News

A little over a year ago, Tucson Subaru in Arizona began having its express service advisers use iPads as a way to speed up the customer intake process.

But along with checking in customers quickly and getting them on their way, the iPads also have helped keep the dealership's three express advisers on task and following processes.

"Express advisers are a little more green, so it prompts them to do the video walk-around and take the pictures and check the different things," Service Director Scott Gregg says. "They have a little checklist on there — they have to check off wiper blades, tires, things like that. So it assists them in developing good habits."

Franchised dealerships across the country constantly strive to boost customer service rankings by doing things such as minimizing wait times and improving communications. To achieve this, some dealership service drives will consider embracing the latest technology by having their s…

Dealership service departments across North America are plagued by troubling customer retention and satisfaction scores, and any increase in customer-pay sales per repair order is likely the result of higher prices, not growing demand.

This sobering assessment came from Carlisle & Co.'s 2020 North America Service Benchmark report. Carlisle collected 2019 data in February from a group of participating automakers representing 15 brands, which the company then analyzed for key trends.

Eliza Johnson, who leads the company's service benchmarking practice, shared the findings to kick off the first installment of the 2020 Automotive News Fixed Ops Journal Forum. (The online event aired Oct. 8; replays at autonews.com/fixed-ops-journal-forum.)

Despite the bleak outlook, Johnson told attendees that the coronavirus pandemic offered an opportunity to make positive change in the service lane.

Among the report's troubling trends is stagnant or declining …

The service slowdown caused by the pandemic hit Woody Buick-GMC in Naperville, Ill., hard, says General Manager Jerry Roberts.

Repair order counts were down about 35 percent, he says. "We had to go out and attract more business to keep people employed."

The dealership's service marketing budget is still modest, but it grew by 70 percent after the pandemic began.

As part of those efforts, Roberts says the dealership is now spending $2,500 a month on highly targeted social media and SEO efforts. It also spent time and money setting up better Web landing pages to capture leads when customers click through the dealership's website.

Instead of blanket spending on Google ads, the dealership now uses digital marketing company Sincro's tools to micro-target social media audiences defined by its customer lists. That includes existing relationships but also informs "lookalike audiences" that are demographically similar but further outside the store's geog…

When service department traffic plummeted in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, dealerships quickly shifted gears to ease the minds of customers worried about human contact.

We'll come get your car, service it and bring it back to you, service departments told customers. You stay at home. No extra charge.

A concierge service that had been chiefly offered by luxury brands suddenly became a must-do for mainstream brands to keep their service bays busy while their customers were hunkered down under state-mandated stay-at-home orders.

But when the urgent need to pick up and deliver cars ends, should dealerships continue to offer the service? And if they do, should it still be free?

That is something Ed Roberts, fixed operations director at Bozard Ford-Lincoln in St. Augustine, Fla., mulled for a long time. Roberts was convinced the service to customers' homes should continue but wasn't sure it should remain compl…

TOKYO — Just as critics were wondering about the viability of General Motors' fuel cell truck partnership with electric heavy-truck startup Nikola, two Asian competitors jumped headlong into the segment.

This month, Hyundai and Toyota each unveiled plans to ramp up development and commercialization of hydrogen-fueled commercial vehicles to be launched from North America to Europe to Asia.

The push into heavy trucking is an uncertain gambit on a nascent technology for all parties. But it could help Hyundai and Toyota achieve scale on the costly fuel cell components and infrastructure necessary for the technology. That, in turn, could speed their rollout of passenger vehicles.

That aggressive foray contrasts with the marketplace murmurings GM heard in September upon announcing a partnership with Nikola Corp. Shortly after word of the GM deal emerged, Nikola founder and CEO Trevor Milton voluntarily stepped down amid public controvers…

During homecoming festivities at Prairie View A&M University in Texas and North Carolina Central University in Durham last fall, Ford Motor Co. invited football fans to check out a tailgate — and the rest of its F-150, too.

