Live from CES with Steve Greenfield, Return-uary

Paul J Daly  0:01  
Good morning, Tuesday. It's Tuesday, January 7. The week is normal, Monday, Tuesday, etc. We have Steve Greenfield live from CES going to be our on site correspondent. We're going to talk about that and some other things as we ease into Tuesday. Monday. You were like,

Unknown Speaker  0:17  
you were like, Monday, because we've had 33 Mondays, and Monday

Paul J Daly  0:20  
we're here and we're together and we're on time. It's Monday. Yeah, that's right, Monday. Actually, Monday. I feel like it was a strong start to like it was a good

Kyle Mountsier  0:29  
I like, I had some conversations across the industry, actually, like I had some random conversations with people on different corners of the US yesterday. And like, the January vibe is good. I think people came off a strong December and and rolling into January, people feeling good about the climate, the sales climate, and just what's going to happen going into this year.

Paul J Daly  0:52  
It feels good. Feels in January. Hey, I have something fun to share. I haven't even Oh, do it? Oh no. Showed you this year. Oh, I'm so excited. We're gonna be rolling it at the NADA show, super heavy. And we decided this year, I think the ASOTU has to, like, roll a little more uniform, right? We already are, like special forces. Now we're gonna look like it. And so we got the special gold. Oh my goodness, that. Are you kidding me? Black. It's metallic gold. You can't really see it in the video, but it kind of sparkles a little

Unknown Speaker  1:21  
well, that is, well, I mean, you know, New Orleans, yeah, and then don't,

Paul J Daly  1:24  
like, dare saints, don't. I'm gonna say, Don't you dare say that word, literally, saints colors. How did we do that? You know, Nathan and I had a hard time swallowing that one. I was like, No, it's not. The Saints borrowed it from New Orleans, right? They're fine with this. Now, see, you did that now, Nathan's gonna show up in a kelly green one. You know, just, uh, just to get the bed.

Unknown Speaker  1:45  
Don't, don't even tempt me. I will, I will. I will go full Philly green.

Paul J Daly  1:51  
I thought about, I'm gonna find us some kelly green ones. We need. We needed the Eagles fan ones. Going to Elena cicatelli, right? We're gonna send all the Eagles fans to kelly green. Love people, more. You love cars, t shirt, unbelievable.

Unknown Speaker  2:03  
So we're excited. I'm getting excited about nada. And I a lot of people are actually getting excited about nada, because nada parties.com has been ripping I mean, people go into it in droves, by far the fastest growing ASOTU property, right? It's, it's, it's quite unbelievable. Actually, I'm excited about it. If you don't know what you're going to be doing on Thursday, Friday, Saturday night, you can go to nada parties.com. Find all the parties. We've got like 30 plus there. Now it's the list is growing. So if you want to know what you want to do after the show, after the show floor, head there, find a place

Paul J Daly  2:38  
to jam. I was scrolling it last night, and I was like, man, there's a lot of stuff on here actually, you know, I'll say this, we had, we had one, one good friend who has a company of ours even, or text me or email me last night, be like, Hey, can you take our party off of there? Like, I don't know how we found it. I mean, you know, it's easy to find stuff on the internet if it's not like, you know, index the way you want it to be, but we put it on there, and then they were like, Hey, can you take it off? We're getting a bunch of RSVPs, and it's I were like, Okay, well, that's good. The site's working, right? The site's working convenience. We'll take that down. But if you want your party to be on there and people to RSVP,

Unknown Speaker  3:14  
I think you gotta send it. We can find it. We can find a spot for okay, we need

Paul J Daly  3:18  
to bring him in, our good friend. You gotta do it. Greenfield, you know him. You love him. He is on site right now in Las Vegas, at CES look at the background. That's not a fake background. It's a real background. Tell us. Tell us where you're at right now. Steve,

Steve Greenfield  3:30  
I am in the West Hall, and it's what is it? Six o'clock in the morning. Yeah, six in the morning out here. There's no one in here. I had to beg and borrow for the security guy to let me in today, because I haven't got my badge yet. I'm in the West Hall that we've all grown to know very well, with an nada out here, sure and but CES is much bigger. It's much bigger conference. So, yeah, looking forward to spending a few days out here and understanding like, you know, cutting edge technology across automotive and the mobility landscape.

