#404 - How Dealers Can Use AI to Ship Vehicles Faster
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Car
Nissan Rogues
The Nissan Rogue is a type of SUV that is popular for its roomy interior and good gas mileage. It's a great choice for families or anyone needing extra space.
Car
Tesla Model Y
The Tesla Model Y is a type of electric car that looks like a small SUV. It's known for being eco-friendly and has a lot of modern features.
Term
auction
An auction is like a sale where people bid money to buy cars. The person who offers the most money gets to take the car home.
Term
cracked windshield
A cracked windshield means there is a break in the glass of the car's front window. This can be dangerous because it makes it harder to see while driving.
Term
broken windshield
A broken windshield is when the front glass of a car is cracked or shattered. This can make it hard to see while driving and usually needs to be fixed.
Term
auto hauler
An auto hauler is a truck that carries cars. It's used to move cars from one place to another, like from a factory to a dealership.
Term
theft
Theft means stealing a car. It's when someone takes a car that doesn't belong to them without permission.
Car
GMC Sierra HD
The GMC 2500 is a strong truck designed to carry heavy loads and is often used for work or towing trailers.
Car
Toyota Highlander
The Toyota Highlander is a type of SUV that is good for families because it has a lot of space inside. It's known to be dependable and can be used for everyday driving or long trips.
Car
Ford Focus
The Ford Focus is a small car that is popular for being affordable and good on gas. It's a common choice for people who need a reliable vehicle for everyday use.
Term
bumper
A bumper is the part of a car that is at the front and back, designed to protect it in case of a crash. It helps to absorb the shock and keep the car safe.
Car
Shelby
Shelby cars are special performance versions of Ford vehicles, especially Mustangs, that are made to go faster and look more aggressive.
Term
shipping costs
Shipping costs are the fees you pay to have a car moved from one place to another, like from one state to another. It can be quite expensive depending on how far it needs to go.
Car
Ford Mustang
The Shelby GT500 is a special version of the Ford Mustang that is designed for high performance. The 1967 model is famous for its powerful engine and sporty look.
Car
Chevrolet Impala
The Chevrolet Impala is a big car that many people loved, especially in the 1960s. It’s known for being comfortable and stylish, making it a favorite choice for families and those who enjoy classic cars.
LIVE
Well, how about all these cars that are getting stolen?
How?
I mean, how does someone steal a car?
How does it, how do cars get stolen, you think?
Like, it's bad, like, they take them out of man,
hammer, adjust them with the drive-out.
How do they get out?
Somebody gave them a drive-out.
Welcome to the Inde-Appendent dealer podcast.
Luke, that intro sounds weird, huh?
I feel like I'm missing something there.
You are missing something, but I think it's right.
That's all right, man, time's changed.
Time's changed.
We're still trekking along.
Hey, we've got Frank here with Auto Holler Exchange.
And so you guys know, if you go back into the archives back
in 283, we did an episode with Auto Holler
when they were just, I don't know,
Frank, were they little babies two years ago?
How old were you guys back in 2023?
We were in our infant stages, probably six months
ish of moving vehicles, or building a marketplace
for our folks to move vehicles.
But yeah, that was pretty infant stages.
We were kind of walking or just
getting out of our crawl phase, also.
And Royce and Dana were nice enough to join us back then
and talk about the shipping industry
and really what's the pain points that us as dealers
have when it comes to just getting cars from the auction
to our dealership with the least amount of hassle
and headache and brain damage is possible.
And you would think that this would become a simpler thing
or that some of the legacy platforms
would have gotten on board
and maybe followed suit and made some changes,
but we're still, none of that's been fixed.
So Jeff, I think the legacy platform,
it's not a big deal for that company.
And so it's an afterthought.
And so they don't care to make it better.
They're not liable for anything.
They just don't care.
And so we need an upstart
and we need someone that can switch this paradigm
and make it better for dealers' cause.
Because what we have right now is the Wild West
and I think we've used that word.
And Frank, as you see it,
what is or was broken with the shipping industry?
Yeah.
Coming into it, a lot of my customers
are focused around dealerships
and because there is other parts of what we do,
OEM stuff, personal vehicles,
I'm focused on dealers
and dealers care about two things, speed and money.
They want to get that vehicle as soon as they say purchase
to get it to the recon facilities
and get it through and get pictures of it.
And they're also combating these arbitration windows,
whether it's 10 days or whatever it is
where if they get this unit and it's traveling a thousand
miles, they want to make sure that that vehicle
is getting back to they can inspect it
in case it has a motor transmission.
So we're fighting that as well.
And then the money part of it.
And there was really two options.
There was the giant load boards that you can post to
that weren't properly vetted, which was great.
You're going to get a great rate.
You might get speed, but you're going to get
not very reliable carriers possibly
and you get vehicle theft.
And then once, and you know,
those boards were a good thing at one point
until they were infiltrated by not so good people.
So now the vetting comes into it
and now you got a hundred thousand dollar vehicles,
$200,000 vehicles being stolen
and becomes a huge problem.
