Car Buying Harder In October, Cybertruck Day Supply, OpenAI’s Operator

Paul J Daly  0:00  
Thursday, November 14, got that record on the road caster today. Today, we're talking about car buying being harder in October. Cyber truck available like now in inventory. And open a eyes. New operator. The people really want an operator. Operator, agent, disruptor of your life.

Kyle Mountsier  0:18  
I feel like, I feel like we got some cheeky ones we get to talk about today. Thursday is going to get a little chippy on the show.

Paul J Daly  0:25  
We yesterday, we released more than cars episode four. Thank you to everyone who was able to join us on the right live stream. It was a riot in the comments. If you haven't seen it, go to more than cars.tv it's right there front and center. You got to see episode four. It is so much fun. We'll be getting great feedback from it. That thing just moves like before you know it, it's over. Go check it out and tell us what you think, because this is just the beginning of what's happening in this industry, where people are finding out the truth of what's actually happening inside dealerships all across the country. And you should be a part of it, especially if you're in this ecosystem. You believe the

Kyle Mountsier  0:59  
same flavor actually don't go to more than cars.tv. Okay? Prime Video, well, the Amazon Prime, your prime app, any of those places type in more than cars, it'll be the first search result. It's there already on. Prime video, if you do us the favor, pay the buck 99 look. If you're really hurting for the buck 99 call your boy. Okay, and I'll figure it out, but show Amazon Prime that we need to be on that ad supported tier as an industry so that other people can watch it that are outside of the industry, and see what the great things that are going on. And that's

Paul J Daly  1:33  
right, like, that's, that's the kind of thing where you can share with friends and family, then on prime, because they're not going to pay $1.99 but you are because you care enough about it, and it's $1.99 I don't do we even get any of that money. Like, no,

Kyle Mountsier  1:44  
I don't get a time of it. You kidding me?

Unknown Speaker  1:47  
It's like a distributor fee and all that stuff. No, no. This

Kyle Mountsier  1:49  
is just, we get one penny per per download. This

Paul J Daly  1:52  
is just to make a little bit of noise. How much we've made. But, like, how much have we made? $12.40 Hey, it's almost enough for Chick fil A meal, almost enough. But listen, listen, if you could do that, go to more than Amazon Prime or Prime Video. This is a way that we can hand raises an industry and builds momentum behind that. If you don't want to do that, that's cool, too. You can go watch it for free on YouTube, or more than cards.tv we don't want to put a barrier there. But you know, if you're if you're a believer, you have $1.99 to make sure Amazon knows. You know, the next time I see you, I give you two bucks.

Kyle Mountsier  2:27  
That's That's exactly right, totally. Will we

Paul J Daly  2:30  
have a webinar coming up this tomorrow, this Friday, tomorrow, at 1pm It's with our friends at stream companies talking about auditing your 2024 ad performance. And it's a part one of a part two. It's going to be analyzing it. Here are tips on how to analyze it. Part two is going to be like all right. Now let's hear some tips on planning 2025 so you can just go to asotu.com right there above fold. You can sign up for the webinar be a part of the live part version. You can heckle us. It's so much fun. Or you'll get the recording when you're done. And I'll try to make this industry better. One short, fun webinar at a time.

Unknown Speaker  3:03  
Hey, there you go. All right, let's

Paul J Daly  3:06  
talk about some news. According to a recent CDK global study, shoppers struggled a bit more in October with finding the right car as inventory disruptions such as stop sales model turnovers, natural disasters did take a toll on EOP or ease of purchase. That's what we're talking about in this whole study, 80% 87% of buyers reported an easy car buying experience, down from 89% 87 sounds good until it was 89 last month, August, was a record. 93% so we're going in the wrong direction. Only 49% of shoppers could buy their preferred vehicle on the lot. That's down from 54% in September with the test drive ease also slipping to 78% which is a rare dip below 80% complaints about quote, too many things to choose from, excessive paperwork helped drop that ease of purchase rating, the time it took to finalize it purchases. Here's another one. Increased for 32% of buyers, up from 25% in September, only 15% of people experience quicker purchase. So ease of purchase, it's going the wrong way, folks,

