How Turning a Blind Eye Will Ruin the Industry

I'm, I'm watching. Well, I'm not watching. Let me rephrase that. I come home and somebody is watching the, the new Tiger King. So I don't know if you know, during the pandemic, but there was a show called Tiger King on Netflix.

Heard of it? Never watched it.

Yeah, so me neither. But I have, I've seen previews and I've heard it referenced, but I, I don't know much about it beyond the guy had tigers and he went to jail. That's kind of what I knew. And so there's a new season of it and I'm home and there's people in the kitchen, living room area watching the new season kind of towards the end of the season. And it ends up, I guess that the reason why that guy was in jail was because this lady and PETA. Do you know what PETA is? Yeah, they're an organization that animal protection. They were chasing these guys that have these zoos because the animals aren't taken care of. They don't like some of these tigers live their whole life in a, like a two by two cage. They've never ran. They never. Because it gets so big. You can't just let them run around. But if you don't have a fenced area that they can't jump over the fence, like you need to have a lot of space and, and certain things in place and they're expensive or whatever. A lot of these tigers live in cages. They get sores. The, like the flies are like laying eggs in their skin. And it, and so this lady and PETA and different organizations go around to protect the animals. Right. And I was just thinking about that in reference to our industry is we just seem like as an industry that we're okay just kind of waiting it out to see what happens. There is no leadership at nada, at any of the manufacturers. There's no leadership anywhere where somebody who's charismatic, who cares about our industry, stands up and says, hey, we're going to change things and we're going to have, you know, we're going to point out the dealers that don't care that aren't good operators. Because I'm just telling you right now, if Land Rover wants to give us a dealership in Los Angeles, not only will we very quickly be the number one selling dealership probably in the world, we will have a service department running 24 hours a day and we will have four and a half to five stars reviews on Google and it will represent what that brand could be like it wouldn't even take us six months to do that. But there's no technicians in these dealerships. They're in service. Is an afterthought in sales. Is, is more like a fighting with somebody who's your enemy than a friend. Like it's adversarial at every point. But we're forgetting the fact that consumers have a vote and that, you know, there is going to become a time when we don't have the leverage in the marketplace and they have other options, I. E. Tesla, you know, these other brands and.

You know, everybody's going to be standing around going, wow, you know, let's talk about the old days and all the talent we used to have and what a great industry it was and you know, how much money we made and this and that. But right now, as we say we could still save it and nobody wants to save it. The manufacturers don't want to save it, the dealer body doesn't want to save it and nobody wants to talk about it. We're all naive to the idea and I guess we think that, that the nation of auto and lithia are going to buy up everything and then that, then that will be it. Like the dealers get their big payday and go away. But doesn't anybody care about just the image of our industry? Just the fact that our, our mothers and our sisters and our cousins buy cars and have to go through this frustration. Like just go on and read some of the reviews. Like people are at their wits end. It is so adversarial.

There's no way, unless we, unless we completely, like we need a PETA or something to come in and, and say like no, you can't, you can't treat people like this. I don't know.

It'S very, it's depressing to me because I grew up in this industry and nobody cares. Everybody just is like complacent to the idea that oh well, something will happen, it'll. And I, I think the fact that the new car grosses and the used car grosses are so high right now because of COVID is creating this secondary.

I don't know, the secondary.

Naivety. Is that how you would say it? Well, it's definitely the supply and demand is creating a false sense of security.

Yes, it's not happening. The profits aren't happening because we're doing better.

But just think like if people were paying $15,000 over sticker because of supply and demand, wouldn't we then expect that we would invest some of that money in making it easy for them when the car breaks or needs service. Like wouldn't we invest something in the relationship after the fact? Like we need to think about the automotive industry more. Like we're selling printers and we make our money on the ink cartridge. Not that it's a one time thing. Like we're in a tourist town and they buy a burger and we're never going to see them again.

Yeah, it's a good point.

Like we're a hamburger stand off the side of the road in a tourist town that gets busy in the summer and we're closed the other six months.

And they got to buy the hamburger because they're hungry and they're there and they got kids. But it's not because they like us.

Yeah, we're just the necessary evil.

Why doesn't anybody want to talk about it?

I'm not sure.

You got really, really quiet.

You're on a rant a little bit.

But I'm curious about your thoughts.

Well, I think that.

It'S really easy for you to go and have these experiences back to back that you do. I feel like I've been places and I've seen, I've seen genuine concern for the clients. Unfortunately, it's the minority, not the majority of the industry. But I think that you coming off.

Of those two things, I'm not saying that there aren't good dealerships out there.

Well, I do think that those people.

Are, I would say, as an industry. As an industry, is there any leadership at all that's talking about how we need to stop being adversarial, we need to have some standards and we need to change the way we think and we approach customers.