And then the other option was really the brokerage model
and giving somebody a quote.
And this is what I'm holding you to
and then going to beat down a carrier
to try to make the biggest margin in between.
But what that does is that takes time
and it takes more money.
And so we kind of built something where we give,
combined really the best of both worlds
is giving the ability for our customer
to post their own rate direct to the carrier,
the same rate that they're posting to the carrier
is the same rate that they're posting,
the same rate the carrier sees.
And then it just really didn't,
it allowed like less muddying of the water as I would say
and more transparency and getting good carriers
what they need.
You know, we pay the carriers on their behalf,
we vet the carriers,
which were eliminating a lot of that stuff
that some of the giant low boards couldn't really do.
And yeah, it was just, you know,
no more having to dispatch and talk to different carriers
it was just a marketplace
to kind of consolidate it all into one place.
Well, why can y'all, how can your platform do this
when the traditional platform can't
and can't vet these things?
Why does it work for y'all
and not for the traditional way?
Yeah, I mean, it's really,
I think there's still good brokers out there
that are vetting their carriers
because they don't want to be liable, right?
So we use the best third party vendor out there
to monitor FMCSA scores, DOT scores,
insurances valid and if it's gonna lapse next week,
you know, they get to remove from the network
until they give us a new, their new insurance form
and then they get, you know,
re-put onto the platform and regain access.
So just having a good,
because you don't want to get burned,
you don't want your customers getting burned
and so just monitoring that.
But I think everyone has the ability to do it.
You know, it's costly
and then those giant boards,
they just want carriers, carriers
because they're getting subscription fees
from all these carriers will let them all on.
But again, we're not going to be able to vet them all,
but that's how they're making their money.
It's kind of the wild, wild west.
Like you said, whereas we don't charge our carriers
to be on our platform,
it's kind of a more, we're pretty selective,
I would say, of the carriers that we allow in.
And then if we have a carrier, again,
in order to find bad carriers sometimes
or carriers that aren't reliable,
you got to kind of let every, you know,
let folks in there qualify.
And then if you find bad ones,
you just remove them from the network
or ones that aren't communicating correctly or all that.
But, you know, over the last two and a half years,
we've been built a reliable network of carriers
that fits, you know, the standards
and expectations of our customer.
Yeah.
The biggest issue I had Luke, sorry, is before,
when you would post on the big boards,
you would get phone calls from 50 different brokers.
It wasn't the shipper.
Like I don't want to put my load on a board
to be picked up by another person
who's just gonna go and try to vet it out again.
Like that is the biggest brain damage.
And if you can't keep those brokers out of there,
the third party people,
that's just such a crazy headache.
Yeah.
I guess it's helped with like our marketplace type
business model of now you don't have to deal,
even if you had to deal with carriers,
I know on some of those boards, right,
you're gonna have five different carriers
reaching out to you and you got to dispatch it,
dispatch your load to that carrier
and that carrier falls out
and then you got to re-dispatch it to another one
or you're gonna have brokers hassling you for them.
You know, they want your business now.
The marketplace, once you post it,
it's really a set and forget it type philosophy.
Once you post it, if you post it at the right rate,
again, we give our customers the ability
to tell me really to post it at whatever rate they want.
If you post it for a dollar, it's never gonna move.
But if you price it in the right inside,
pricing inside based on where the market is right now,
that vehicle's gonna get picked up pretty quickly
you've probably seen
and everything is kind of handled after that point.
There's no dispatching.
It's you get notifications
of when that vehicle plans on delivery.
We have a pretty small window
of when the carrier is able to check that out
and we're averaging around four days right now
from posted to delivered.
And you know, we have customers all over the country
that are buying from all over the country.
So transit times, you know, pull into that as well.
But if you post at the right rate,
it's within seconds that you're gonna get assigned
to a carrier, a carrier is gonna pluck it off
on marketplace.
Yeah, so there was a lot there
and I wanna talk about each one of those components
as the pain points as dealers have
when we're trying to get something shipped
and talk about that when I was using the big boards,
yeah, you'd get calls from brokers and get headaches.
And then I went to just using one guy, I had a guy, right?
Everyone has that guy and he's your shipper
and he runs one route for you
pretty often with his own truck.
And I would send him stuff
and he would have a guy that would run the other route.
But the problem is that guy only runs that route
once a week.
So if I didn't get it to him and get on that load,
I had to wait till the very next Thursday
to get on his load that time.
And then he'd ship it up
and it would sit in the next spot for like a week
waiting for my guy to go down and get it on his next trip.
So what I found is being able to grab a ship,
get a shipper to pick it off.
This is, yeah, I'm coming through your city.
I'm gonna pick it up tomorrow
and I'll have it there by the next morning.
It's not going from like,
it's not playing this like hot potato game
where it goes from one spot,
ends up at a Mannheim,
sits there for three days.
When the next day.
Does that actually do that?
Does that actually happen?