Kyle Mountsier  4:14  
we're all going the wrong way. What happened? Okay, new things happening. I think some people are already prepping, like on the ease of purchase, the actual paperwork side, people have been prepping for the cars rule, and paperwork has entered the ecosystem, ladies and gentlemen, yes, I think that that's happening. I do think that, you know, one of the benefits of limited inventory is reducing decision fatigue. It's like, you get that one or that one, which one you want, and now you increase decision fatigue, you increase availability. This is like universal psychology. It is tougher, and so drawing people down a path, whether online or in the showroom, that reduces choice intelligently, actually could help speed up the buying process. So thinking about how you're making that introduction. On the showroom, how you're, you know, giving the customer exactly what they want when they want it, so that they're able to pick and choose the right thing without having to go through the decision fatigue of, you know, there's, there's honestly just more cars available, yeah. I

Paul J Daly  5:15  
mean, if you're thinking, you'd be thinking in, you know, past thinking was, oh, they have one, I'll take it versus now, like they have this one, but I know there's another one, this one, but, and I bet that exists somewhere else, I'm gonna keep looking for it. Hey, I do want to point out something here. Our friends at CDK had a bit of a rough year. So I just want to thank them, for them, like, you know, give continuing to put out good tribute to the industry. Absolutely good research, valuable for dealers and so thank you. Absolutely right.

Kyle Mountsier  5:47  
You're so right about that. I'm saying, Yeah, saying, speaking

Paul J Daly  5:50  
of things, we're so right about, if you want a Tesla side control, blooded,

Unknown Speaker  5:57  
the Segway was cold ball just,

Paul J Daly  5:59  
it's just the truth. Tesla's begun now offering cyber trucks directly from new vehicle get this inventory, indicating its once massive reservation backlog has dwindled. US buyers can now order and receive a cyber truck in roughly one week, suggesting that Tesla's exhausted the backlog. Despite over a million initial reservations, Tesla has delivered approximately 50,000 cyber trucks in the US so far. Was that 5% 5% Yeah, changes in the production model, higher price, lower range than originally promised. Probably contribute, I'm gonna say, have contribute. Contribute price, I think is the biggest Well, I mean, initially it was like 60 grand and 500 miles of range, and now it's 100 grand and 300 miles of range. Like, it's a difference that changes. Tesla's expanded the deliveries to Mexico and Canada to rise matching capacity. But you know, there still can be like, Hey, we were the number one selling electric pickup truck last quarter.

Kyle Mountsier  6:51  
The number one selling early adopters will always be fast and furious. The question is, can they hit the second round of the bell curve? Right? How do they compare? As you know, the first rung of early adopters kind of runs out, and you run into a competitive matrix across all trucks that are EVs. It's going to be a really interesting next couple quarters for them on on whether or not that demand, especially in the US side, is there now they have started producing the lower cost models, right? So they're getting, well, which

Paul J Daly  7:23  
is the other 60 grand, or something, 68 grand. Can you imagine that buying a cyber truck like today, and then, like, in a few months, there's gonna be one that's $30,000 cheaper, that's just a little bit different,

Kyle Mountsier  7:34  
hair, different, without a badge on it? Yeah, right, yeah. It's a really interesting conundrum. But I think it's, you know, they're, they're honestly doing the apple play when it comes to cars, like Apple always makes the premier thing look the best, look that look like that you want. Yeah, you know. But is the demand there? That'll be the big question mark. Hey, all I can tell you is, look, if you want to drive one in a week, you can drive one in a week. You just, yeah, that's a big deal. That's kind of crazy. That's

Paul J Daly  8:03  
interesting. You mentioned that about Apple because they did not do that with the Mac Mini.

Kyle Mountsier  8:08  
Oh, right. They came in swinging low, and it's amazing.

