Used EV Price Drops, Battery Shipping Struggles, Chick-Fil-A's Digital-Practical Innovation

Paul Daly: 0:32How what was the last time we had a Monday close?There's something about the Monday close. That makes you feel a little bit behind before you started but we're gonna get it rolling today. We got a whole week of good stuff to people Monday close. You're not open on Sunday?

‍Kyle Mountsier: 0:49

No, it's it is a strange thing in the world of sales and services and it's a Monday close because you like all this energy goes into that Friday and Saturday. And then there's like, there's like this waning yet residual and energy all at the same time. It's like,oh, we came off that high. But there's still a bunch of things.

Paul Daly: 1:11

It's Monday, because I'm here today we're talking about a few fun things that Evie price drops, battery shipping across the ocean is apparently a thing. And some really, really interesting new Chick fil A store designs. But before that,a lot of buzz starting to spin up around the soda con in the in the September. I know event season two is coming up. And I don't know what happened. But it feels like everyone is now having an event.

Kyle Mountsier: 1:37

I think I saw 33new events on the events calendar that are in

Paul Daly: 1:41

September alone. Oh,sorry, got some old standbys got a lot of new new companies doing doing one or two events, which is awesome. When you bring your people and your community together, that's great. But asoto con 2023 is like we, it's legitimately, truthfully, like the south by southwest of the auto industry, where the value isn't, I mean, we will talk about the speakers and all that.But there's so much value in the community that gathers and the willingness of the speakers and participants to actually engage in conversation and not have somewhere to run, or seven other people waiting for their time.This is actually where you're going to hear from practitioners and learn about all the things that you're trying to figure out, you're gonna get to talk to other people doing the exact things.

Kyle Mountsier: 2:27

Yeah, you know,I was actually talking to Danny's as Lawsky Event Queue on Friday. And we're like, what's the what's the value of a conference? Like? And that's always a question for everybody,like, I'm gonna send my people there, what are they going to get out? And yes, there are going to be people that take notes, they're going to bring their notepad or their remarkable or that they're going to scribble notes the whole entire time, every single session there and, and there's probably going to be 123 things that get implemented or get discussed a managers meetings.But the reality is, is that as you go through and you're scribbling those notes, or you're listening and hearing,you then have the opportunity after that thing after that, you know, session happens and in the halls, to meet the speakers or to or to sit next to the person that was sitting next to you nodding at the same time exchange information. And when you go to implement that struggle with somebody instead of stand alone, and I think that's the biggest benefit. It's like, oh, now I have a community that I can bounce this off of that I can figure it out with that I don't have to do this on an island in my store or at my location. That's, I think that that's actually the biggest value.

Paul Daly: 3:31

Oh, yeah. Those relationships. Yeah, look,you'll probably end up sitting next to a lot of the speakers in the adjacent sessions. Like the reality is that and like the points that you learn, all that stuff is great. you'll implement some of it, you'll forget most of it. But the relationships you make at events like this are going to be the ones that carry you through an entire career.And again, it's like that phone a friend really steps up. We're going to talk about three today.We have three publicly traded auto groups going to be participating in a soda con2023, Kimberly barter, the CMO of group one auto, Mike Kevin,if you know him, you know how sharp he is the regional VP for Lithia and driveway and Melissa Carter ganja head of digital advertising for auto nation. So like this isn't this isn't window dressing. These are people that actually have their hands in the dirt every day.They're going to be participating from stages,they're going to be participating in the two day event. Just being there meeting people talking, sharing,learning about new tech, maybe if you want to be a sponsor learning about your new tech, so all of that to say this is just shaping up we already have about1000 rooftops represented just in our first batch of speakers,you can still count corrected me. Tickets are still $100 off even after today. If you are in from a dealership so go to a soda con.com and get your tickets now. You really want to be in the main hotel if you can,which means you need to get your tickets as early as possible.BWI Baltimore airport is a Southwest hub. So a lot of places you can get there. To like under 100 bucks it's ridiculously super easy. Yeah.And if you're an industry partner you want to sponsor we still have some spaces left you want to be around these 1000rooftops just reach out to us crew@asoto.com Or kit and read directly at a m j at a soda.com.Yo, we really want to hang out with you there. But we have some news to talk about. Let's get into it. All right. All right,so this is a continuing conversation. Evie prices continue to plunge causing a ripple effect across the US car sector and putting a dent in dealer profits and analysts shows or analysis shows that a year over year drop in Evie prices is actually eight times higher than all other cars so economical. Big time you get that again, low, low gas prices general lack of interest, some of the things dampening consumer interest in EVs. So I see cars did an analysis of 1.8 million use cars that are between one and five years old. And non EVs dropped 3.6% year over year but EVs dropped almost 30% compared to previous Yeah, oh, that's worth it. Oh, hit all the buttons right now. I see cars executive analyst called Karl Brauer said market share is very slow. In states that already have a lot of Evie market share,basically, market share growth.So saying like states like Washington, California, Oregon,three of the highest states with as far as Evie adoption, and those also are the slowest growth states. So it seems like once you get to the seven to 10%adoption rate, it gets very,very hard to push through that

Kyle Mountsier: 6:36

the curve just cuts off. Yes. So that that we were talking about this a lot.Yes, last week that that that early adopter curve is running out in a lot of those states.And man, if I I've seen so many conversations over just the last week, between used car managers and general managers, online and in person and just conversations of like, what are we going to do with these use cars? What how are we going to appropriate use car values and understand what the markets doing? And know if we're buying something too high or too low? And when you look at evey like no other vehicle sector, prices falling eight times. So 30% price is falling like that is abnormal for any time. I think the only time that we maybe saw that is like the first two months at COVID. Oh,for real, you know, it's yeah,it's a tough market to come up with.