Ford provided more than 500 F-150 test drives to fans at the two schools and at the annual Southern Heritage Classic, which attracted nearly 50,000 spectators in Memphis, Tenn., through its Historically Black Colleges and Universities Truck Tour.

"As we talk about reaching and growing, it makes sense to talk about growth audiences," Damoni Hurt, Ford's cross-brand strategy and growth audience manager, told Automotive News. "We do well with our core; we always strive to do better. But some of the bigger opportunities to grow our brand and grow our market share, grow our sales, are to some audiences that we should talk to in a different and more meaningful way."

That sort of authentic outreach, through experie…

SHANGHAI — Visiting dealerships in China these days, you can't help feeling a sense of euphoria.

Even as COVID cases in the United States rise again, China's automotive retail market is showing every indication that it is returning to a pre-pandemic reality.

Take the cluster of dealerships on Wuzhong Road in southwest Shanghai.

In February, immediately after the coronavirus spread from Wuhan to the rest of China, dealership employees donned face masks, even though there was virtually no showroom traffic.

Now, eight months later, several salesmen at the row's BMW dealership could be found last week out for an afternoon break, smoking and laughing — and most notably, not wearing face masks.

Salespeople at the nearby Toyota store could be seen chatting merrily. They had good reason. Because of robust sales, the dealership has run out of inventory, said Zhang Feng, a sales consultant.

"A customer h…

First, Hyundai made headlines about its electric cars catching fire. Five days later, it was General Motors and Ford Motor Co. The next day, it was BMW Group.

Vehicles going up in flames aren't new to the electric era. An estimated 171,500 took place annually in the U.S. alone over a recent three-year period, and cars powered by the combustion of gasoline are plenty prone to catching fire.

But the issues affecting some of the world's largest automakers over the past week are both a reflection of plug-in models taking off in the market and a threat to more widespread adoption. Automakers are preparing to debut nearly 100 EVs in the U.S. market through 2024, Automotive News reported this past week.

The vehicle blazes are making a big impact before automakers have even managed to pin down their precise causes.

Many of the initial reports of EV fires often focussed on Tesla Inc. because of its early entry into the segment. Several incidents have involv…

Billionaire Robert F. Smith has been hailed as a brilliant investor who built Vista Equity Partners into a private equity powerhouse and a generous philanthropist lauded for paying off the student debt of Morehouse College’s entire graduating class last year.

But federal prosecutors undercut that image on Thursday, saying Smith concealed income and evaded taxes for 15 years by using foreign trusts, corporations and bank accounts to cheat the Internal Revenue Service.

Smith, 57, avoided prosecution only by cooperating in a case against Robert Brockman, the CEO of DMS giant Reynolds and Reynolds Co. accused Thursday of using a web of Caribbean entities to hide $2 billion in income in what prosecutors called the largest U.S. tax case ever against an individual.

“Smith committed serious crimes, but he also agreed to cooperate,” said David Anderson, the U.S. attorney in San Francisco. “Smith’s agreement to cooperate has put him on a path away from indictment.…

The full-size Ford pickup, traditionally the top-selling U.S. pickup, also became the most stolen vehicle of 2019, according to a National Insurance Crime Bureau report.

NICB's "Hot Wheels: America's Top Ten Most Stolen Vehicle Makes" measures theft data submitted by law enforcement to the National Crime Information Center.

The Ford pickup moved to the top spot from third place in last year's report with 38,938 thefts,up from 36,355 the year before. The most stolen model year for the F-Series is 2006.

Tully Lehman, a spokesman for NICB, told Automotive News that Ford has been on the list before but never at the top.

One of the reasons for a high number of thefts is the number of vehicles out there. "There are a lot of Ford pickups on the road," Lehman said.

Ford's F-Series has been the top-selling pickup in the U.S. for 43 years, and the automaker sold 896,526 of them in 2019, a 1.4 percent drop from 2018.

The most stolen vehicle of…