Paul J Daly  3:58  
Give us, give us the rundown of of what you're most excited to see. Well,

Steve Greenfield  4:02  
this is an interesting conference, right? Because you think of nada, they may get 23,000 attendees, you know, ces gets 140,000 so you actually can't contain it all within all the halls within the Las Vegas Convention Center. I assume most of the folks have been out here for some convention. So it spills over into other other hotels. So it's really hard, actually, like you people complain about seeing everything at nada over a few days, was almost impossible to see everything at CES and you know, it was originally the Consumer Electronics Show, but they rebranded a couple of years ago because you've got so much more than that now. And many of the auto makers take the opportunity to show new models, to show new technologies, etc. So it really is sort of the epicenter of and you've got, like over 300 of the the fortune 500 companies that are represented here, either exhibit, exhibiting or attending. So really, it's become like this interesting kind of confluence of folks that. Are here to see new technologies, but also, obviously, meet with other folks in the industry. And then, you know, from an exhibiting standpoint, it's the best conference, I think, globally, to exhibit new cutting edge technologies. So you walk around and you see everything. You see everything. But you know, for me specifically, to answer your question, it's more around, you know, keeping my fingers on the pulse of some of those early stage stuff, and also meeting with some strategic partners out there as well.

Unknown Speaker  5:26  
So So you you also have the opportunity to speak this morning. And you know when you when you approach an event like this, it's a little bit different than speaking to dealers or the industry partners like insularly Inside the industry. What does that approach look like for you, and what are you going to be covering during your chat?

Steve Greenfield  5:44  
Yeah. So I'm lucky enough to be kicking off the conference this morning at nine. I'm doing an hour on the future of mobility. And really, whereas typically, I'd be in front of a dealer audience talking about the future of automotive the next five or 10 years, I finally got this book coming out on the next two weeks called the future of mobility. So I'm taking the opportunity to kind of fly over the top of like what 2030 to 2050 looks like across all the different modalities of mobility, not only ground transport, but micro mobility, you know, aviation, space, you name it. And have some fun with it as well. So talk about some of the technologies that may or may not manifest. Put everything into context in terms of what's going on with autonomous vehicles right now, but it'll be a fun little kind of kick off, and just try to provoke some thoughts for the attendees. So when they do walk into the hall, when it opens this morning, they can orient themselves a little bit around the things that they should be looking for.

Paul J Daly  6:35  
What a great time to be in the auto industry, like, where, where? This is giant convergence around the conversation of mobility, obviously, electrification has really pushed that forward. What is your furthest out prediction? Right? You have all these things like, what is the type of mobility that you're like, Okay, this is a bit you know you're talking about. You know, on the tech side, you're like, Oh, well, maybe CDK and Reynolds emerge. And your predictors like, what's your, what's your version of that for mobility out in 2050

Steve Greenfield  7:02  
Well, I think it's what the dominant drive train is going to be, right? I mean, I think it's whether, you know, electrification is 100% of all passenger vehicles, which I think, if you go out for Far, far enough you can believe, because the battery chemistry will just get so much better, right? We'll be able to have 1000 miles on one charge. They'll be lighter, you know, be more stable, they'll be able to charge within five minutes. And, you know, once we get to inductive charging, meaning, like, you know, when you drive over plates, they charge automatically. Then I think we've got a future where, you know, consumers like, we're gonna look back at like, plug in chargers, being like, Rotary

Paul J Daly  7:36  
used to have to plug it in, right?

Steve Greenfield  7:41  
Like your kids. Kids are gonna look back and say, You guys had to plug it. I don't really understand, you know, the pay phone. It's funny. I think I told you the story, but so I don't know. Like, last summer, I was walking around New York and I saw a pay phone. I saw a pay phone. That's why is there a pay phone left in New York City, and I think it only accepts credit cards, no longer quarters installation, yeah, but it's amazing. Like, it's amazing. And, you know, nowadays, you know, I think that kids, like in the next generation, are gonna look back and a lot of the technologies that we have now, but all this charging infrastructure, like, plug in, charger infrastructure, they're like, What do you mean? Cars just charge themselves, don't they? Like, they won't even think about it, because inductive charging will be so ubiquitous, right? So I think there's a lot here. I think the big threat is really the disruptive nature of the Chinese. I think I told you guys, you know, when I was over in Kazakhstan a month ago. I mean, there's a country with a very small new car population. But you know that three years ago, the Chinese had zero penetration of new car sales. 2024 was 30% and this year is 50% so if you draw that extrapolation line out, it won't be long before the Chinese effectively has the entire market. And so it's going to be really interesting to see what these tariffs do in terms of, you know, slowing down the Chinese global expansion. But it's only really buying a short amount of time. And you all talk a little bit about this today. How do these legacy auto makers compete in an environment where you've got the Chinese being so dominant and so aggressive? I mean, they've got to bet on some technologies that they think are going to be able to leapfrog the Chinese, and it's tough. It's, I mean, I don't envy the auto makers that now and suppliers right now, in boardrooms thinking about, how are we going to compete against this Chinese juggernaut that's

