The Biggest Risk, Easiest Charge, and A Snapshot from 100 Years Ago in Rochester NY

September 6, 2022
This Tuesday we’re taking a look into the future of Dealer threats, the past of auto pricing, as well as talking about the now when it comes to new EV charging infrastructure pop ups.
Listen On
Apple Podcasts IconSpotify IconGoogle Podcasts Icon

Automotive Ventures Retail Risk Assessment (AVRRA) is worth your attention

  • Areas covered: OTA Updates, servicing of vehicles, consumer expectations, software subs, EVs, new sales models, margin compression, direct selling/agency, F&I regulation, consolidation, consumer privacy, autonomy, OEM tech influence, big tech players, build to order, vehicle subscription
  • “AVRRA’s goal is to be able to work closely with the dealer body to develop a roadmap for action, to prepare for and neutralize some of the bigger threats exposed. We hope that monitoring these trends on behalf of the industry will allow participants to be better informed and prepared for the future. “
  • Take away: Check out the full report here and subscribe to AV for free

Recent announcements from retailers Starbucks and Ikea to install banks of chargers at some locations mark a potential shift in expectations of the driving/charging experience

  • Charging availability is one of the biggest hurdles to EV adoption according to recent studies released by CDK and more retailers are incorporating charging infrastructure into their physical locations
  • Walmart and Target have chargers at over 100 locations each
  • Starbucks announced a partnership w/ Volvo in March to install 60 fast chargers from Seattle to Denver
  • IKEA announced a partnership w Electrify America to install fast chargers at 25 locations across 18 states

A 100 year old newspaper auto ad shows just how much has changed in the manufacturer count, and also how much more expensive a car is today, yes we adjusted for inflation.

  • Twitter user Zerin Dube @speedsportlife tweeted a photo of a sales page in the Democrat & Chronicle from 100 years ago listing 22 manufactures and prices of their various models. Only 3 OEMs remain from the list, Buick, Cadillac, and Chevrolet
  • None of the dealers are around anymore; one location is a closed oriental rug store, one a health insurance office, one an addiction recovery clinic
  • Author used West Herr Chevy, Vision Buick, and Vision Cadillac as a comparison for pricing
  • Cheapest Chevy: Fully equipped Model Superior Touring $356 ($6278 today)
  • Todays cheapest: Blue Spark L1T: $17,595
  • Most expensive Caddy:  7-Passenger Imperial $5,051 ($89,076)
  • Todays most expensive: V Series Escalade $156,965

Get the Daily Push Back email at https://www.asotu.com/

Rock with us LIVE at ASOTU CON! Tickets: https://www.asotucon.com

JOIN the conversation on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/asotu/

Read our most recent email at: https://www.asotu.com/media/push-back-email

Share your positive dealer stories:

SPEAKERS

Kyle Mountsier, Paul Daly


Paul Daly  00:22

If you've ever been to an auto conference, this is the one that started out if you're sick of auto conferences in general, or you just need something a little different. A solo con is the place to be September 11. Through 13th. We only have a limited number of tickets, and most of our events have sold out. So Exactly.


Kyle Mountsier  00:38

We're really excited and we just hope that you'll join us because we want to craft something that is for the whole industry, not just for a substance,


Paul Daly  00:46

go to a solo con.com Get your tickets now. Yo, it's Tuesday. I can't even see anything. Kyle, there's so many awesome automotive stuff, too. Let's get into it. This is the week. I feel like the car is on the track now.


Kyle Mountsier  01:13

It's Unbeliev. Like yesterday, I had, you know, like we made a vow across our team to stay off slack. But I had this like, anxious energy all day. I was like, okay, okay, there's things. There's nope, nothing's happening. There's things happening. Nothing. Okay.


