In another high tech collab announcement Nvidia and MediaTek announce a landmark collaboration to power the next generation of vehicle infotainment systems. With AI and immersive capabilities, the partnership aims to revolutionize the auto industry with a focus on video streaming, gaming, and interactive driver communication
A suggestion by a disabled Steallantis employee led to the company’s upgrade of over 1.8 million vehicles to issue hazard alerts, highlighting the company's drive towards safety and innovation. This new feature named “HELP: Hazard Enhanced Location Protocol” warns drivers of imminent threats like approaching firetrucks and ambulances
Cavender Auto recently participated in the United Way Shoebox Program, setting a store record by filling 800 shoeboxes filled with essential items for families in need. The collective effort involved Cavender Toyota, Audi Dominion, Cavender Carquest, CAVCO Insurance, and the Headquarters teams. Owner Rick Cavender shared the achievement via LinkedIn, highlighting the importance of community support.
Unknown: 0:00all right
Paul Daly: 0:27
oh my gosh, how can I forget the trigger pad?
Kyle Mountsier: 0:31
How can I forget the trigger pad write a memorial day weekend happen
Paul Daly: 0:35
just like everybody else. Today we're gonna talk about infotainment boosts employee suggestions helping and dealers making a difference.Because that's what we always talk about here, Kyle,
Kyle Mountsier: 0:45
look every single day, every day, there are dealers making a difference in the community is like just look around you. It's an unbelievable so like to highlight it. We like yeah, we are gonna
Paul Daly: 1:02
talk about that. We hope you had an awesome Memorial Day weekend. Kyle and I were catching up on the way end and we did a lot of nothing. A lot of
Unknown: 1:11
nothing. Yeah, my family was super chill. It was gorgeous in Nashville. So we just took the time to play on the playground at the house and you know, play on the playground and the neighborhood and play on the playground one city away. We like it all the toward a playgrounds toward a playground that Nashville.
Paul Daly: 1:32
That's amazing. Yeah,we just stayed stayed home in our little in our little corner of upstate New York. We get the old pontoon boat out for the weekend and the weather couldn't have been better. That's the little Memorial Day Parade,grill the bunch, spend some time outside. We hope all of you did,too. If you were open on Memorial Day, we hope you had an awesome sales day. I bet you did. Because when the weather's good, people are out walking around, especially those who are looking for a good deal or want to buy a car. And if you had the day off, we hope you showed up nice and refreshed, ready to serve some people because we're on the homestretch of may already
Unknown: 2:03
it's like that simply shoot on Thursday that slingshot have the three day weekend and the two day like just rockin sales and service close. So
Paul Daly: 2:12
it is June. Good night, June and we're in it. We just released a new episode of auto collabs which is the podcast Kyle myself and Michael Cirillo host it's always so much fun. I think Rick Reichert on don't really seem yesterday or on Friday,
Unknown: 2:28
or it's out on Friday,on Friday, it's out it's ready to go. You can find it on all the podcast, it's fun one or so tube as Oh, T u dot v, if you want to check out the the video version.
Paul Daly: 2:39
So I also have a ton of amazing feedback coming in from the more than cars, pilot episode launch, you can go to more than cars.tv to watch it.And check out what we're doing with crowdfunding. Because this will be the first crowdfunding project ever is in retail automotive. And if you can be a part of that if you can just give a little we need to get Season One funded, to again,talk about all the awesome things dealers are doing to millions of people, not just the people in our industry, but also the people outside our industry,which is kind of the real goal,right?
Unknown: 3:11
There's a perception thing we're trying to change we try and shift that around rewrite it just a little bit.
Paul Daly: 3:16
I would say we're already changing it right like we're trying to put a big fat dent in it but even like wearing these more love people more than you love cars, shirts. Every single time I wear this, people have nothing to do with the auto industry stopped me and asked me what it's about.
