More Than Cars Makes News, Unusual Toyota Annual Meeting, $3B Worth of Electric

Unknown: 0:37happy employees create happy customers the best thing about being in the car business is it does not matter what happens we pivot

‍Paul Daly: 1:05

Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Great week to be in retail automotive.You just saw the trailer for the live a soda tonight we'll talk about it if you're on the podcast, but we get talking about a soda making the news for once in a while. We talk about the news. Like hey, why don't I know? We're gonna need another one of these bugs? Wow. Like,

Kyle Mountsier: 1:31

but because and then. And then it's gonna have a picture of our actual faces. And my wife was like, Well, Paul got his actual face. You did? And I was like, scroll down. Scroll down. No, no, no, no.

Paul Daly: 1:41

It's in there. Oh,man. We have these, these mugs of when we were in automotive news, but it was just kind of the back of us. And we always like our team made this versus a joke. But now we've actually been an automotive news with our faces. We'll talk about that in a second. But you just saw the preview if you're watching the live stream, live tonight by us Soto is happening this Wednesday live in Atlanta. And if you can't be in Atlanta with us on Wednesday, it's actually going to be on Thursday afternoon live stream. So we hope you can join us whichever one you can join us for. But if you are in striking distance of Atlanta, please go to a SOTU x.com and get yourself a ticket. If you work for a dealership, you can come for free. And we have like dozens and dozens and dozens of people from front line work like the front lines of dealerships already confirmed that they're on their way. This is probably this definitely going to be our biggest live live tonight. We've had, oh yeah,

Kyle Mountsier: 2:32

it's gonna be a riot. A ton of fun. We got the red carpet rolled out we're gonna have all the food and drinks and the whole nine yards.

Paul Daly: 2:41

Theater, by the way,it's

Kyle Mountsier: 2:42

at a theater called Buckhead theatre to Live Nation theater where like big acts come and play. And so it's just going to have the vibe of a night. It's an evening so you can get there. It's we don't start with doors open at six.The show doesn't start till seven. So even if you're at the store, or you're working all day, you're downtown Atlanta,wherever you're at your outskirts of Atlanta, make sure to drive in you're gonna want to be there dealers come free. Or if you are in Atlanta, Georgia community member like work for a news source or work for some someone in the community. Make sure that you get there because we've made those tickets available as well. Yeah, so that's super cool. We got a lot we got a lot of talk about this morning. Gosh, we we brought on a new creative director on Friday. Should have had her on the show. We're gonna have to show some run on that.

Paul Daly: 3:29

We're gonna say we'll bring her out tomorrow. That's a good idea. Tomorrow. Well, if you

Kyle Mountsier: 3:32

have been around the auto ecosystem for a little while or been to any past events over the last three years, you may have been introduced to Kelly Verity. She took about a year off of the auto scene. And it's coming back with the asoto crew. She's a dynamic energetic personality matches so much of what we do over here at a Soto and and the team's already got the chance to meet her and she's she's hitting the ground running, just going to add a whole level of energy to the soda crew and continue pushing us forward and just bringing us together to serve the industry.Well,

Paul Daly: 4:09

yeah, check her out on LinkedIn ke l li, ve R di the profile show a little love Welcome to the Soto crew. Yeah,community style, you know are saying, what else do we have anything else? We got to

Kyle Mountsier: 4:21

get to amplify podcast dropping? Oh, Chris Garcia got amplified podcast all over the place some of the most high level encouraging energetic conversations that I've had in person at a conference. Thanks to Reuters for helping us putting that podcast together.Speaking of news organizations,segue. Oh, right. We

Paul Daly: 4:43

need to be the first story today from reporting the news to making the news. We want to thank Dan shine, the editor of the fixed stops journal for automotive news. Also writer Abigail ham for publishing this piece that just came out I think came out late Friday. We saw Saturday on our more Then cars series on our Docu series. So I read I put a couple of clips in here from the article because I always love to hear like, what other kind of other people?Yeah, absolutely. It's so much fun. Unless, well, we'll probably have some haters. So,got a couple of words on Reddit.I think we posted we posted the series on Reddit and we got a few haters like, Oh, I like those words, too. Let's talk to you. Here's, here's some words,though, for the automotive news article. More than cars hosts,Paul Daly, and car mounts here grew to love the auto industry while working in it. Now they want to teach others to love it,too.

Kyle Mountsier: 5:38

We just captured it, put it on a t shirt because I would I would lean in I don't know,

Paul Daly: 5:42

man, we could fit that on. Another one. More than cars aims to highlight with daily amounts here feel as an overlooked side of car sales and service, the humans behind it.Finally, the duo who run the auto retail content creation company, automotive State of the Union, we were like, that's probably the best contextual version of who we are hope to make seven more episodes, they will film the second episode in Atlanta this month, actually.

Kyle Mountsier: 6:08

On Thursday,let's go. Let's go. Yeah, I love you know, the fact that you know, the auto retail content creation company, like that fits, that fits them. Like yes,there's, there's more to that I,you know, maybe we throw like community in there and things like that. But, you know, for us, it's really cool. It was great to share it. You know, we got to be honest with Abigail and chat with her. And, you know, she's newer to the industry. And I think she's an intern reporter for automotive news. And she got to kind of listen to everything that we're saying and ask questions. And it was neat to hear the questions from her perspective. So you know, and then we've gotten countless messages over the weekend, last weekend, from people on LinkedIn or in our text messages, just encouraging what we're doing. And that's not to like say, Hey, we've done it,we've arrived or anything like that. But we know that this is what the industry wants and needs. So continue to share it out. This is I keep saying this.This is for the industry. This isn't for us. This is this is the industry. It's like we're giving it to you to push out and to move in and to go into communities and say yes, this is us. This is exactly who we are.So use it as that.