Paul Daly  01:29

We're cool. We're cool with this. We're cool with this. We're cool with this. All right. You all know what a soda con is coming in hot. Less than a week starts on Sunday. It's already Tuesday. Right? I think it feels like it's Monday, but it's actually Tuesday. Soda con starts on Sunday. And I just thought I bring some of the giveaways we have obtained and have in our possession one PlayStation five horizon edition, we will be giving away at asoto con so if you want to be your kid's hero, come get that one. We also have these air pods Max. These are like five or $600 headphones that I don't own because they're five or $600 and go and I'm also not eligible to win the so I'm little upset about that. This is probably one of the coolest ones. It is a Mogo Pro. It's like a sono speaker with a high definition camera in it. And you can just like stream your movies to it set up a 300 inch high definition screen anywhere with the speaker inside outside of this sucker battery powered.


Kyle Mountsier  02:23

It's got you know, I think it is yeah, it's got a battery. Yeah, it's got Yeah, so you could just take it a hole and just take a CAC, er anywhere


Paul Daly  02:31

Football season is about to start, like the applications for that are amazing. So if you haven't already get your tickets to a soda con, we still have some left starts on Sunday night. But if you can't make it Sunday night, all day, Monday and Tuesday, we're going to have amazing content for you. The collaborators go on to social media, follow us on LinkedIn, you can see all the collaborators, all the speakers, we went on Zoom calls with them, and it's just been absolutely invigorating. rolling into a soda.


Kyle Mountsier  02:59

That's a great word. Because when we get off of these calls with these collaborators, the speakers, the moderators, it just it like fills you up. Everyone has a specific energy attributed to it. Like they're coming with their own intentionality, the the moderators or are encouraging the speakers to like I had one I had one moderator last week. That was like telling the speakers No, no, we're gonna be in the moment stop talking. Yeah, they were trying to talk about what they're talking about. The moderator was like, whoa, whoa, save it for the show. You know? Yeah. So I love that type of energy. It's really fun.


Paul Daly  03:35

Without a doubt. I mean, like, literally, the more exciting thing for me is that I realizing that this what we're doing here at asoto is this element of like, initially started as like dealers banding together, right. And now it's like banding together to elevate the culture and perception of retail, automotive, through innovation, through public relations through community service, through customer experience, people really believe in what we are doing together, they really believe in it, and asoto is just going to exponentially, like explode this to the next level, I can tell just look at the speaker list. And to a to a person, everyone is excited to be there. This isn't like I'm gonna go to another account, right? It's not that, but today, we have some news to talk about. So we probably shouldn't do that, or four minutes in. Just so you know, if you're going follow the asoto Khan Instagram account, even if you're not going follow the asoto Khan Instagram accounts at asoto Khan. And we're that's going to be kind of a little hub for like up to date, you know, announcements and information. And we have an insane content team ready to fire. So if even if you can't be there, and make sure you're following us on LinkedIn, follow the asoto LinkedIn page. They can also follow these So Instagram, and sort of on Instagram and YouTube shorts or wherever you'd like to see


Kyle Mountsier  04:52

you're stuck into YouTube and tick tock we're


Paul Daly  04:54

gonna put it everywhere. Put it out. Yeah, but but we're gonna do our best to know that like, everyone can't make it out. And so we're gonna do our best to bring vibes to you because you're a part of this community. Whether or not you come to us Otakon Yes, I'd like we're gonna have other asoto cons. Actually next year, we might do some regional roadshows


Kyle Mountsier  05:12

next year. Next year. Hey, real quick, if you are paying, if you're on LinkedIn, if you're on Facebook, Youtube anywhere, if you are a podcast listener, make sure you grab today's podcast, with Alex Vetter, CEO of cars. Yes, this I'm telling auto collabs it's auto on auto collabs auto collabs you can search it anywhere podcasts are found this interview was one of my man, I keep on saying one of my favorites. But I know that's why I stopped myself. Like it's like it was elevated. He spoke a lot of like real truths. There was no filter on this interview. And I'm like, Is he allowed to say that? Yeah, I was like,


Paul Daly  05:50

let's run this by Pr quick. Now we're good Alex better? Yeah, go listen to the interview or watch it because we have the video version available as well.


05:59

Writing of no filter.