Paul Daly: 7:29

It is and it'll be interesting to see how it pans out or if it levels off or how it levels off and how the savviest dealers are, you know,really handling appraisal values. And, you know, turns on EVs like almost treating that as a separate bucket than the rest of ice vehicles, mainly speaking of EVs, segway, just complexity on complexity of bringing card carrier off the Dutch coast is now being relocated away from shipping routes as part of a salvage operation. So the ship you may have heard about it was carrying about 3800 vehicles,including 500 EVs. Originally,they reported there was only 25EVs onboard, because when a car carrier catches on fire, that's the first question. The first answer was like, I think like25, actually was 500. And now,many BMW and Mercedes Benz have all confirmed they have hundreds of new vehicles among those on the ship. And this kind of is a continuation of maritime shippers struggling to manage the fire risk associated with shipping EVs, the batteries, can cars cause fires, as we know from like, when they're not on boats are really hard and complicated to put out. Really,the way they put out an Eevee fire is isolated first, lots of water directly under the vehicle where the battery compartment is. And that's hard to do on these carriers the called roll on roll off which basically all the cars roll in. And then the front opens and they all roll out. They said they could have as many as 12 decks of cars stacked with only a couple of feet of headroom in between them, like bumper to bumper side to side. So you think about getting, you know, fire personnel into one of those,like, who's running into that compartment?

Kyle Mountsier: 9:06

Well, and this is why, like, historically, when when vehicles are shipped,they're shipped with like, two miles of gas sitting in them,right? Because we know that flammables on top of flammables on top of flammables are hard to deal with. And so they intentionally leave flammable material out of and especially,you know, fluids out of the ice vehicles, but you can't do that with an Eevee. And so we're like, this is

Paul Daly: 9:33

actually I did say that their start, they might regulate how much charge can be in the battery. So apparently that does affect flammability or maybe it maybe affects volatility, I don't know. But the batteries are still like highly flammable, whether they're

Kyle Mountsier: 9:48

highly flammable. Yeah, it's wild. I mean, I was actually as I as I'm reading this article this morning, I'm thinking like,gosh, it's it's like, you know,two, three years ago I never heard about fires is on on these things and it was so last year was a record number of fires in2022 of 209 fires on these on these ships and I mean I don't know what the record is stacking up to this year so far but I would have to guess that it's going to be higher and this is just like we keep wondering oh inventory is going to come back inventory is going to come back and when we're looking at trying to press into evey inventory,we're gonna see this maybe it doesn't come back as quick as we want it to you know, the insurance costs are going up on this stuff it's like this is just over and over and over you cannot predict the market because things like this right now make the market even more volatile than just interest rates skin

Paul Daly: 10:47

you know, with all the with all the investment into American manufacturing shouldn't equate to right less vehicles having to be on the water and moving across to me that's part of the solution. But I you know,I don't think anyone you know, I think everybody's fine from that Ship fire, which is great.Because like, I can't even imagine like a fire at sea just seems like one of the most like desperate situations I can think of you won't find me on one of those boats anytime soon. You will not. Alright, let's let's brighten up the news a little bit. Let's raise the price of elevating things

Kyle Mountsier: 11:21

elevating things. Elevate. Alright, check it out. So Chick fil A is further adapting to the digital world while cutting down on their drive thru lanes spilling into traffic as the fast food giant plans to elevate customer convenience by unveiling two new restaurant designs. They've got one restaurant design that's going to be placed in Atlanta,you can actually see it on the screen there. And we might have a couple more pictures of it.But essentially, the idea is where all of the restaurant is actually elevated in the drive thru lanes go underneath the restaurant. And then in New York City, they're doing a walk up only restaurant so because of like the the type of traffic there's these get. They've got these new drive thru lanes, but run below the structure and can hold up to 75 cars as what they're calling a sophisticated food transport system delivers meals to the ground level for distribution. This is like if you are live in the south, and you have ever seen like the double rap double push out all the way to the street, you know exactly the problem here. And so I'm interested interested to see what exactly happens here because you know, you're prioritizing that drive through traffic, even though it's still fit just 50% of your total traffic and making it harder for customers. Oh, it wasn't

Paul Daly: 12:43

saying this thing. It wasn't saying that drive thru traffic is 50% Saying that digital orders is 50%. So I obviously like if there's a drive thru rate that goes through the center of the vehicle, like getting in and out of the building, like up and down like that produces like a different logistical issue. But Chick fil A did say that it actually just takes the same amount of space as a standard Chick fil A parcel. So it doesn't mean guess under the building is a place to put all the cars. It makes tons of sense, right? Like this makes all the sense. And I think it's an example of a company adapting to the times and the new digital needs. And I think we in the auto industry can take a lot of cues from companies that are looking at the digital way people are doing business and say great, how can we adapt and adapt our facility to accommodate people's desire to just flow through the process start digitally finish in person, right, a lot of common things there. And it's fun to watch.

Kyle Mountsier: 13:46

So I was reading through a comment thread of one of the articles and one of the shared articles on this and my favorite comment will leave you will leave it with this. My favorite comment was this. Oh,look, they got super inventive.They made a car dealership.

Paul Daly: 14:00

Oh, no. Well, there you go. We got the Monday close.Everybody's out there, finish the paperwork, close those final deals care about some people and you know what? You should probably just have a little fun while you're doing it. We'll see you tomorrow.

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