The Automotive Industry Is Treating Symptoms And Not The Cause
Chris Collins argues that the automotive industry repeatedly treats symptoms rather than root causes. He criticizes common dealer practices like reliance on scripted advisor training instead of fixing systems and increasing technician capacity, and he urges dealers to proactively embrace EV infrastructure (chargers, showroom space, nav-map presence) rather than resist costly manufacturer directives. Collins also places the shift toward EVs in global context, noting China’s aggressive EV policy and larger new-car market as a driving force manufacturers respond to.
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Foreign. Let's talk about this in the sense of what is really going on here. So what, you know, a lot of these comments come from people in our industry that are service managers, service advisors, dealers. Right. Are are commenting here. And most of the comments are.
Anti electric cars in the sense of radio range anxiety, structure, infrastructure, that sort of thing. And this is where our industry constantly missteps and becomes reactive instead of being ahead of the curve. And so there, there's also some comments in there like, oh, you know, where I live, nobody buys electric or you know, in our, in our rural area, it's not a thing, that sort of thing. And so we, we kind of like react to the situation and we have an opinion and we look at it in, you know, reference to how it affects us personally. Right. But in a sense what we're doing again as an industry and pay attention to what I'm about to say because we have a long track record of doing this. And I don't, you know, if you're the CEO of GM or you're running a, you know, a little shop somewhere, is that what we tend to do is treat the symptom, not the cause in these situations. So we've been talking about this a lot lately. Internally is a lot of the training that we do treats the symptom, not the cause. So we'll have a dealer or a service manager say, you know, we, we need advisor training and does your advisor training have scripts?
The that the idea is that we're going to have advisors memorize scripts and that's going to make them better instead of, you know, making them understand what we're trying to do. It's in essence, we're giving them fish instead of teaching them how to fish. We're not fixing their mindset, we're not getting them to want to do better. We're giving them a script in the script. But scripts don't work in the sense that I could deliver a script and I could say things the way I say them, but that exact same thing wouldn't be as effective if Christian did it because he's not me. And it comes across as a script. You can tell when you call places that they're reading a script. Right. We've done BDC training with scripts and it takes a while for somebody to be good at it. And most of the time when they get good at it, they actually change it a little bit to fit their, their personality. So we want them to understand the spirit of what we're trying to do. But script same Thing with oh, train my advisors. Well, training your advisors a hundred percent of the time in the last, you know, probably three years is treating the symptom, not the cause in the sense that most of the time what you need is you need more texts. I don't think we've gone into a dealership where we didn't need more techs. If we train your advisors and they sell more, they, they aren't going to be able to get the work done, which is going to teach them learned helplessness, going to affect their self esteem, it's going to compound the problem and it's going to piss customers off. So you know, what we need to do is we need to fix your systems, we need to add more capacity in the production part of the business and then we can train the advisors. But by the time we get to training the advisors, that really isn't as important because the floodgates have opened up and the advisors can do what they wanted to do all along and it ends up, it wasn't advisor training that it was our biggest need, it was production, how the work was dispatched, all of that, that really at the end of the day fixes the problem. So now as an industry, when we're talking about electric vehicles is we're talking about, oh, I won't own one, I don't care, the infrastructure, whatever. And I get this question often from dealers and they'll say, Chris, what are your other Volkswagen dealers or what are your other GM dealers doing? Because the manufacturer, I got this from an Audi dealer just the other day. The manufacturer wants me to spend 150, $200,000 to put in chargers and a dedicated section to electric vehicles in the showroom. And they're like, I don't want to do it, the manufacturer doesn't know what they're doing, etc. Etc. And once again, or talking about the symptom. So now if we understand.
That an issue here is the infrastructure and dealers are losing and service departments are losing their equity with consumers and the, the need and cars are more reliable than ever before, would we not try to put ourselves in front of the consumer by having the infrastructure come to us? Would we not install charging stations and be on every nav map out there and make it easy, have you know, a situation where they can get coffee, where they feel different about us as a dealership, make sure that they work, that the charging stations work. Would we not want to be the solution and the answer instead of talking about change and the symptom and we don't Want like we have an opportunity right now as an industry to endear consumers to us to figure out how we can be the answer. Because if we want to sit around and, you know, if you would like, Christian and I can do an episode where we sit here and debate about whether electric cars are good for the environment or not. We can sit here and debate whether manufacturers should be making electric cars or not. But. But the trains left the station. And so in a sense, do we want to get ahead of this or do we want to sit around and talk about what's already in our future? Like, I remember being a speaker pre Covid. So it's a couple years ago now in Vegas at an automotive accounting.
Meeting. So it was accountants for the automotive industry and dealers. And there was one of the top brokers on stage talking about selling dealerships and the buy Sell and the different public groups that were buying. And he was talking about how.
People are waiting on buy sells for Volkswagen dealerships because Volkswagen had announced that half of their lineup would be electric by 2025 or something to that effect. And he's talking about it like Volkswagen is pushing the electric cars on everybody because they woke up one day and that's what they wanted to do. And not at all considering the global climate of we, we have this ego in America or, you know, we're number one and we are number one in a lot of areas. And we do have an incredible system here of capitalism. And, you know, it's. There's no better country, I don't think, then. Then the US or Canada, you know, or, you know, the UK too, I enjoy. But I mean, I love America and I'm biased in that, in that sense. But what we're losing sight of is that the leadership in China.
Said that by 2026, every car sold there has to be electric. And now China sells more than two times the amount of new cars than the US sells. So if we're selling 14 million new cars a year, down from 18, so our new car sales are shrinking because of parents like you that don't raise their kid to love cars. So you're not out in the garage with your son rebuilding engines, right? You're buying in video games and he's playing on a, you know, what are those, Wiis or Nintendos? Yeah, he's playing on the switch. So where a lot of us were building things and taking things apart, these kids, because of your bad parenting and Christian especially, you're. They're online and they have no connection whatsoever to cars as a part of their identity. It's not something that they've invested in emotionally. And the average age of a kid getting a license is, you know, longer and longer. They just don't care. Yeah, they don't care. They're not buying cars. So our new car sales are shrinking. Different in China. Their middle class is growing. Those kids are out rebuilding cars on the weekend. Like, you know, they're doing what we were doing 30 years ago in a sense. And so they're selling close to 30 million new cars. You're the president of Volkswagen and you're like, okay, so the number one consumer of new cars has said that we cannot sell any gasoline powered combustion engine cars by 2026.
I have to retrofit my plants to build electric cars. Now am I going to go open more plants for Americans because they don't want electric cars? No, no. Hey America, you're going to get some electric cars. And then, you know, you also, then what those manufacturers do is they lobby our politicians which are glad to take their money and things like Biden putting it into the infrastructure deal. The, the government is going to buy all these electric cars. Like something you're like, what? Hold on, wait, what? Like, you know, you see it now at the top of, of our politics that the manufacturers have done a good job lobbying instead of trying to change consumers mind, they're just going to make it a part of what's going to happen. And so we could sit and talk about corrupt politics. We could sit and I mean, but won't get us anywhere. Once again, we're talking about the symptom, not the cause. So as leaders in our industry, what we need to do is we need to say, well, how can we use this to our advantage? Thanks so much for watching this clip of Service Driving Revolution. We're uploading new stuff every day so make sure you subscribe and click the bell icon so you don't miss out. If you have a question you'd like us to answer on the show, call 8333 Ask SDR and we'll answer your question on the show. That's 8333 Ask SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to to offers.chriscollinsinc.com now that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video.