Paul Daly  06:01

Thank you.


Kyle Mountsier  06:02

Segue. Look, Steve Greenfield. If you do not get his Intel report on a monthly basis, please leave the


Paul Daly  06:17

show and leave right show like the rest of the show is not, you'll come


Kyle Mountsier  06:21

back. I'm telling you come back, find it and find this again. But go automotive ventures.com and get the Intel report because this intel report is specifically this one and the way he has broken down.


Paul Daly  06:36

I see that every month.


Kyle Mountsier  06:39

So he created this. He talked about this last month. And he created this automotive ventures retail risk assessment assessment or Avaira. for short. This is a good car guy, he got us an acronym. He's a good car guy, you know, I'm saying. But what he's done is he's taken, I think, like somewhere in the 1718 range of different market forces. So when we men, so do everything that we talked about, about market forces, different market forces that are coming into the franchise, retail system, everything from over the air updates, servicing vehicles, customer expectations, software subs, and a whole bunch more, we can't list them all. But what he's done is put them on two different risk assessments, from a probable to improbable to very likely so will they happen or not, and then from a minor to significant risk. And he's placed those on a continuum a four, a four, block spectrum, and said, Hey, this is this is what dealers industry partners should be preparing for in the next three to five years in the way that we do retail. His quote says this average goal is to be able to work closely with the dealer body to develop a roadmap for action to prepare for and neutralize some of the bigger threats expose, we hope that monitoring these trends on behalf of the industry will allow participants to be better informed and prepared for the future. And look at each one he broke down like six or seven of them, each one that he dialed in, like what's happening, what's the risk, and what's the future plan is, is something that every single dealer should be paying attention to. Without a doubt.


Paul Daly  08:23

I mean, one of the, it takes a lot to summarize a big issue into a few words. I can't remember who said it, but they're like, if I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter. Right. And Steve just does a great job of distilling the issues. And to because like dealers don't have time, right? Just one thing, you don't have a lot of right got a lot of money, don't a lot of inventory either have a lot of money, a lot of motivation, right? A lot of things, time isn't one of them. So Steve does a great job of saying like, look, you're hearing all these things out in the news, you're hearing the snippets of this instant bits of that, let me consolidate that in one place, and then give you a very visual way to say how concerned should I be about this. And I think the brilliance of simplicity in the communication of these things, is going to be what allows many more dealers to be aware of what's going on. So we're going to be talking about this a lot more, we're going to partner with Steve to figure out how we can get this information out to you more regularly. And again. So you can take a drip feed of this everyday like an IV right into your dealer blood. And you can decide, be prepared decide to take on these challenges together. The link to the report is in the show notes and where you can just go to automotive ventures.com And you really should be subscribed to this scribed you really do you really doing all right, speaking of just the thing, I don't know what to say. There's there speaking of just the thing that's the weakest whenever I can't think of another. It was terrible. It's a Tuesday morning, that's a Tuesday after holiday segue right there. Either way, we're gonna go right into retail


Kyle Mountsier  09:53

risk assessment. Okay, The things that he actually covered was a lot of like the way that vehicles and subscriptions and even things like charging are coming into the Evie landscape. And it looks like some recent announcements have have have said, hey, look retailers are getting in the charging game. Yeah,


Paul Daly  10:22

so Starbucks and IKEA are set to install banks of chargers at some locations, which marks a potential shift in expectations of the driving charging experience. Some studies released by CDK last month says that charging availability is one of the biggest hurdles of broad Evie adoption. Yes, we obvious kind of that that one. And charging infrastructure and physical locations is the thing right? So Walmart and Target have chargers now with over 100 locations. Starbucks announced a partnership with Volvo earlier in the year we did cover that to install 60 fast chargers between Seattle and Denver. So their headquarters in Denver, I guess. And IKEA just announced in a partnership with Electrify America to install fast chargers at 25 of their locations, which will be in 18 different states. So the presiding thinking and premise behind this is that people want availability of chargers, there's a lot of anxiety actually, one of the things in the study is that the majority of issues were over chart. People having gotten to chargers that were down like they didn't work for some reason. Yeah. Right. And if you're already struggling to get


Kyle Mountsier  11:31

meaning in Washington engineers sitting in the spot.


