Dec. 4, 2025 | How dealers should shop for AI tools; Trump unveils relaxed CAFE standards

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Driver, a conanemi rules dealer sentiment sinks as the tear fresh fades and tax credits end. And Toyota regains its spot on top of consumer reports of most reliable brands. Plus, what are the steps dealers should take before they decide on A.I. tools for their stores? Yuri de Midco, a Fox Motors, joins the show to talk about it.

not just spray and pray. Let's run through all the news you need to know to keep up in the auto

industry. The Trump administration is proposing relaxed federal fuel economy standards, automakers

would be required to meet an average of 34.5 miles per gallon across 2031 model year vehicles.

That's a significant rollback from Biden-era rules that required 50.4 miles per gallon.

President Trump defended the move at a White House event attended by Ford CEO Jim Farley,

Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa, and GM executives.

People were brainwashed. This is a green, new scam. And people were paying too much for a car

that didn't work as well. And now they're going to have a great car that's going to be environmentally

friendly, but it's going to push you a lot less and it's going to work great. All of the nonsense

is being taken out of the cars. The move continues the administration's push to unwind

federal support for EVs. Alliance for Automotive Innovation says the current cafe rules are

extremely challenging given the current EV marketplace. More on the story in a minute with

our own Molly Boygon. While automaker celebrate looser fuel efficiency standards, dealers are

feeling grim about their business. Dealership professionals showed near-record levels of unhappiness

in the fourth quarter. Second, only to their weak sentiment at the start of the COVID pandemic.

That's according to Cox Automotive's dealer sentiment index. Dealers blamed the economy and

lack of consumer confidence, but Cox analysts say they're really just coming off the high of

front-loaded sales when customers rushed to buy vehicles before tariffs hit and EV tax credits

ended. Cox's Erin Keating says dealer pessimism is, quote, probably a little disconnected

from actual reality. And Toyota is back in the top spot on consumer reports' annual ranking

of the most reliable car brands for the first time since 2022 edging out Subaru.

Improved reliability of the Camry, Tacoma, and Tundra gave Toyota just enough momentum to

pass last year's winner. Ford landed at number 11 its highest ranking in 15 years,

and assigned the automaker is making progress on quality despite leading the industry and recalls

this year. The rankings are based on survey data from about 380,000 vehicles. Consumer

reports says electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids experienced about 80% more problems than combustion

engine vehicles. And those are today's headlines. You can find more details on all those stories

at autonews.com. President Donald Trump's announcement from the White House yesterday included

some high-profile industry leaders who applauded his proposal to relax fuel economy standards.

Automotive news reporter Molly Boygon was tuning in, and she spoke with our own Jake

near about it. Molly Boygon, welcome back to Daily Drive. Thanks for having me, Jake.

Okay, so what do we know now that this press conference has happened? We've had President

Trump's announcement about sort of the top line numbers here and also what it would mean for

the industry if this rule is actually finalized. The Trump administration announced a change to

the corporate average fuel economy standards cafe. So under the Biden administration,

there was a rule that manufacturers had to achieve an average of 50.4 miles per gallon across

their 2031 model-year vehicles. Now, the proposal that's on the table from the Trump administration

would require 34.5 miles per gallon across 2031 model-year vehicles. So it's a loosening of the

regulations that basically gives manufacturers more wiggle room in making and selling vehicles that

have less fuel economy. The one interesting, one of many interesting parts of this is that the one

big beautiful bill act that passed over the summer actually eliminated fines for non-compliance

with cafe. So the practical implications of this are sort of unclear because the enforcement

mechanism for cafe has been eliminated. But the automakers and the industry stakeholders that were

at the press conference cheered the move saying that this previous administration standard was

really difficult to meet given market conditions and they're basically expressing relief about

the reduction in the standards. The White House has been citing affordability as the driving

force behind this, at least one of the main driving forces. As we know, MSRP's are getting really,

really high for most customers that are under a certain tax bracket, I guess you could say.

Just yesterday on the show, we had Jessica Caldwell on talking about how the new car market has become

exclusionary is the word that she used. Jessica Caldwell from Edmonds. So this is a real issue,

the affordability is a real issue, but when it comes to the actual impact on sticker prices,

based on even what the White House says, would this really move the needle?

The White House estimates that the change to the fuel economy standards will save consumers

around $900 on the sticker price of the vehicle. The increased consumption of the vehicle right now

is not as big of a deal because gas prices are at an historic low. But in reading some of the

analyst notes and having conversations about this, there is some question as to whether the

elimination of the gas savings that's provided by improved fuel economy will basically overshadow

the predicted sticker price savings. And again, the automakers already were not

accountable for fines if they did not comply with cafe. So that's another question that I have

about how the practical savings will actually work. I think anyone would be happy to save $900,

right? But again, just in the context of it, if you're talking about an average transaction price

around $50,000 that monthly payment to me, it seems like it's sort of questionable how much

that would really move the needle. But I guess I digress there, Molly. But what happens next?