Paul J Daly  8:11  
And they made it the most affordable, you know, like dollars per performance out there. And you think, if you know, and granted, they've been doing this for a while, right? The Cyber truck is the first swing. But you know, if that cyber truck, the one that they're making, about to release at 60 something grand, that would have sent demand through the roof, I think so. However, they wouldn't have been able to deliver on that demand, therefore disappointing a lot of people. So, like, I wonder what the players you

Kyle Mountsier  8:39  
wonder if, like all those people that said nah, to the original reservation

Paul J Daly  8:44  
almost back through it's, it's literally almost half price, because some of those were 119 right? And they come out out of the gate at 60, grand 60, between 60 and 70. So I'm sure they got the follow up mechanism on that, right? Yeah. Now they've actually had a little more time to dial in manufacturing. Paul, you're Paul, you're about

Kyle Mountsier  9:00  
to get like, an email every day, being like, you want to buy the cheaper one. Hey, remember the one you

Paul J Daly  9:05  
turned us down and made the post about try it again. Speaking of trying it again, I don't know if this is exciting or terrifying.

Kyle Mountsier  9:15  
This is this one's a little wild. Obviously, we're going to see this across a lot of different companies, but open AI is set to release a new i ai quote agent, code named operator, designed to take actions on users computers like writing code or booking travel. It's expected to launch as a research preview so similar to like the current oh one mini and oh one preview in January. Operator will be available through open API. Open AI's API first allowing developers to integrate it into various applications. Obviously, a bunch of people like Google's Gemini and Microsoft's copilot are already doing some of these agent things. But the the what this brings is autonomy. To AI at a level that we haven't seen in the past. And so open AI, Sam Altman hits it at this shift, calling it the next giant breakthrough in an AI, in AI during a recent reddit AMA. So ask me anything. So he's eye on it well. So, so

Paul J Daly  10:20  
this is the next phase right where agents and Steve Greenfield mentioned this in the article he just wrote for our new AI newsletter. By the way, if you haven't gotten it, ASOTU has released a new weekly AI curated email called auto industry.ai. Right there way to be on the trigger with that. Nathan, auto industry AI, sign up for that once a week. We're going to give you a curated list note. And Steve Greenfield listed AI agents as a second step in AI deployment through companies. This is basically a massive game changer like this is far beyond just improving a model a little bit. This is now having a thing go carry out a task for you, without you having to sit there and prompt the back and forth and coming back with a result.

Kyle Mountsier  10:59  
Right? Yep. And this, the interesting thing for me here is, when you look at what, like Claude or co pilot or Gemini, are, you know, are their penetration into the market, they just have less penetration. And so you see less people using agents. They're obviously only opening this to the API, which most of the public is not utilizing the API. They're using the UI interface. But as it comes to the UI interface, you're going to see more daily and monthly active users using agents than ever before, and probably less educated people that are utilizing agents. That's where the question mark comes into me is like the Gen pop ready for a lot more use of

Paul J Daly  11:42  
AI. No, we were talking yesterday about the bell curve of AI. And, like, we're, like, thinking, like, two, three years out as we're kind of, like, mulling it over, going over, and you were like, dude, most people couldn't even, like, do some basic things on this right now.

Kyle Mountsier  11:56  
No basic prompting is tough for most people.

Paul J Daly  11:58  
Let me ask you this, so how do you how do you actually get access and use the API.

Kyle Mountsier  12:01  
So there's a, there's a totally separate website that is dedicated to API. It's pretty easy to create, yep, but then you have to have some developer knowledge in how to interact with you. Can

Paul J Daly  12:15  
I have aI develop me something that uses that API?

Kyle Mountsier  12:19  
Yes, absolutely. Now you need to understand GitHub a little bit, or get repo or, you know, or something like that, to be able to, like, deploy, okay, that stuff, yep, but okay, you could probably, you know, through two or three days of prompting, AI, get it to help. You're

Paul J Daly  12:35  
kind of handy, right? This is like, when Home Depot is like, you can do it. We can help, right? Like so if you got the friend right, this is a you can do it. We can help. Moment, maybe you can get early access to use the agent. But if you're thinking about that, if you're thinking about that, you can figure it out. If you're not thinking about it, don't worry about it. We'll help you figure it out. Subscribe to auto industry.ai. Get your nerdy side there and just get the feel good. This is why the industry is great. At Amazon Prime video search more than cars that pay the dollar 99 for crying out loud, you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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