Paul Daly  11:36

I wonder if you can get towed for that these days. But the bottom line is, is like the thinking around this, I started thinking about, you know, Starbucks saying like, Oh, we're gonna put chargers in, come in and stay a while. I think that that's convenient. As long as they only have one or two chargers. The second they have like 10 chargers out there. That opens up a world of problems for them. Because what do people do? The first thing you do when you stop at a gas station for some fuel and like what do you do and you would drive while you use the restroom? Alright, Starbucks, right? Starbucks only usually has two restrooms, both like locks Single use, right? And so like the restroom infrastructure alone, I think would need to be scaled up if they're going to have more than, you know, two or three chargers. Yep. You know, but Well,


Kyle Mountsier  12:21

here's here's my thing is, so one had to leave early days, also, Kohl's was actually one of the most early adopters to putting charging stations at retail locations. And consistently, one they were down to, they're in, they were in the worst spots. So I am wondering like are they going to bring them closer to the front of the store and not kind of set to the side, which is where you didn't want to park and walk along way. Three is I rarely see them used. And so even for people that are that do have, you know, electric vehicles, like they were parking, I would see electric vehicles not parked in those Evie parking spots with the Chargers. And then I think the last thing is, for me when I'm going in and out of a store, and then out of a Starbucks speed is the key. And what I found is even just like getting out hooking it up, you know, scanning the QR code saying that's me, you know, all of that rigamarole was an inconvenience. So yeah. And I also wonder, like, we're talking about Walmart, and we're talking about, you know, just places that you wouldn't expect a bunch of Tesla's to me laying around. Now, I


Paul Daly  13:37

think that is the point, right? I mean, that's the point. Is that like thinking outside the Tesla lane, like you need broad adoption, so you need all the different types. You know, it does, it does make sense, like Ikea makes sense that you would make it really convenient. Because if you're the most convenient place to charge, gosh, even if you're an offer, like shipping electricity in hours to


Kyle Mountsier  13:56

get there anyway. Yeah, I mean, so you could probably put slow chargers in there and people but


Paul Daly  14:01

I think about other places where people spend a little bit of time, right? Shopping malls make a lot of sense, right? That's a great way to get people to come back to the mall. Actually, if you subsidize the electricity, like you might actually do a better job of getting some traffic, movie theaters, places that people go and spend a little bit of time. I think, primarily, the idea of sitting at a gas station is terrible to anybody. Right? There's a couple there's a comfort to it, right? Because I'm used to getting gas there. So I'm used to charging up there but like, most gas stations are not really places where you want to spend a lot of time actually in like think


Kyle Mountsier  14:33

about it like you're four minutes in at most at a gas station. And so you know, that's not practice. There's there's no fast charger on the planet that's four minutes in and so you have to put them I think we have to put them in retail locations. We have to rethink charging if we're going to do this and so this is a great step. I'm just still intrigued as to as to whether like the the markets ready for it and that that's like a normal rhythm that we're going to be but we'll see See, I'm proud of him. Specifically IKEA genius. You're gonna spend 20 hours there anyway.


Paul Daly  15:05

Yeah. And they're, they're very green climate sensitive company. You know what I mean? So it just makes all the sense in the world.


Kyle Mountsier  15:12

They should Trader Joe's should just put them in every spot. That's what she's right.


