The Drone Packages are Dropping, Hacking GM, Third Party Transactions

May 25, 2022
Today we cover the breakout horse in the drone package delivery race, talk about they simple ‘why’ behind the recently discovered GM consumer hack, and discuss some 3rd party online transaction options. We’ll also try our best to make fun of ourselves. 
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Walmart is expanding it’s 3.99 drone delivery service to 34 cities

  1. Represents over 4 million eligible households
  2. Delivered with a claw and repel line (less than 10 lbs between 8a-8p)
  3. Has completed hundreds of deliveries within 1.5 miles of a store
  4. All drones are piloted by humans while Amazon is working on Autonomous
  5. Take Away: There is always more than one way to innovate the same result

Hackers get into nearly 5000 GM customer accounts according to California AG

  1. Occurred between April 11-15
  2. In some cases hackers redeemed points for gift cards
  3. Passwords were not stolen from GM but from other sites where the same password was used
  4. Take Away: Here are some tips to secure your passwords. Yes we mean YOU.

Third party sites continue their evolution toward transactional marketplaces

  1. Latest examples are CarGurus Digital Deal and TrueCar +
  2. Intended to compete with online retail experiences of Carvana / Rivian etc
  3. Developed in part to recover revenue drop due to drop in inventory ad dollars
  4. Take Away: Dealers, you do not have to wait for someone else to innovate your online retail offerings. Our suggestion, use what is useful, but don’t  fully outsource your online retail experience. 

Paul Daly  0:21  

Yo its hump day i've just always wanted to do that at the beginning? Wednesday y'all moving through it, I'll tell you about Walmart dropping off packages from the sky

Kyle Mountsier  0:37  

is in Hallmark, they stopped Walmart, we're gonna you know what's crazy? Every time I, every time I learn more about Walmart, I'm like you guys are acting ridiculous.

Paul Daly  0:47  

Yeah, right, you're a little bit

Kyle Mountsier  0:49  

that they do like even the way that they do like online shopping and delivery and they actually aggregate products from multiple sources more like Amazon than what you would expect, like they don't actually stock store these things. Yeah, it's really quite wild. Like if you dig into it, it's it's surprising how much shopper demand they have. So we'll get into that a second,

Paul Daly  1:12  

we'll tell you about Walmart in a second. First, I mean, dude, this is the second time in two weeks, when we are talking about a mass shooting. Yeah, and I know everybody's getting it from every direction. So we don't want to like, you know, you can get that news everywhere else. We just want to take a moment to acknowledge, you know, what happened. And, and you know, as parents of elementary school kids, and I know a lot of automotive folks are as well, a little bit harder, maybe a lot bit harder, right to drop the kids off at school this morning, a lot bit harder to even just think about what's going on in process. And we just want to let you know that you know, kind of we're in that we're in the fields with you as well, our prayers, and our thoughts and our hearts are with those families and volley. And if there are any dealers or you know of anybody in the auto industry that is in and or around that area, that we can help kind of activate in some way to serve that community to do something, I don't know what we can do, right. But if you reach out to us, crew@asoto.com, and let us know if your store is near there, or you have people near there, or whatever, we'd love to help figure out something we can do to help just serve the hurt and serve the community there. So I don't know if you have anything to add to that, Kyle?

Kyle Mountsier  2:33  

No, I mean, it's it's obviously hitting, you know, my wife dropped off our kids today at elementary school. And that was, you know, just a moment that she reached out to me, and just, there was a different recognition of what the, the stark reality of life and what, what happens today. And so I think just being present with your people being present with people around that are, that are experiencing life in a different way. Today, you know, we've had these tragedies over the past, you know, even 90 120 days with Ukraine, and with and then with the buffalo shooting, and then with this, and there, there are constantly elements that bring stressors and anxiety into all of life. And so recognizing that recognizing that the the the engaging people in a way that recognizing that life doesn't stop happening in the workplace, something that we're encouraging, and something that we're going to try and do today to as we're on calls and in amongst the places that we go. Because we recognize that there's not anyone that this doesn't touch in some way.