What is the next steps for this? Once the government posts the proposal

in the federal register, there's a 45-day comment period where they will take feedback from

industry people and then issue a final decision. The other thing that is sort of factoring into this

is that the government is considering pulling back what's called the endangerment finding,

which is the government's acknowledgement that humans contribute to climate change. And therefore

that the government has the power to regulate different industries that may be contributing to

climate impact. So the endangerment finding underlies all of the different regulations across

different agencies related to greenhouse gas emissions and other polluters coming from the auto

industry. The Trump administration has indicated that it wants to pull back the endangerment

finding which would sort of render toothless any of the regulations that relate to greenhouse

gas emissions coming from the auto industry. So that's another thing that I'm watching because

if the government decides to make this move, it renders sort of this whole conversation mood

because it got the government's ability to regulate climate affecting industries like the auto

industry. Molly Boygan is tech and innovation reporter here at Automotive News and one of the hosts

of our shift podcast. Molly, thank you so much for joining us and breaking this down for us.

Thanks for having me, Jake. Coming up, a look at the steps retailers need to take before deciding

on AI tools for their dealerships. That's next on Daily Drive.

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in-class products and services you need and by remaining true to the automotive passion we share.

Your dedicated Ally account executive will work hand in hand with you to help you gain efficiencies,

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business as much as you do. We're all better off with an Ally. Contact your local Ally account

executive to get started today. Ally, do it right. Welcome back to Daily Drive. I'm Kellyn Walker.

Shopping for AI isn't as simple as finding the flashiest vendor.

Yuri Demidko, chief information officer at Fox Motors, says dealerships need to assess their needs

and clean up their data before they even start looking at AI solutions. He spoke with

our own Mark Homer. Here's a piece of their conversation. Yuri, thanks for joining me.

We're going to talk about all things AI and we're precisely had a shop for it,

had a pick it out and how to install it in your dealership. So I'm grateful that you're taking the time.

Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. For sure. Now, not every dealership is using AI,

obviously. So what I'm wondering is what is step one? How do you get started?

Step one is very technical and very complicated. So get ready for this. If you need to write

something down, this will be really important. So step one is you go and you look at the sales

person's LinkedIn profile and you're going to pull the whole profile up. You just look at the title

under their name. If it says something along lines of AI expert, AI visionary, driving AI forward,

go ahead and disregard that company and proceed to the next one. That would be that would be the

first. Good move. Why is that? Why is that? That's a great question. The reason that is is if you

ask somebody, if somebody calls themselves an AI expert the way I would classify it's like,

so you're a data scientist, you actually build models because that would be in it. I'm not an AI

expert. For example, my background before I was a corporate stooge is I was an engineer.

So I'm a software engineer. I did full stack development, that kind of stuff. Now do I have

understanding of how AI works where it can be applied? Sure, but I would not classify myself as an

AI expert because I do not build models. So it's not to really mince words, but the salesperson selling

you the AI is probably not the AI expert. This is kind of what I'm trying to say.

So step one is to find someone to help you. So then it's not the AI expert. Who do you find?

So I think step one before you even start looking for it. This is really important. It sounds

like fluff, but it's not. What are you trying to solve or what problem are you trying to solve

or what are you trying to improve? And that's a very important question. Sometimes maybe you're

not maybe you're like, hey, I just want to see what's out there, which that's okay to. But generally,

if you have a problem, you're thinking AI can solve, make sure you really hone in on that problem.

And what I mean by that is don't go for like a monolithic way of I want to revolutionize

the service drive process. That's a really big like what are we talking about here?

You know, like that's it's like are we talking about greeting the customer? Are we talking about

getting the customer to the service drive? Are we are we talking about the write-up process?

Like there's a lot of steps there, which you really want to do, especially in the current

state that AI is in, is hone in on specific areas of improvements. In other words,

kind of map out what the friction points are. What are you trying to either improve or solve?

There is a problem or where you think where you're trying to find the better mouse trap. And that's

kind of like, hey, I don't know what's out there, but I want to see what I can do with it. Like that

that kind of stuff. So that would be the first thing. When she do that, then what comes next?

So after that, you need to start looking internally. And as you notice, you've just

been three questions already. And I have actually told you to go to talk to anybody yet.

There is a reason for why I'm doing that. You want to look internally at the state of your

data infrastructure. And if you're like, I literally don't know what you just said,

that's already a state of your data infrastructure. That means do you need to go find somebody

internal or do you start looking for a partner that can help you with the data side of things?

That is extremely important. Not every dealer has a formal data warehouse or a data lake or any

other of these cool tech words. So if that's the case, that's the type of partner you want to look at.

Reason I bring that up is because AI sits on top of data. And it's essentially useless without

data. It's just a brain with no knowledge. It could be the smart, you know, it could be Einstein's

brain. But if there is nothing in there, it just doesn't matter. And the important thing there. So

what a lot of AI companies do is, especially like you know, so let's talk our industry automotive.