My guy would, yeah.
Cause he would only run certain routes.
There's routes like in the West coast,
they'd run in Southern California to Vegas
or Phoenix to Vegas.
But very few people run Southern California
past my town, right?
So my guy would go pick them up in Vegas.
He would just do my town to Vegas back and forth
once or twice a week
and he'd have his buddies
bring it up from Southern California.
So if they don't match up,
my car's sitting down and parking on Vegas for seven days.
Frank, do y'all let that happen?
I've never heard of such.
Yeah, I mean, what's great in the industry
is you did have a relationship
and you, that he's done well by you,
you value that relationship.
But now we're giving you the ability
to really cast a wider net
and if that relationship falls through,
now we've built a bunch of relationships on your behalf.
So now I'll post them to the dealers
that we have relationships with
and get your vehicle quicker.
We do have something recently just built in too
where you can give that carrier friend of yours.
We included him into our network
and he fit our standards
which I'm sure he would if he's working with you.
You can give him like a preferred booking request.
So let's just say you posted that load out of there.
You wanna give him the first ride to refusal
but he can't do it.
Then I'll just go to the board
to all the rest of the network of carriers.
So boom, let's give him the right.
You know, I like that relationship.
I built with him.
Let's give him that ability.
But hey, he can't do it until next week.
All right, I can't wait that long.
Hey guys, just to jump in
and talk about Buckeye risk services.
They've been one of our sponsors forever.
They're great to the industry.
They're one of your sponsors.
You don't even know it.
Every time you go to a convention
or something like that,
they're there helping out.
Ain't that right, Jeff?
Yeah, absolutely.
I have not seen a company so willing
to get behind the dealers from an education,
from a support standpoint.
I mean, there's a handful that we see in our sphere
that are very active and always have our back
but Buckeye really sets the standard.
So when you're looking for a reinsurance company,
if you've decided it's time to get into it,
you've got to call the guys and girls over at Buckeye.
I promise you will not regret it.
Yeah, reinsurance, force savings account, wealth building,
tax playing, all these things go together.
So call Buckeye.
What about the opposite?
Can I blacklist people from taking my bookings?
100%.
There's ones that I've had a bad experience with.
I'd hope that you would call us and let us know that
and that's where it would happen.
Well, it's not that.
It's the guys that grab my booking right away.
They sit on it for three days and then they cancel it
because they decide they can't make that route
or their truck breaks down.
And now I have to go back to the board
and wait another two weeks.
That's the worst.
How do you get past that?
Yeah, how you get past that is letting us know too
because if we find a carrier
and we were monitoring that too,
if we find carriers that are doing that too often,
again, they just, it's very easy.
You just remove them from the network
and we're not doing those carriers anymore.
And then we give them warnings and things too.
Like we understand breakdowns happen
but if once a week you're holding a load
to wait for something more expensive,
you know, something, we get it.
You tie them all up hoping you get that fifth or sixth car.
But if you're breaking axles every week
or, you know, you're in a tire issue every week
for, you know, loads like that, then,
hey, we're going to alert that
and there kind of be a flag to count kind of thing
and a flag carrier.
Yeah, that's, that's the worst
is when you've been waiting for a car
and they're like, oh yeah, I broke down.
And you're like, could you have told me that,
that day it would have been a lot better here.
What about, let's talk about the pricing thing
because that's a big, big concern, right?
Prices are not, they're not static.
It's not like a buck 25 a mile or a buck 50 a mile.
Like it changes because I know that on my route,
sometimes I'll, I'll post them for a buck a mile
and they'll get picked up within seconds.
And other times I'll have stuff sitting on there
for a buck 50 a mile and I can't get anyone
to get my attention.
I know you guys have the AI pricing tool.
I'm too scared to use it.
Yeah.
Why is that?
I don't want you guys pricing my cars.
I don't want AI pricing my cars.
Yeah, I mean, it's just using lane data,
different, you know, bid systems
because we have that bidding function too.
Whereas if you put it load in, you know,
you want to post it at 800
but you're willing to go up to 900
and secure your bids 850, it'll get assigned to them.
You don't have to do anything.
It's just kind of like, yeah, I'm willing to do it for that.
It will take bids too.
Let's just say you do post it 800, 900.
All of a sudden, cares are booking 1100, 1000, 1100, 1100.
We kind of know that that market rate
may be moving up slightly
because lane data is hard to come by.
It's like the stock market, like predicting different,
you know, you might be moving them out of Nashville.
The same price for eight months
that all of a sudden Nissan decided to release
100,000 rogues, you know, to the masses.
And now all of a sudden, there's a huge demand
to get out of Nashville.
So that price just went up, right?
Like, snowbird season comes up right about now.
You know, it's going to be very expensive
to go north to south in these next couple of months.
But on a good thing, I tell dealers is like,
hey, if you're looking for more inventory,
look at Manhattan, Orlando right now.
It's because coming out of Florida, it's pretty cheap.