Paul Daly  3:40  

Yeah, for sure. It's the parallel rails of life. It's, it's terrible things and good things. And they're always moving forward on both sides. So our hearts are with you. And please, again, if you know of any dealers in that area, or have people in the area, are connected in any way reached out at crew out of asotu.com put volley in the subject line. So we know and we can look at it and see if there's some way we can activate this community to serve the communities that need it really bad today. You know, so, with that being said, we have some other news and stuff to talk about as well. You know, we do have a lot of our close friends and family gathering in Napa this week at DMSC of Brian patches. dmsc. You know, we're getting tagged and mentioned in comments and we're seeing seeing the friends and in the in the sessions and just enjoying themselves and learning a lot. And you know, I don't know I'm a little jealous.

Kyle Mountsier  4:37  

Yeah, no, I'm definitely jealous. There's a lot of FOMO going on. I just see a lot of friends and industry family out there. And you know what's really cool is there's there's so many insights that come out of a conference like that I know that the dealers that are there that are going to be better for it and the industry partners that are there are going to be better find out because the past is and specifically Ryan really know how to curate the content that draws high level thinkers together in an event like that. Oh, yeah, super excited to hear what the insights out of that are.

Paul Daly  5:11  

Yeah, for sure. I'm Brian passions just a boss of a host. Can I just say that sled Glen to like the patch brothers, or like the dynamic duo of hosting that they just draw, draw the the insights out in a really special way. So maybe next year just couldn't work out this year. But all our love to all the family out there, we've been having a lot of conversations this week that we're excited about throwing our own event, a asotu.com in September 11 through 13th, you can go to asotu con.com and look at a really crappy landing page. But the most important thing on that page is the button the thing where you put your email in. So you'll be the first to know, as we start dropping this we've had, we have 3040 calls this week, all with people and sponsors that were looking to collaborate to put on the craziest, the best, most insightful, most refreshing event in automotive ever, you know, us, we did not come here to bunt ever, that's ever, ever. That's right.

Kyle Mountsier  6:07  

So let's get into some news. Paul, we gotta we gotta go. We got to talk about we got that. Okay, look, we kind of preface this, but we're talking about Walmart. So they are expanding their drone delivery service to 34 states, meaning they're going to drop off, they're going to be able to drop off items that weighed less than 10 pounds in the middle of the day to over 4 million potential households across the US. And they've already been doing this at some tests, and dropping off a ton of things within within a small radius around a store. And

Paul Daly  6:45  

I own my own within a mile and a half of the store. Right? What's really

Kyle Mountsier  6:48  

interesting to me about this is that they're not talking, you know, everything's been about like autonomous delivery, whether it be a vehicle or a drone, or a robot on a on a sidewalk, but they're actually utilizing humans to fly these things. Pilots is kind of like, yeah, like actually pilots to fly this sudden, I

Paul Daly  7:08  

think that makes me feel better. But at some point, it kind of doesn't make me feel better. Like I'm very conflicted over what when I read that I'm like, oh, so they have like, probably some VR goggles going on, or some screens and some controls sitting in the control room somewhere, I think of it like a BDC. Except for it's like just a drone drone pilots, right.

Kyle Mountsier  7:27  

And they're just, I'm thinking about this, like, I get my like, it gets dropped off on nice and calm and everything. And all of a sudden, there's like someone racing on the way back to Walmart, it's like beat you back.

Paul Daly  7:40  

You know what I thought of immediately, that would never work at my house, because my dogs would take that thing down. Like you got the claw, right, coming down with a cane come down. And then the drone, I could just see my German Shepherd grabbing a hold of that cable and just taking that drone for a ride. I was like that I'll just never have that at my house. It's not gonna happen. I have to build like a landing. Yeah, but so. So as opposed to like Amazon whose strategy is to go full autonomy, but Walmart coming out and be like, we've done hundreds of these delivered deliveries already. They're like, hey, the most popular items are like Hamburger Helper kind of things. Which makes sense. So if you need something in 30 minutes, and you're cooking dinner, guess what I'm willing to pay $2.99 to have it delivered by drone in 30 minutes. That sounds like a heck of a deal. But Walmart's saying the cities are moving into represent over 4 million households. And they're going to be doing 1000s of these and then hundreds of 1000s of these by the end of the year. And so, you know, our kind of takeaway around this specifically is like, there's always more than one way to innovate, always. And we know that in automotive super well, because you have a whole bunch of smart people trying to solve the same problem. And you start seeing all these iterations coming out, which is the best, right? The more people we have trying different ways to solve the problem is better for everybody. Because when you see people doing it right or doing it wrong, you can take those learnings and you can improve your product, do it a little faster. That's what we're trying to do with this. So too, right? We're not saying like, we're the best media outlet, or we're gonna put on the best content, what we are saying we're gonna put on the best conference. But we are saying, we're saying that we are. But in doing that, we're not saying everybody else's conference is bad. We're saying like, we hope that through trying some new things and doing it a new way. We're going to be able to pull people for it and inspire them to like, oh, we can tweak our thing this way. And then we want to look at what they did. And