Unknown: 3:30
And they're at the airport, turning me around, like what is happening, you know, all the time,
Paul Daly: 3:35
all the time.Alright, let's talk about some news. We got a few things going on Europe a little bit slow coming out on Memorial Day weekend. But speaking about things that are anything but slow. Segway anything but slow and another high tech collaboration announcement,Nvidia and Media Tech announced a landmark collaboration to power the next generation of get this vehicle infotainment systems talked about this similar one a little while ago,but it's just seems to be doubling down with AI and immersive capabilities. The partnership aims to revolutionize the auto industry with a focus on video streaming,gaming, and interactive driving communication. So that means like, yes, you're talking to your car for real, not the dumb talking to your car that happens in vehicle infotainment systems now, where you just end up like yelling at it, where you press the button, and you wait three seconds, and it's like, Oh, tell it something. gets it wrong.Yeah, yeah. So you can't stop it midstream. So basically, the partnership was unveiled at Computex technology trade show in Taipei, where media tech is going to integrate Nvidia graphic processing unit chipsets into the the product that media tech makes so they're using video technology in the media tech product. And now this stuff used to be just like for real high end vehicles like Landrovers Mercedes Benz but now they're this partnership they say is going to bring it to a whole lot more vehicles. You know, because there are a lot of segments that that don't have this as a part of it first products in vehicles slated to be released in 2025.
Unknown: 5:08
I love this. Yeah, you know how I feel about this,this, this, in my opinion is the way that automakers need to be looking to like, make sure that they're aligned with the partnerships like this that are taking place Nvidia is probably the leading graphics provider with graphics chips in like across computers. And like everything you use from technology, there's a good chance Nvidia is powering some level of the video processing power. So for Media Tech, to put that into their digital displays, and start to display stuff that is more like, like what we experienced and the rest of the technology that we use,kudos, I can't wait to see more of these collabs pop up, I think automakers who are smart to connect with this and let those power their infotainment systems are going to see higher rates of adoption of their technology and their vehicles. This is a really, really key thing.Because historically, you've looked at vehicles as like, how how do they look exterior? And how do they look interior? That those are kind of the two primary things. And then like third piece was what technology?can I access like what like technology pieces, but we're gonna see more and more people making buying decisions based on the infotainment system and the software provided, because the software updates that are going to be required or available,need to have like core hardware components, sorry, hardware is what they're going to be looking at, because the software layered into that hardware is going to be more and more complex. So the hardware needs to be correct. So that software upgrades can can come along quickly. Because that's what people are going to be thinking about less and less about the hardware surrounding like vehicle mechanics, or like look and feel right. So
Paul Daly: 7:05
yeah, I mean, my 16year old son is like just in the in that moment right now. And he's starting to look at look at like, hey, what kind of vehicle might I want? And the technology is definitely very, very, very high unless because a lot like it's fun watching it from his perspective, because like a lot of the small size like the small and midsize SUVs, they look very, very similar. Right. So it's like, oh, what does the what does the entertainment look like? What does the interface look like? Is it fast? Right? Is it fast? Imagine
Unknown: 7:34
a world where like, a vehicle details page looks more like a computer shopping page on apple.com. With the spec lineups, right. Oh, like, you see, like the ram and the process. Think about that. Yeah,I mean, that's that response time for me to do? Yeah,
Paul Daly: 7:50
I think one that most people overlook is response time. Because with Gen Z coming up in a gaming environment in a discord environment, they're used to really commanding their visual world, like what's going on on the screens, like very,very quickly. And when there's like a half a second lag between like you pressing the button and the screen immediately responding, tries to bonkers
Unknown: 8:10
response time refresh rates, screen, you know, like screen dpi, all of that type of stuff I think is going to be really sure is and is like we're gonna have to look at new structured data embedded into vehicle information because of technology. And they're
Paul Daly: 8:26
gonna figure out which one they want on Reddit.So it is just so you know,speaking of response time,segue. It's a good one. So fun one, I like a lot about this next story, a suggestion by a disabled sta Lantis employee led to the company's upgrade of over1.8 million vehicles to issue hazard alerts highlighting the company's drive towards safety and innovation. The new feature is called Help, which stands for hazard enhanced location protocol. Basically, what it does is if there's an emergency vehicle, there's this, I can't remember the cloud is called,it's just like a safety cloud.Well, fire safety cloud platform has got it. When there's like an emergency vehicle, or potentially soon, you know,construction zones, there's an alert that gets sent out that if the vehicle is enabled, it can absorb those and within, you know, 15 or 20 seconds being seeing the vehicle, it'll actually let you know, on the infotainment system that hey,there's a hazard vehicle around now this driver almost hit an emergency vehicle because they couldn't hear it and they didn't know it was there. And so it's the Lantis did a really cool thing by setting setting up they already had this in place which is called a startup internal competition where people can make suggestions and recommendations. So this came from a real word such a situation, it was suggested it was adopted. And you know, who was it we got a quote here.Turbo va livanski. Their manager of Global Innovation said this really hit at our heartstrings and they said we need to implement this and do something for our customers. So this is in full effect they said it can be implemented via to what you were just saying over the air update.So there's so much so much about the story to love.
