. And

Paul Daly  15:41

Oh, for sure. Either way. We're running. We're gonna we're paying attention to things we're bringing you with us. Join us today a pitch tank 10 o'clock Eastern call review webinar. 2pm. Eastern asoto x next week, April.

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