You know, carriers don't want to come out empty
because that's just empty miles
they're putting on their trucks.
So they'll pretty much take whatever they need
to get back north, to get that inventory
to go back south from people moving their,
you know, their snowbird vehicles.
But yeah, again, Colorado and the mountains.
All of a sudden, they don't want to go there
in the wintertime.
So the price to go through the Colorado mountains
gets a little bit more expensive.
Yeah, weather plays a huge role into it.
You know, so yeah, it changes the price
changes for different things like that.
That's a, that's interesting that happens throughout.
And I guess more than anything, y'all are the brokers now,
right?
I mean, that's how that system works.
Do y'all have to have a lot of people in the back end
to make this happen?
So it's kind of like the technology in a way
is kind of connecting, right?
The shipper and the carrier.
And yeah, I mean, we do have an operations team.
Like I said, when you're buying out an auction,
especially about 90% of all those
probably go pretty smoothly.
I mean, you have a 24 hour pickup window
at Manhattan, Pennsylvania, your dealership,
you may allow, you know, an after night dropout.
And it's just autopilot.
You didn't need a broker making these large rips
off of you to move that.
Now there is 10% of the time that a guy falls
through three days out.
And now I need to really get this vehicle or whatever.
And we have an operations team that's
sitting right on the other side of the screen
that is monitoring ETAs, expectations, standards.
And it's something for you.
In case you do need that on a 10% of the time
or 5% of whatever you're dealing with,
somebody to reach out to.
So you have best of really all worlds
is you have somebody that you can reach out to.
You have the ability to post.
You have the ability to reach out to the carrier.
We want you to talk to the carrier.
We want the transparency for you to do that.
Whereas in other models, they don't want you talking
to the carriers.
They don't want you to know what you're paying the truck
and what I just charged you.
They don't want you doing that.
So we welcome that.
Is there a way in y'all's platform
to GPS track where my load is across the country?
Because to me, sometimes I get a little uneasy, right?
I was supposed to have my truck here, my $50,000
truck here two days ago.
And it's not here.
And I've texted the guy.
He's not responding.
I'd love to know where that thing is.
And it's not that there's any evil intent.
Something happened.
I mean, how does that work?
Yeah, so we do.
I would say, again, I'd like to be transparent and be upfront.
We require all of our carriers to live track and trace,
we call it.
And not everyone likes to be tracked and traced.
But I would say honestly, probably 75% of all of our loads
accurately track and trace the whole way through.
And then we have, right now, a carrier will deduct.
Before you book the load, it's like,
you are required to live track and trace
so that it'll be deducted so and so money from the rate.
You know what I mean?
So to really try to make sure that that happens.
But welcome to 2025.
Everything's tracked and traced nowadays.
That's just the expectation, the service level
that everyone provides.
And we want to do the same thing
in the vehicle logistics space.
Yeah.
And I like to, the BOL part of it
is when these shippers, there's a consistency to it.
I had an incident with a test of the Model Y
I bought a couple of months ago out of Mannheim, Southern
California, unfortunately, worst auction
in the entire country.
And it shows up with a cracked windshield.
And I'm like, that freaking shipper didn't tell me
he broke the windshield.
He must have had a chain drop or something.
So I go back through the contact to you guys
and you're like, hey, check out the picture.
So I go back.
And of course, there's great video and pictures of the Tesla
sitting in the parking lot right outside the gate of Mannheim,
Southern California with a broken windshield
before he put it on the truck.
So it happens so often.
Obviously, this windshield was broken in the auction, right?
Because he literally had pulled it 100 feet out
of the auction and it had a broken windshield.
But sure enough, Mannheim's not
going to take any responsibility because their CR
had a clean windshield.
And I'm telling them 100 yards later,
it has a broken windshield.
And they're like, well, anyways.
But knowing that and just having that consistency of record
is super important because I don't get
that when I sometimes go out to my buddy on the shipping
because he might farm it out to another guy that doesn't care
or doesn't have an obligation.
Like you guys with your software,
these dudes have to upload a video at pickup and drop off.
The pictures, it's all about really CYA.
It's a cover in your butt.
Because just like you said, you may not
have seen that, but you take all those pictures
and then you go back and you can compare the pickup photos
to the drop off photos so many times it
helps with arbitration back at Mannheim
or to really put the blame on.
Or now the carrier is liable and now you
go through the proper channels, whether they
want to pay out of pocket or they
want to use insurance to cover, which majority of the time
they'd rather pay out of pocket so their insurance doesn't
surge.
But yeah.
Hey, real quick break to make sure you guys
know about BlitzPay.
It's who I use to take all the payments
at my Buy, Here, Pay, Here dealership.
We've been with them for almost three years now
and it is absolutely amazing.
It's great.
Yeah.
The product is so simple, even an idiot like me can use it.
But you know, even when my collector's out
and I'm just taking a phone call here or there,
no matter where I am, I can log into BlitzPay
and I can take that payment.
I can see the customer texting in and say,
hey, can you run this?