Unknown: 10:06
Yeah, there's a lot to love. And one, like I, you know,I like to talk about the accessibility on the web, but accessibility across everything it's like, what happens is, it makes it easier for everybody how many times, you know, if you're slightly hard of hearing,and you can't hear that, it's a massive, massive help. But even just like people that have great hearing, or great eyesight, to like, you never know like radios, blasting, kids are yelling in the backseat,anything like that. And all of a sudden that that that quickly approaching, you know, on the side street where the where the audio is not directly lined up with your car is approaching,especially in these cars that have a lot of insulation from road noise, and you just don't hear it coming on the cross street. So I think this is a massive innovation, and probably clears up, you know, just accidents maybe makes it easier for even easier for emergency vehicles to get where they're going because they have less need to slow down because pas are cleared a lot easily, a lot more easily. So kudos to scientists for listening to employee putting into action working through the r&d phase.And I can't wait to kind of see this rolled out and see, I'm sure we'll see some like YouTube reactions from it, we'll have to track this story and kind of see what happens out there and reward experiences. Yeah, for sure.
Paul Daly: 11:25
Speaking of real world experiences,
Unknown: 11:27
segue. Hey, Rick Cavinder recently shared on LinkedIn a really, really cool thing that Cavinder Otto is doing there, they are working with United Way shoe box program. And they have set a store record for their stores.They recently filled 800 shoe boxes filled with essential items for families in need.Basically, the collective effort in involved cabinet, a Toyota,Adi, Dominion Cavinder,carquest, cavco, insurance and the headquarters teams. And like, look 800 shoe boxes of essential items for our community, that's a massive impact. And I love you know,working with United Way you working with the community,bringing around a little healthy competition between sub entities of a group. And then to put that out in the community. Kudos to that to the Cavinder Auto Group.This is I don't
Paul Daly: 12:23
want to skip over the the importance of these things that we talked about. And if you don't get our daily email, we do try to include a lot of these just quick shot hits, you can get it at a soda.com We've internally decided we're going to celebrate as many of these things as possible, because they happen so frequently, and it's easy to forget about them. And you know, we've had some conversations with some dealers,believe it or not, who are like,we don't know that we really want to like talk about these things too much, right? Because if they're just awesome people,right? They just like, No, we're just serving, we're just giving back to give back not so that people pay attention to us. And we argue, hey, every time we talk about one of these things,it inspires somebody else to do more of the same or encourages them that they're on the right path, or they're not alone. And so like, when we look at this,yeah, we should all stand up and applaud anyone who's doing something like this. But as an industry, we should talk about these things even more. And then here's the thing.
Unknown: 13:22
Don't be afraid to copy and paste the recipe of someone else. Please do feel like you need to just come up with some brand new way to do things that nobody else has ever thought of.Like, okay, if 800 dealerships in the country just were like,hey, maybe I've got a United Way shoe box program locally, they do rung up the United Way people I'm sure they'd be ready to go.Imagine United Way being like,man, we basically funded a country. essential items through the auto industry don't know how that happened. Like, oh, because Cavinder kicked it off. And we just all fell in line. Don't Don't be afraid to just match right? Like do something that meets the heart of you or your people organization or as an employee but at the same time if you see something cool that someone is doing, like we highlighted in our Saturday podcast, what the crew up at West herded with the little, the little try the little, the little cars, go, go rip it,
Paul Daly: 14:27
do it to all day big deal. And the nice thing is that every dealership is going to give you the playbook. Right like you don't have to go through all the hassle of just like oh, how should we set this up? How they're going to be like here's how we did it. Here's what we stopped doing because you need a contact at Westar or Cavinder please let us know
Unknown: 14:44
anywhere let us know we'll dial them up get them on a20 minute phone call and give you the playbook guarantee it seen it happen.
Paul Daly: 14:50
Oh man, well look,it's already feels like we're gonna wrap up may well, we're gonna get going in June. Well,and we're gonna make a big, fat,dense, big fat den. In the public's perception of what an auto dealer really is