A year after its widespread rollout, Asbury Automotive Group’s Clicklane platform for fully online car sales is producing nearly $2,200 in finance-and-insurance gross profit on each vehicle.
, Asbury CEO David Hult said the average vehicle produced front-end gross profit of $3,765 plus finance-and-insurance gross profit of $2,162 through Clicklane. The platform is on track to generate $1 billion in revenue by the end of the year and $2.2 billion by the end of 2023.
The human F&I managers at Asbury are still beating the machines. The company saw overall same-store F&I gross profit of $2,409 for the second quarter.
Dan Clara, Asbury senior vice president of operations, told analysts the company is quite pleased with the results. Enabling customers to manage their own F&I experience is producing gross profit above $2,000. “We think those numbers are pretty strong,” he said.
At least one competitor, Group 1 Automotive Inc., already is producing higher F&I gross profit online than in stores. Group 1 reported in a July 27 earnings call that its fully online sales platform Acceleride yielded $151 more than the company’s average U.S. F&I profit per vehicle for the second quarter. U.S. Operations President Daryl Kenningham said greater customer usage of Acceleride would drive up the company’s overall F&I profit.
Asbury, of Duluth, Ga., ranks No. 5 on the Automotive News top 150 dealership groups list, with retail sales of 109,910 new vehicles in 2021. Group 1, of Houston, ranks No. 4, with retail sales of 146,072 new vehicles in 2021.
Asbury deployed Clicklane to its existing stores in the first quarter of 2021, with the second quarter marking the publicly traded dealership group’s first full quarter with the technology companywide.
Asbury sold 6,594 vehicles on the Clicklane platform in the second quarter of 2022, up 17 percent from the first three months of the year and up 55 percent over second-quarter 2021.
The average credit score on Clicklane exceeds 700 — better than the average customer visiting a physical Asbury store — and 80 percent of customers seeking financing receive instant approvals, Clara said. Customers put an average of $8,871 down on their vehicles, he added.
Clicklane customers finish the average cash deal in about eight minutes and purchase financed vehicles in an average of 14 minutes. This is “roughly in line” with other quarters, Clara said.
The platform continues to exceed expectations in multiple areas, he added. And that might be just the beginning.
Right now, only 37 percent of Clicklane sales involve new vehicles, with the platform’s potential stymied by a lack of inventory, according to Hult. On a previous earnings call, he indicated promotion would be illogical without inventory to sell, so plans for a Clicklane advertising campaign are on hold.
Asbury has bought dozens of locations since it rolled out Clicklane in 2021, and the third quarter will see the platform reach new stores, the company said. The quarter will also introduce a redesigned F&I product sales experience.
On the earnings call, Hult said Clicklane is integrated in only 88 of Asbury’s 155 dealerships. By the end of the third quarter, he told Automotive News on Aug. 1, he expects Asbury will have expanded Clicklane from legacy stores into acquisitions — a to-do list that includes dozens of Larry H. Miller Dealerships locations the company bought for more than $3 billion in December.
For now, Clicklane sells third-party F&I products rather than the portfolio of first-party provider Total Care Auto Asbury bought as part of the Larry H. Miller deal, Hult said Aug. 1. But he said on the earnings call Asbury completed the systems integration between Clicklane and Total Care Auto in the second quarter. This will allow the Larry H. Miller stores on Clicklane to sell Total Care Auto products.
Switching legacy Asbury stores to sell Total Care Auto products is a more difficult process because of policy and regulatory complexity, and Hult said Aug. 1 he felt this would take the next 12 months to complete. He believes Asbury’s Colorado stores on Clicklane could be selling Total Care Auto products by the end of the third quarter.
“We’ll slowly chip away after that,” he said.
Clicklane’s F&I product sales presentation also is poised for a revamp. On July 28, Asbury announced the second iteration of the interface would offer customers bundles of F&I products while retaining the ability to buy coverage a la carte.
“Bundling differentiated products and services frequently delivers more perceived value to customers when compared to a la carte products,” Asbury wrote in a slide to investors.
On Aug. 1, Hult said he felt the new interface would begin to reach stores at the end of August and grow from there. It would work with dealerships selling third-party F&I products, as well as those selling Total Care Auto coverage.