Kyle Mountsier  9:28  

drone delivery. You may not be doing drone deliveries but probably not doing deliveries, right? Yeah, you're definitely not doing drone deliveries unless maybe you got like cheap parts, right? Or like low low cost, low low weight parts, right. You got a bunch of rates. I like I imagine how many times did you need does your technician need like a new a new clamp ring, right? Oh my gosh, if you didn't have to send a truck down to Napa to get your rings or a

Paul Daly  9:57  

parts runner inside the store? I'm advocating for instore drone deliveries

Kyle Mountsier  10:05  

I going to go into each bay look great. With 100 days probably use that thing. He's got people flying everywhere. It's like a drone per day, just back and forth between. Now we see now now we get a little crazy ideas out there, we get a little crazy, I

Paul Daly  10:22  

didn't he knows, I was gonna try to make my way into his segway, but it would be stretching way too far. So I'm not gonna do it. I'm just gonna press the Segway button. Segway is gonna, we're just gonna do a cheap one. I feel like I needed that little MC Hammer in my life this morning. So it was just announced by the California Attorney General that hackers have infiltrated 5000 GM consumer accounts, that's a great gift happened between April 11. And the 15th. And kind of the biggest damage that was done here is that hackers were able to take points from like the GM account, whatever the point system is, and redeem them for gift cards. Like, I don't know how much they got, but for the amount of trouble they could get it, I can't see how this is worth it. I can't see how it's worth it.

Kyle Mountsier  11:14  

I can't see how it's worth it. But there is just the reality that like, Y'all, passwords are important. Oh, this is

Paul Daly  11:25  

authentication. Well, I don't know if everyone's gonna do two step authentication for their GM accounts. But but here's the deal, they didn't actually steal any password from GM. All they did was scrubbed the internet and they bought password lists from all these other things. And they just use the same password and email address in the GM account. And for those of you, we know you're out there that have the same password for everything attached to the same email address, there's a very simple way you can avoid most of this. And it's just have separate passwords for everything. That's like step one, grab one password or password manager. Here's a little tip right, one password for every account that will take care of most of the potential hacking scenarios out there. Second step, use the password generator instead of trying to come up with a name right? Because once you have one password for every account, you can no longer remember them use the password generator, it's a random combination of letters and numbers. And I've talked to IT specialists are like that will take care of a whole lot of if you just do those two steps. You are just by far by far safer than most people out there. And little hint, hackers take down the easiest ones first. Right? And eventually they get tired.

Kyle Mountsier  12:38  

Yep, they absolutely do. So like please, please, please, especially dealership employees, the level of PII. And not just dealership employees. But vendors, like the level of PII that you have access to from a data perspective is is unreal, like to stop using Password 123 is that it's not going to work for us as an industry.

Paul Daly  13:05  

Oh, but I capitalize the P

Kyle Mountsier  13:09  

put a period in the middle of

Paul Daly  13:10  

it, put a smiley face at the end of the middle of it. All right. Last story for today are automotive news article is something that we covered kind of like a week or two ago when CarGurus launched their digital deal platform. But basically, the automotive news article that we link up is just talking about the generality of third party sites, just continuing their evolution to be transactional companies, right? It, you know, ad revenue is down because inventory is down and just this this move of resources in the same like, how can we be part of the transactions, latest examples being you know, CarGurus, digital deal. TrueCar Plus, there are others. And, you know, this is just something we we want to talk about early and often because we're not saying that they're bad. Let's be you know, yesterday's yesterday, somebody was like, I thought Paul hated this. Like maybe I just come across as like, I hate things when I don't hate things. So we're not saying that. We're not saying they're bad. But we're saying don't make them an excuse to stop innovating.