Paul J Daly  9:23  
taking over the world? That's part of the the empathy side of I think, dealers who are savvy enough to understand the big picture and kind of find this balance between what's going on right now, which is always the urgent thing, right? You have inventory that was pushed to your lot. It's sitting on the front line. You have to sell it, and also understanding, like, in 36 months from now, if the OEMs don't figure this out, and like, tariffs can protect you for a while, but eventually, right, eventually, there are cracks in the dam, and technologies find their way to get in other ways. Um, that's, that's a very tough thing. And I think that, you know, dealers working with, oh. PMs in an understanding way will benefit all of us. But I mean, that that's really hard. When you have a front line full of EVs, you can't sell.

Steve Greenfield  10:08  
It's tough balancing the short term decisions keep the engine running, so to speak, yeah, and then the long term strategic investments. I mean, obviously everyone had bet on EV adoption being faster, and now it's cost them, like, billions of dollars, and they're unwinding a lot of those decisions. So I do have empathy for the OEMs right now, because it's just really hard with all the ambiguity and uncertainty around how quickly consumers will adopt some of these technologies. Yeah,

Paul J Daly  10:34  
I mean, well,

Unknown Speaker  10:36  
and go ahead and I would say that, like you said, what is the alternative fuel the future? I still think we have yet to figure that out. You know, we see inductive charging as an opportunity, but the weight, the the change to the the highway infrastructure still has a lot of question marks there, and there are other alternative fuels being being looked at. And I think that that's potentially the way that we that that, oh, like even, even Japanese OEMs in a combination with us OEMs, because there's a lot of already crossover there, and there has been a historical like relationship to see, you know what? What is the technology that you know, either is the challenger brand or the thing that overtakes the Chinese OEMs? I think that that's a that that's just like a watch out over the next couple years.

Paul J Daly  11:21  
No doubt, no doubt. All right, well, we will definitely ask you for your updates from tomorrow. It's funny, like as even since we've been on the show, I see more headlines populating about Nvidia's presentation yesterday. Which would there was a line to get in. It was like the Taylor Swift event of CES. They're talking about a $3,000 computer, personal computer that is an AI super computer called digits. You know, Sony and afila announced that their vehicle is going to start at 99 99,000 I believe it was so 89 Yeah, is it 89 oh, 89,000 Nvidia is releasing new chips, so there's going to be a lot that's talked about today. Looking forward to checking in with you tomorrow, but since you're here, why don't we just talk about today's last story, which is a retail story, return. You worry. We're going to call it the post holiday season phenomenon, where returns dominate the retail landscape is back this year, retailers and shoppers face tighter policies, though, amid escalating return volumes, get this returns in january 2024 are expected to hit 890 billion I think that's supposed to say. 2025 are expected to hit $890 billion which represents 17% of all merchandise sales. This is up from last year, when it was 743 billion. Retailers like sex and Zara have introduced return fees, shorter windows. Fraudulent returns are also straining retailers making up 14% of total returns last year, new return rules affecting shoppers. Wall Street Journal reported that, quote, more than two thirds of consumers who are aware of stricter return policy say those rules deter them from making purchases in the first place return. You worry, I don't know, are you well?

Kyle Mountsier  13:05  
Well, it's actually interesting, because my commentary around this has some backstory, of like a person that I knew that managed the returns of four of the largest big box retailers in the nation. He was a they were basically the technology around that. And the reality is, is that the cost of managing the return, in some cases, is actually more than the return than you get from the resale of that return. And so originally, basically what had happened and what has caused this situation is retailers made it increasingly easier to, like, almost return without sending the merchandise back, because they didn't want to handle the merchandise like that. Handling procedure of getting it to the right place, shipping it around the country, potentially moving it to another, to a to a third party reseller, was actually a higher cost than just, like, returning the dollars right to the user. And so it actually has exacerbated the problem to the point of, like, people just having an overabundant willingness to return things. And I think that we see this in auto kind of come out in people just kind of expecting the ability to return now, especially with the, you know, the carvanas and the car maxes, kind of making it a mainstay. And so I think it's, it's, it's like a note that says, Oh, look, if the rest of retail is kind of turning back to this potentially stricter return policy, we might have the opportunity to go back to that in auto and not make it table stakes, just to have return policies for return policy.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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