Or whatever's going on, it's always on top of it.
And the money's in the bank almost the next day.
And that is, to me, so important.
And the support is great.
If we do have a chargeback or a dispute,
we get an email that says, hey, there was this dispute.
And then their team goes to work to help us resolve it.
They don't just dump it back on your table
with some random notification or email
that you barely ever see like my previous processors.
Yeah, it's so helpful.
And a lot of times, it's because our customers did
something wrong.
But when it's not, they'll fight to the end with you
and get that money back in your account.
Yeah, so give them a call.
The guys and girls over at BlitzPay, great partner
to have, definitely an essential tool
to have if you're a buy, here, pay, here dealer.
Let's talk about if every dealer out there
should be using auto hauler exchange.
So let's put that up for a bit.
If for some reason somebody decided,
what are some best practices that dealers should be doing
to ensure the safety of their cars?
I would, obviously, the vetting of the carrier
is the biggest thing.
There's so many carriers out there right now
that the vetting is by far the biggest thing.
And how can you do that?
I mean, as just a dealer who's trying to get loads moved
and if you buy 10 or 15 cars a day or something like that,
and maybe you have onesies and twosies
and calling these insurance companies
and making sure they have insurance,
I mean, that seems almost impossible.
You would literally need to do that too
because you've seen it too where someone will maybe like,
hey, I need your insurance car, they'll send it,
but they don't know that that insurance is still live.
Whereas obviously there's vendors out there
that will monitor that by the second.
That's the biggest thing,
just making sure insurance and you're covered there.
Well, how about all these cars that are getting stolen?
How?
How does someone steal a car?
How does it, how do cars get stolen these days?
Like it's, it's bad lately.
They take them out of Manheim or Odessa with the driveout.
How do they get it out?
Somebody gave him a driveout.
How do they get a gate pass?
Someone's bad within a carrier group maybe
and shares a pickup pass with somebody who's not so good.
But you think that,
so this has either got to happen at the Mannheim level
and you've got some guy who has access
to printed gate pass for my car
and send it to his sketchy buddy
who's going to come out and snag that thing out.
Everything's filmed.
I have to write my driver's license number
on every gate pass and have it scanned.
So I don't get how that happens,
but then it, or if you have a bad shipper who says,
oh, this is a sweet ride.
I'm going to send it over to my guy
and I'm going to shoot him the gate pass
and he's going to rip it out of there
and take it to Mexico.
Like, is that the other spot?
Yeah, but I don't know if that person
would want to do that either
because then we would have tracking of everybody
who's seen that within that company.
So then that person would be investigated
to figure out like, where was the leak to,
where was the leak?
How did that leak happen to get to somebody that could,
how did that pass get to the bad guy?
You know what I mean?
You follow that trail.
Not so good for that person to get that out.
So auto and haulery exchange has a way
so that in theory that shouldn't happen
because y'all have chain of custody,
I guess is the best way to say that.
Correct, yeah.
I mean, you'd see exactly who's viewed that pass.
There would definitely be a,
definitely some breadcrumbs we'd be able to follow
or find to get to that person that leaked it.
So let me ask this.
So even on the auto hauler platform,
there has to have been theft.
Like-
There's been theft on auto hauling?
Yeah, like someone's stealing a car.
Someone's losing a vehicle.
You guys have shipped something that's got lost.
Like it just has to happen, right?
Shipped something that's gotten lost.
We've had units damaged,
where this was one of the ones that I know,
this was like when we kind of early started
where a unit caught fire,
driving on the freeway, it was three on a trailer.
Caught fire on the first one,
the wind blew it onto the second vehicle.
The wind then blew it onto the third vehicle,
all three done.
That one was a scary one.
But again, insurance covered that.
There was about 110,000 in losses.
We haven't had any issues.
We've been nervous on a few.
We were like, wait, this doesn't,
this seems a little shady and then double-checking.
We've had it where a good carrier one time
caught a situation where somebody reached out to them
of like, hey, we're switching up the drop-off location
and caught that and where he's like,
this doesn't seem right.
He reached out to us.
Again, we don't know if it was poor,
whatever their intentions.
But again, by using the right sources of vet.
And I like that.
And I like that a lot when I book through you guys,
I don't ever talk to anyone else.
And I think that's crucial for security.
Because when you book through a broker,
you've got 50 people calling you
and you don't know if it's really Susan
from broker or whatever,
or it's somebody trying to tell you
they gotta reroute your load
and they need an updated phone number
or, hey, I need to send,
you need to send a gate pass to this phone number
so I can get the car out.
I'm here at the auction.
It's like, you don't get that crap anymore.
No, man, I uploaded it.
If you need a gate pass,
I'll upload it to Autoholler
and you can log in and get it.
I'm not gonna send it directly to your email
or your phone number, like that's bull crap.
So that's the beauty of having a technology first platform
is it's like, no, everything's there.
It's all reported, it's all documented.
Like there's minimal ways
for people to insert themselves into the system.