Well, I think it has to. I agree with you. It has to come from a really, really high level. And I think that maybe that's the thing that happens in 2022, is that there's someone that's going to come and say that in order for us to save the industry, it's got to be about the customer. I believe that that could be a case because I think that as you know, the supply and demand starts to level off, we're going to realize that there are just some people that did it so wrong that we're going to lose a ton of customers. And if we're going to get them back, we got to be proactive. I don't think we're the only ones having this conversation. I just don't think it's being said at the right arenas. I think we need to talk louder.

I think that in the sense that I have friends with very expensive fast cars, like we're like McLaren's Ferraris, Lambos that go very, very fast, that would be considered the fastest cars on the road, and that Tesla makes them look like a Ford Pinto. And that shift and power in the industry.

Is only perceived by the consumer. But everybody inside of the industry seems to think of it as something either they don't understand or something they're scared to face, but they don't understand that it's shifting.

And it's already kind of shifted. That, you know, I don't believe it's too late, but I do believe two years from now it's going to be too late.

Yeah, I think that action now is needed. But the scary thing that you're talking about, especially with Tesla, is so now we've kind of pointed out one that it's easy to buy and to that in some cases you can make a case it's a superior product. Like that's, that's going to be really tough to compete with. It's not just that it's a good product, it's that it's fricking easy to buy a car.

But we're letting Tesla make it easier to buy because it's not like we can't do that.

I think we can learn from them for sure.

Like, I posed this question, I think, on a panel with Ben Stark or whatever that I was on, and I. Or we were talking about, would you rather have Amazon's AI selling your cars or your salespeople?

I'm all Amazon AI.

Yeah. And most people are too, even though they're like, well, I hope my sales manager doesn't listen to this, but Tesla is kind of already proving that you don't even need that. Right. And so it, we could do that. We could make the experience not be this content, you know, this adversarial situation. Right.

We, we also could fix the service part and we could make service a priority. We could make the relationship with the consumer a priority. We could do all the things that Tesla is doing better, except for maybe we can't get an electric car to go or a car to go 0 to 60 in 1.8 seconds. But that should be an anomaly. That shouldn't be the 10th thing on the stack of disadvantages that we have.

Right.

Like, Tesla could have their advantages, but why are we handing them all of the advantages?

Yeah.

Why aren't we making service in the customer experience something that, that they perceive? Right. Like, that's the thing when, when people are debating the idea of the repair authorization is the thing that's missed there more than anything is not that, you know, it's saving the tech time. It's not that you're telling the truth. It's not all those other things. It's that at the end of the day, the customer came there to get a problem fixed. And when you do that and there's less calls and less amounts going up, right? Like, okay, well, we started with diagnosis and they don't know what that means. And then now you need this, and now you need this, or whatever. Their perception is that it was easy because there were less back and forth. We made it easy. Why aren't we, why aren't we spending a lot of time and a lot of effort as an industry on how to make things easier for consumers and taking our advantage back? Why are we giving the advantage away? I do not for the life of me understand because Tesla in a lot of ways isn't doing things that we couldn't do as an industry. They're not. It's just because we are stuck in our ways and we're stubborn and we don't want to talk about it, we don't want to think about it. And in a lot of ways we're entitled. Like, we're those rich entitled kids that are, we just think like, oh, it'll be okay forever. And because we have money, we deserve it. But the truth of the matter is is that mindset is going to be our downfall. That entitlement and that, you know, I said, I said it in my State of the Union is we used to be an industry that was progress. Like we were on the cutting edge of industry, of design.

Other industries look to us to say, okay, what can we learn from them? And do it in our thing. You're right.

That is, and what, you know, this. So I've been driving that Land Rover for a day. I got it yesterday. I've been driving it for a day. Like the technology and that thing's pretty cool. A lot of, there's a lot of thoughtful things going on in the design. The, you know, the WI fi, the integration, like the ride, the, the, the fit and finish, like it's, it's a high end luxury vehicle that is fun. But the, the, it is clouded by the, the, the experience trying to buy it. It is going to be clouded by going in and taking it in for service because it's going to be a flipping nightmare. Because those service departments, probably the, you know, the ones here, they probably need 30 techs and I bet they have five. I mean, and the five that they have hate their jobs. And they got, you know, two service advisors that are making the appointments, trying to call everybody back, dealing with parts. Like, we aren't making it a priority because we're more worried about headcount than we are the customer experience and, and where we are in the, you know, in the industry. And, you know, these companies like Tesla and Lucid come in and they're willing to lose money for a long time to gain market share. And they're doing it like, they're doing it like, you know, Bezos and Amazon invested a lot of money and didn't, didn't they? Didn't Car and Driver just name that truck the loose or it's not Lucid Rivian? Didn't they name it Truck of the Year?

I think so.

Like, what a fix that is. Like, how can that be Truck of the Year when they're not even on sale yet?

Like, that is like, that's marketing and controlling a narrative. Like, I have never seen that. The Truck of the Year is something that isn't readily available. I mean, aren't they only making like a couple thousand of those at first for consumers?

Yeah, that's pretty interesting.

Explain to me how that's possible.

The fix is in.

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