Paul Daly  15:18

She's gonna make it back. They will make it back. Speaking of going way back found this great story this morning A 100 year old newspaper auto ad page shows just how much things have changed in the OEM count, as well as how much more expensive a car is today than it was 100 years ago. And yes, I hear you. We adjusted for inflation. So Twitter users Aaron Dube is at speed sport live tweeted a photo of a sales page in the Democrat and Chronicle which is still around today in Rochester, New York, which is only about 50 miles from my office right here from 100 years ago and get this it had 22 OEMs listed on the page. Hold on. I gotta get the photo up just so I can. I can read some of these OEMs there it is on the screen. Buick Cadillac case Chalmers, Chandler, sixth Chevrolet Cleveland, six Columbia dort Durant. I love how they're in alphabetical order. The Earl was an OEM, Essex gardener Hayes Hudson home, Jewett, Jordan Maxwell Nash Oaklyn Oldsmobile, overland Packard, Paige, Pierce, arrow, standard eight, Stearns, Studebaker Valley six and Willis night, those are all automotive OEMs. Kyle,


Kyle Mountsier  16:37

it's pretty wild to me, because you just think of the stalwarts of our industry. And it's like, only a few made it made it through from only the GM ones from only the GM ones from that page. So like you think about the change, and even I think about people that have been talking about all these new entrants. Oh, my goodness, we're gonna have so many Evie new, new OEMs. And there's two things happening here. One, probably bunch of them aren't gonna make it because we trends through will say definitely, definitely. And then also, it's like, it's not that scary, though. There's been times of tons and tons of OEMs, and a market trying to figure out whether the market is going to allow them in or not. But I It is crazy that like you see inflation over time, still, like cars, way outpacing inflation from a pricing perspective. Although I will say this is this is one car that has stood the test of time, and I wish I had the photo up and I wish I would have like thought of it earlier. But if you look at the price of a Miata in the early 90s, and a Miata today, they're only like two grand difference. It's pretty well,


Paul Daly  17:44

that's pretty cool. So that's pretty cool. It's


Kyle Mountsier  17:46

pretty interesting.


Paul Daly  17:47

That's a nice little Mazda fact. So on on this article, you have to check it out. We link to it as a Jalopnik article that covered the tweet. And the article goes through from a Rochester native he lives in Rochester. And he says like you know, it goes around none of the none of the dealers are around the actual dealers are around anymore. Some of the stores that were mentioned, you know, ones and oriental rugs store one is like an addiction rehab place. One is a health insurance office. So he was like, Well, let me let me look so of the three manufacturers Chevy Buick and Cadillac are still around of the OEM. So he went and he used Westar, Chevy vision Buick Envision Cadillac to do some comparisons. And here's the deal of the whole list. As far as all the cars listed in the 100 year old add. The cheapest one was a Chevy, a fully equipped model superior touring was the model model superior touring actually was what it was called. It was $356 You're driving off the lot taillights over the curb for that one, which adjusted for inflation is only $6,278 today. So then he went to West her Chevy, no reflection on the dealer pricing is just what the car costs. A blue spark L one T is the cheapest car that they have $17,500 So adjusted for inflation, it's almost three times as expensive to get in the cheapest car available today. The most expensive one on the Cadillac list was called their seven passenger Imperial that was the name of the car $5,051 adjusted for inflation it's $89,000.76 so much more realistic. That's


Kyle Mountsier  19:21

that's a price point right there.


Paul Daly  19:22

No doubt until you look at the V series Cadillac Escalade that's on the lot at Vision Buick, which tops out at a mere 156,965. That's what I'm talking about. I think that one your your point, though, is is the most relevant takeaway. I think for this article, you had a list of OEMs that no one's ever heard of anymore because the auto industry was new people were scrambling in to see who can grab a little market share who could actually make it work. Turns out only three of the 22 made it work. We have all these Evie new entrants, everyone's got lots of aspirations in the next biggest idea on how they're going to do it. But what's really going to happen? Just a handful are going to make it and


Kyle Mountsier  20:03

don't be so jaded that your OEM is going to


Paul Daly  20:07

gonna be one of them. That is no shots fired on Tuesday morning shots. So, I think the bottom line of today's whole episode is this. We are in an amazing industry. And if we band together and look at the future and pay attention, we can be the ones that are standing on the other side.

Get the daily email that makes reading the news actually enjoyable. Stay informed and entertained, for free.