When that got real hot and heavy too,
we really needed like that
two step authentication too.
So if you did have like maybe carriers
that did work for a company,
but we had to remove their login.
We didn't want them logging back in
unless the two step authentication,
that was a big thing for us too.
You know what, I mean,
that's just hard in any industry,
but yeah, we've been very fortunate
to kind of get ahead of a lot of that stuff.
Yeah.
And I think when these guys show up,
I mean, I'm probably 50-50,
like the transporters that actually deliver the car.
Some speak English, most don't.
Probably 50-50 on that part.
And then every so often,
it'll show up on some sort of three car wedge.
And I'm like, all right, well, he made it.
So that's success.
It's funny that we're recording this today
because I don't use auto hauler exchange.
I'm gonna say that right now,
but I'm tempted to switch.
Dude, it doesn't cost you anything.
You just sign up and use it.
I know, I'm so doing the same thing for so long.
This morning, a transporter was bringing in two GMC 2500 vans
and the transporter hit a telephone pole,
I'm sorry, a power pole,
knocked out the power to our dealership.
And it was out for about two hours.
I was almost unable to get on a call this morning
because of that.
And I had one of my good friends,
total a $30,000 van the other day, that's a transporter.
So these things happened, Jeff.
And if you ship enough cars, they happen a lot, unfortunately.
Knock on wood.
Frank, let me wrap this up with a couple of requests
I have as a user of the platform.
I gotta be able to upload a gate pass and have AI hosted.
The fact that I have to like pick the location,
pick the destination and copy and paste the VIN number.
It's like three steps.
And then I have to upload the gate pass.
That's like four steps that should be simplified by AI.
Oh, I've been asking that for two years
and it's probably on our, it's on our deal,
but the fact that you just said that,
I might move it up even quicker.
It's the integration between me buying a load
and me getting it on the exchange.
And that's the rub, right?
Like you'll never get API integration with talks, right?
Like you just, you won't,
you won't get a button on their website.
That won't happen.
Which would be great.
But if you could just drag a PDF
of your gate pass right into the site,
it knows it's picking up from Mannheim Nashville
and you know it's going to your location every time.
You know the price you've been paying
or you know what the market rate is inside of the AI
for whatever it is.
And you drag and drop eight of those in
or one file of them in.
And they automatically, that's a goal for sure.
Yeah, that would be a huge, huge streamline.
It would take four steps out of the process.
Cause honestly, that's the only rub to using
the platform is that I got to log in,
add the destination, add the pickup,
add the VIN number, price it, add the gate pass.
It's not that hard, but.
I mean, it's really, it probably takes you what,
30 seconds to pick Mannheim Nashville,
you know, whatever Mannheim.
Yeah, and now you guys have saved the pickup hours
which is super handy.
So that's nice when I bring up a used location
that I've used before
because before it was a little bit of a headache.
I'm like, come on, there's like,
there's like 80 locations in the country
to get picked up from.
Maybe 180, let's say.
Those shall be picked up for them.
These are all because now there's two
that we use Google listings.
So it'll actually take Google listings
when you put in the address,
use their operation number.
So yeah, again, again,
it's going to keep evolving like that.
But these are all requests I've been asking for.
The only other thing I have is
ACH payments.
Why do you guys make me send a check?
Why do you send me a two-page invoice on every load?
I gotta imagine your accounts payable
have got to be insane
for accounts receivable.
Jeff, I love that you're saying all this
because these are, wait to you about a month from now
and wait, I don't want to give it a date
but it's in the accounting whole thing.
You're right.
With the way that we're growing right now,
we just hired a new accounting person for that reason.
I know, he emails me all the time.
But you're gonna see huge upgrades
in the accounting part of this
and I've been asking for that too.
Yeah, that's so silly.
Like once it's verified that it's dropped off,
like take the funds out.
It should be immediately.
It should never, the aggravation,
I just got a text while we're doing this says,
hey, can you leave a check out for me tonight?
That is such a pain or, hey, can you sell me?
Like, man, come on, this is not rocket science.
Yeah, so we are paying the,
Luke, we are paying the truck
so you're never paying carriers.
But Jeff now has to pay us.
He may move 10 units this week
and he's gonna get batch built for those 10 units.
There needs to be an easier way for him to just.
Because then I got to print out all these invoices
then I got to get into bill pay
and then I got to send it with the unique code
so that I can track it to make sure you guys get it
and get it credited to the right car.
Anyway, so yeah, that process could easily be streamlined
in my opinion
and you guys would get your cash so much faster.
Especially some guys like dealers.
I mean, come on, we love to string everybody out.
We can't.
It's called float.
It's called float.
It's called float.
What else you got, Jeff, any other?
I love it.
No, I think that's it.
That's the only things that off the top of my head
the invoice, if it's gonna be an invoice,
make it one page.
Why is it two pages?
It prints a second page.
There's nothing on the second page.
Yeah.
So that's the only thing.