Paul Daly: 7:21

So the plan is to shoot seven more episodes. This was after the pilot episode is released, you can go to more than cars.tv to see the pilot episode. Episode Two is going to be filmed at in Atlanta on Thursday. And we have Episode Three teed up as well. And we'll be talking about all this stuff.But it's important to say this is very expensive to make the show. And we were investing a lot of our own money and getting this off the ground. We thought it'd be cool to have a crowdfunding campaign to let the industry supported what it is that we're trying to do for everybody. You can also check that out at more than cars.tv and a lot more announcements and stuff coming about out about that soon. See, it's pretty cool. Stuff. Segway. So amongst a rare show of dissension Toyota's annual meeting has sparked a debate over Chairman Occhio. Toyota has cautious approach to electric vehicles,with shareholders including one of which the New York City comptroller's office and California Public Employees Retirement System can they're both considering voting against his board reappointment due to his resistance to an all electric lineup if you didn't know to Toyota to why od a grandson of the founder of the company actually stepped down as CEO to hand it off because of a lot of resistance about his Evie strategy and what he thought was the best way forward or the most reasonable way forward. Toyota released a statement it said even in this difficult business environment Chairman of the Board of Kyoto Toyota has been strengthening our competitiveness from a long term perspective. So although the probability of his removal from the board is super, super low,even a slight reduction in support can be seen as an embarrassment in Japan's consensus driven corporate culture. And it's not at this is a great story they say it's not uncommon to have shareholders stand up and tearfully thank him for what he's done for the company so

Kyle Mountsier: 9:17

wild that is that's that's impressive when a when a leader of a company can move others to tears in thanks.Over typical so to move, like even a little bit from what just a year ago was a 96% approval rate to renomination is pretty it's just it's just an interesting environment because you just look at what Toyota is doing in the marketplace. And it's clear that they are still front runners in the overall marketplace that they're still leading the game. It was funny,we're actually in a Toyota dealership last week in a major metro and you know the sentiment there was well we got one Eve be, but I nobody around here looking for that sucker. You know, like that was the sentiment two people said that to me. So you know it is it's,it's just interesting and you kind of look at like New York,California, definitely a totally different political landscape totally different economics and landscape and a lot of the country and what they're experiencing and what real buyers are doing. So it's really interesting to see this like dichotomy of positioning from Brandon automakers to actual activity. And I think that writing the balance of that from an executive stance is is continually going to be something hard to do over the next five to six years, as many automakers are saying, like,this is the way we're all in.

Paul Daly: 10:42

You know, it's reminds me of this this phrase we use to talk about stock prices. And is it a voting machine or a weighing machine voting machine being what pop culture thinks it's worth a weighing machine being what the balance sheet, the p&l actually say, it's worth, like, what it's actually really worth. So Toyota, you get the weighing machine and the voting machine in this conversation. And it's hard to think that it's not a lot of pop culture sway happening in here. Speaking of one thing swaying another segue.

Kyle Mountsier: 11:15

This is unbelievable, because Tesla could be adding up to $3 billion to its annual revenue by 2030,and up to 5.4 billion by 2032,just from GM and Ford partnerships alone. According to Piper Sandler analysts, Alex Potter, who released the research note last week, these figures may be not significant to their overall annual revenue of 80 billion. But the interesting thing is, it's not just an impact to the bottom line of Tesla, but potentially could impact but the bottom line of their competitive its competitors, namely, GM and Ford, who have recently made announcements to utilize the charging network of Tesla,seeing as their current Evie programs are unprofitable. And this may change the way that they need to grow and scale their charging networks over over the next few years. So just wild that like, with a snap of a finger, and a couple of agreements, and a couple of big announcements in a month, there,they've got a projection out for a few years from now to add $3billion of revenue, just you know, charging networks

Paul Daly: 12:24

there, there is an element like we're talking about GM and Ford missing out on revenue. But obviously Tesla has a huge head start in making EVs,they have a huge advantage in making them and being able to sell them profitably. And they've demonstrated that over time, I think that not having to focus now on the charging standard, all that I think the element of focus is actually going to be beneficial for Ford and GM, since that's just another divergence of like,where they have to allocate resources in time. And to really kind of like go in that play. I think it actually from a brand perspective, it moves them closer to the progressive nature of what Tesla is in represents.So I think from a brand standpoint, aligning with Tesla in places they can align,actually is really good for them in an economy and in a situation where they have to kind of say why they're different so much,which takes a lot of which it takes a lot of energy, a lot of money. A lot of, you know,advertising, a lot of thought.So I like to play I think it's really good. And for Tesla, the$3 billion is gonna make a big difference. Knowing that they're using your money to compete against you is a little bit of a rough it is what it is. Hey,look, we have so much going on this week. We hope you follow along with us follow us on LinkedIn, a soda page on LinkedIn, we post a lot of stuff there. You also have going on on Instagram Tik Tok, and please get the email newsletter asotu.com