Kyle Mountsier  14:16  

Yeah, well, and and see, here's, here's my problem is that the solve that we're looking for is the customer experience. And so if that isn't central to how you're partnering with, with technology, with software systems with partners across the industry, then you're going to miss some level of customer experience. And then the next layer is employee experience. And so if you're not cognizant of the customer and employee experience, in any process that you implement across your digital or physical strategy, then then you have an opportunity to lose brand right every time Every loss of like brand attention or brand recognition because of a digital strategy or, or a physical strategy strategy that's different. This is what OEMs know, this is why they want the consumer approach because they recognize that their brand loss at every step of the way, is potentially higher and higher, and especially at some levels of partners or dealers or franchises. And so you recognizing that as a dealer, that your brand is diluted, by the way that you approach your digital and physical strategy. Just like make sure that it's cohesive, right? It doesn't mean that you can't have multiple partners in a in a spiderweb, of Digital Ocean physical interaction. And you should actually, it's just being cognizant of the way the end user, both the customer and the employee, realize that experience.

Paul Daly  15:49  

Look, there's just an element of taking ownership and responsibility for everything that's going on through your process that we just can't advocate for enough, right? You take tools that come up, use them, try things iterate, right, it's great to do that, you need to do that. But if you're back into the mode, where you start to let somebody else do it all for you, you're like getting out of the game. And like there really is a separation and dealers that we talked to a lot, Kyle, it's like we see dealers who are always testing in the kitchen, right? Always trying always switching things out. And then on the other side of the spectrum, you have people who almost feel like a victim to technology, right? And they operate through their, their their dealership, and they're in like as a victim to technology and like throw their hands up like, well, I have to wait for somebody to give me the exact thing that will do the exact thing. And the reality is most of the game in this industry is played in the middle of those two parts, right? There are yes, 1000s levels. And between those two, and we just want to encourage everybody to just like, take the good, right? We call chew and spit and my house, rightly to steaks, but the fat, right? You got it, you got to chew it right before you realize kind of like, oh, this is going, this is saying this is going. And so like, we just want to encourage you as these things are coming out. Let's keep talking about them. Let's keep trying them. Let's keep using them. But never, ever, ever throw your hands up and give all of your hopes and prayers into a technology that somebody designed. Because like Kyle said, like everything else that goes with that is literally your business.

Kyle Mountsier  17:23  

Exactly. Yeah, don't, don't, don't put it on your business just at the weight of technology or leaves. Own your brand own vision and make sure they're things that come in align with that before you do anything.

Paul Daly  17:38  

Thanks for hanging with us today. We also want to just take a moment to thank you. Thank you like, yeah, definitely. For those of you that listen to the podcast, and have shared the podcast, our podcast is growing every single month because it's getting out there. So hey, if you want to leave a review or something like that, for the podcast, that would be awesome. Or if you just want to tell somebody, like I listened to these two crazy guys in the morning, they kind of make me feel better. And I learn something every once in a while, we'd appreciate that. Also for everyone that opens that email every morning. We are so grateful that email list is growing. That's something if you share you get free stuff. By the way, if you're not on it a sotu.com it is kind of the heart and soul of a soda communicated to you every morning, our senior writer Chris, he does put his heart and soul he has owned that email and he's constantly on our back Slack channels, like asking for ideas and feedback. And like there's always articles flying back and forth. And we were on a call yesterday, I want to give Chris a shout out from yesterday, we were on a call with an industry partner. And he said, Who's that guy's name? I met him. I met him at the party. He's like, tell him he's my spirit animal. I was like Chris is gonna love that. Chris has literally become somebody's spirit animal because of the heart and soul unbelief that he pours into the email every day and that he pours into this industry. And by the way, he did not come from this industry. So that makes me even happier. Right? So bringing people and letting know there's so much going on in automotive, that it can literally light someone's heart on fire that had never considered automotive as anything other than a guy in a plaid suit trying to sell a piece of metal ever. There you go. So we want to thank you look, we're gonna get through this and we're gonna good with the community today. Thank you for being a part of this community. We're just getting started. And we're just getting started on Wednesday. So go out there and get something started.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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