My only advice because everything else is super smooth,
super easy, like transparent.
I even had my shipper who I normally use.
He got on the platform and started looking at stuff
and he's like, well, what did you list this one for?
I see that you have a Highlander
coming out of Southern California.
What'd you list?
Are they taking an arbitrage
between what you say you're gonna pay
and what your fees are?
And I was like, no, I listed it at 400 bucks.
And he's like, oh, okay.
Yeah, that's what it pays.
I'm curious what you used to see in that
because you get a quote and they go try to get it
for the lowest dollar, you know,
posted on their boards or their marketplaces.
But yeah, that's what happened.
Yeah.
And I was like, I don't see as a shipper
why you're just not on the system
because if you do have a load
and you need to fill the last two spaces,
this is the best way to do it.
I mean, just you pick up onesie twosies
wherever you can on your way
from where you're going.
Preferred lanes now too that they're assigned.
Like they picked their, what their lanes?
I come out of Dallas every time.
So they get notifications as soon as you post one
out of their preferred lane,
they get a notification instantly
and they can book it right off of that notification.
So we're just trying to speed this whole thing up.
Jeff, what is your favorite thing about using
vehicle auto hauler compared to the traditional way
we used to do?
Is it just the non-aggravation aspect of it?
Yeah, it's, I mean, coordinating shipments
for someone who has larger volume than me,
it's a full time job.
I don't get it because my system
before I started using auto hauler more accurately
was I would just text a gate pass to my guy
and he would ship that thing out to wherever it was.
And he had a buddy that came from Denver.
He had a buddy coming from San Francisco
and he'd ship it out to his buddy.
And then I guess he would pay them and I'd pay him.
And it was very, very vague
as to who actually had possession of my car
at any one time.
So if there ever was damage,
it was really hard to go back through that chain of control
or possession to see who was responsible.
So the fact that A, now I can put it in one spot
and it's one guy picking it up
and bringing it directly to me, right?
The guy who picked it up from the auction
is the guy dropping it off.
And then also the fact that I never have to talk to them.
I don't have to interact.
I don't have to pick up the phone.
I don't have to send them a gate pass
and deal with that stuff.
Every so often, Mannheim will screw something up
and the guy'll show up and the key won't be there
or it won't be running or some bullshiz
that isn't the shipper's fault will happen.
But man, it's again, it's streamlining the process.
Safety and convenience sounds like...
And for me, it's convenience over everything
because I'm not shipping $80,000 of Mercedes.
Like, yeah, if you knock that frickin' Ford Focus
off the side of your transport,
I'm out like three grand.
Like, okay, big deal.
My dad...
If you added a scratch,
you actually made that bumper look better
because now you evened out the dens.
My dad, yeah.
My dad just bought a Shelby from Washington State
and he did this happen last week.
And he said, hey, I need you to get that thing shipped
in and the first thing that came to my mind was,
oh my God, I'm just thinking.
So Auto Holloway Exchange is going to ship it in.
And I already told my dad,
I said it's gonna probably be like $4,000 to ship it
because I don't even want this thing to get touched
because I can't imagine the blowback I'm gonna get from him.
Yeah.
Where is it going, to and from?
Somewhere in Washington State
at Columbia, South Carolina.
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Okay, it won't be for a grand.
It won't be, but it's gonna be.
It's probably one of the more expensive things
you can ask for.
It's an enclosed carrier going from.
Yeah, right?
I've never seen a logo for four grand for a single vehicle.
But you know what I mean,
it's gotta be enclosed.
It's a $200,000 car.
Like it's gonna be one of those.
What kind of Shelby is it?
I'm a big Mustang guy.
67 GT 500.
Oh wow.
Yeah, and it's just,
I don't even wanna think about,
if I were to post this our traditional way,
there's no chance
because that car would not make it all across the country.
It would be,
it would be stolen away somewhere
and my dad would just lose his mind, right?
Yeah.
Oh man.
I did pass a load yesterday on a three car wedge
that was like,
it was like a 60 something Mustang,
60 something Impala and like,
these were on an open air three car wedge
on this guy with like a Dooley.
And I was just like,
Oh my gosh.
The world is shipping this thing
and the front one was on backwards.
And I was like,
Oh my gosh.
Who is doing this?
That is like insane.
It is truly amazing what you get into the game.
How many times a vehicle has moved in its lifetime?
Like I see,
I'd never noticed vehicle haulers before getting into this.
Now it's like all I see.
I mean, I do live in Detroit.
I go to Kansas city often,
which is kind of like a logistics hub
being mentally, you know, sexually located.
But like I've had it where a dealer in Michigan
buys from an auction in Texas.
We move it all the way up to Michigan,
or you know, it moves up to Michigan.
And then all of a sudden they sell it to a customer
in Texas back down to Texas.
You're like, it was insane.
You know, it's insane that that happened.
You know, it's just a, it's a crazy spend.
Yeah. And not to mention when they're new
cause they get shipped all over when they're new too.
They hop on a train here and go there and go there.
But that's, that's funny.
Living in the Southeast and getting on 95 every once
while I mean it's, there's haulers everywhere.
Hold on.
Here's the thing.
Technology in the distributed auction type model
of like an ACV or a back lots
or whoever still exists out there.
It's going to make that more and more and more, right?
Because as guys get more disgruntled with the big guys
and buying from a central auction
and the fees and all the nonsense,
we're going to start buying directly
from the new car stores.
And so yeah, I'm only shipping two
out of a new car store in Texas
and I got to get it here to Utah.
You know, I'm not buying 10 in a lane out of Texas, you know?
So that like onesie-toosie shipper type thing
because it's being more facilitated now
makes those types of auctions make a lot more sense, right?
Cause I don't quite need the economies of scale
like I used to cause I'd have to fill a eight car hauler
to get anything out of Florida, right?
And I don't want to buy eight cars
in the sale that week.
What's funny you say that too is like
I have a lot of dealers in Kansas City
and when some of my dealers buy a lot more out of California
than some of my, you know, what,
some of my dealers might buy one
but I have another dealer who's buying seven
out of Mannheim, Longgett, you know, or California.
And he's like, I can't believe I was able to move
that single for that price.
But like little does he know
he's basically combining into the other dealer
that just bought seven
and that one just completed his truck.
So he's kind of almost getting like a,
cause you can only move multiples
for a better price than you can a single vehicle.
But he was like blown away that he's moving singles
for as cheap as he was.
But because the other dealers in Kansas City
were all buying from the same location,
like it's almost like you're working together
to get the most efficient rate to your dealership.
Cool Frank.
Hey man, thanks so much for your time.
Thanks, Jeff.
I appreciate it.
Luke's nice meeting you.
And yeah, we'll have to get you,
I'll help you with that Shelby.
Love that.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna reach out.
He's gonna, he's gonna be back soon and I'll reach out.
Hey, be sure you, and be sure you call Frank,
586-604-1885, tell him Jeff sent you
and he wants his referral code
because they give me this stupid pop-up
every time I log into post a vehicle.
And it says I need to have Frank as my referral code.
So if auto hauler would stop spamming me
with this stupid pop-up because I hit X
and then it pops back up the next time I try to shift.
That was actually my idea too, Jeff.
So thank you.
Hey, I got no more spamming.
I'm trying to give it over
I can to get dealers to jump on board
because it's honestly, I haven't had a dealer
that's given us a fair, honest try.
It doesn't just base us on the first load or you know,
whatever, but given a fair, honest try,
not many folks leave once they've kind of like
really jumped in and like learned
how to use it the right way.
Dude, there's nothing to learn.
It's so, I mean, I'm looking at my dashboard right now.
It's so easy.
I see everything in transport.
I see everything I'm waiting to get picked up.
I see stuff that's in voice.
I can click in the pictures.
Like it's the simplest one page upload.
Again, it'll get better.
But anyway, sorry, Paul Frank, get it checked out.
Luke's gonna do it.
I'm gonna do it.
All right.
See you, Frank.
Thanks, guys.
About this episode
Exploring the challenges and innovations in vehicle shipping, this episode features Frank from Auto Hauler Exchange, who discusses how AI can streamline the process for dealerships. The conversation dives into the issues with traditional shipping methods, including vehicle theft, unreliable carriers, and the complexities of dispatching. Frank explains how their platform enhances transparency and efficiency, allowing dealers to post rates directly to carriers and track shipments in real-time. The episode also touches on the importance of vetting carriers and the evolving landscape of vehicle logistics.
Original notes
In this candid conversation, we dive into real user experience with our automotive shipping platform, Auto Hauler Exchange. Jeff and Luke share their straightforward assessment of the service, highlighting what works well and where there's room for improvement.
Key Discussion Points: - Transparency in pricing and platform fees - How our platform differs from traditional shipping brokers - The arbitrage model vs. direct pricing - A shipper's perspective on competitive rates - Why clear pricing matters in the auto transport industry Whether you're an independent dealer looking for reliable vehicle transport solutions or a shipper evaluating new platforms, this honest review provides valuable insights into how modern auto transport technology is changing the game. Subscribe for more candid industry conversations 🔔 Like if you appreciate honest dealer feedback 👍 Comment with your own shipping experiences 💬 Thank you for listening. We hope you learned something new. Let us know what you think. Leave us a review www.theindependentdealer.com @independentdealer.com Support the businesses that support the podcast: Blytzpay for your credit card processing and text communications. Tell them IDP sent you to get 3 free months! Buckeye Risk Services for all your education and reinsurance needs Taxmax for flexibility with your tax returns. Please like, subscribe, leave us a review, and share with a friend. Connect with us online: / independentautogroup / jlukegodwin / sendtojeffw Listen to all our episodes on Anchor: https://anchor.fm/theindependentdealer
The Independent Dealer Podcast
Jeff Watson & Luke Godwin
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40:19