So what AI companies do in automotive is they take an existing model, then they use something

called retrieval advantage generation or rag for short. And all that means is they take some of

the industry data or their specific data or your specific data and then put that along with

the other training stuff that's already been in the model. So OpenAI makes Chad GPT, which runs on

GPT-5 right now. They hook GPT-5 with all of its knowledge into your into other data as well.

That's retrieval advantage generation. Well, the catch with what I just said is that means that

the model will be using the data that they hook it into. If that data is complete garbage data,

like there is, let's say, let's say you're doing some kind of front end thing with the CRM,

let's just put it that way. If you have a bunch of duplicates, nothing is cleaned up.

Vehicle ownership is not, is not figured out. It's just, you know, a person owns 30 vehicles,

29 of which they haven't owned in 20 years, that kind of thing. This AI will just exacerbate

the, the problem has been going on in dealer world for the longest time where the way I like to put

it is, you know, when somebody dies, we litter their grave with marketing material for vehicles they

haven't owned in half their life. So up until this generative AI boom, that's already been a serious

problem from a marketing standpoint, from a business intelligence standpoint. Well, now it is even

further exacerbated from the AI standpoint. Because now, what happens if you don't have that in

order is when you hook the AI on top of it, it will give you the most eloquently worded

best cleaned up answer ever. It will sound perfect, you know, just a perfect answer to anything you

ask, anything you do, and it will be fundamentally wrong. So now, before you even went to a partner

and you didn't figure this part out, you will try it once. This is probably why a lot of dealers

call it, you know, it's just a bunch of AI slop is because what happens is you put it on top of

this garbage data set and then you go, this piece of crap, yeah, it doesn't work. And it's like

it is working. It is regurgitating the crap that you gave it. So let's recap them. Step one is to

assess your needs. Step two, please repeat step two, as you see it, a short version. Step step two

is either figure out the current hygiene state of your data or make sure you reach out to partners

that would be the ones taking care of cleaning up that data. So step two is getting becoming data

ready before you even start AI would be the easiest step to. So once your data is in order of

cleaned up for revamped or whatever is needed, then what comes after that? That's when the fun part

starts. So the fun part in my opinion is where you start looking what's out there. So this can be,

you know, every there is a lot of companies out there. And during the again in our current time,

the really interesting thing about automotive and that's what I've been like really energized by

is the fact that we have a lot of people from not automotive industry coming into our industry,

especially in the vendor space, as a result of this, as the say, I boom, bringing all this

technology into the automotive industry. Like for example, like myself, I'm the CIO in Fox Motors,

but I worked at Apple. Like so it's like, what are you doing there? What are you here?

So this is shopping for vendors, basically. How should a dealership shop for vendor?

So that best thing I would do is start with a nice Google search or chat GPT search or

perplexity search, whatever, you know, however you search. I would start with that and I would

really look at what people are saying about it. What are other people saying about it? I would

definitely, you know, the traditional start demoing. But again, fixate on what you are trying to solve.

Not just spray and pray. I will give you a, like so when shopping, this is extremely important

because a lot of times you see a feature and you're like, this is really cool, it's shiny,

I like it. And then you put it in and you're like, either, let's say even if it does work,

you're like, well, this is not really solving what I was trying to solve. And I'll give you a perfect

example of this. Let's say you had a problem and I know a lot of dealerships have this problem is

when people call into your service department, calls go to voicemail and nobody picks it up and

then we have trouble following up after that and customers are upset, CSI gets hit, that kind of

stuff. So it's a problem. So you immediately go, okay, well, this is a modern day of AI. There is

a lot of voice AI that we can implement, you know, to pick up the phone. Sweet. All right, cool. So

then you start going into a situation saying, well, majority of our calls are appointments.

You're saying this generally because majority, yes, a lot of calls are appointments, but that's not

all your calls, but you go majority of our calls are appointments. So now you land on the thing of,

well, why don't we get an AI to pick up the phone and if they want to do an appointment,

we use voice AI to get an appointment put into our system. But if you're picking a vendor,

is it a question of picking a vendor for a specific function? Yes, 100%. I would say 100%.

You definitely want to pick a vendor for a specific function.

Would you go to a big provider or would you go to a smaller startup? I mean, is one better than the

other? I would definitely see what the big providers are doing, but at the same, I would also look

at the small ones as well. I usually, my approach, I usually prefer small to medium, but hungry and

you know how the vendor, like the vendor curve and automotive is kind of like this. It's really

hard to get started. Then they hit kind of like this and then it goes like that. I'd get the ones

which are kind of like this. That's I think I think they're the scrapiest, most innovative and at

the same time, they're past like the really like the alpha beta stage where it's like, hey,

we've got a couple hundred rooftops or we got like 500 rooftops. So you're in the space a bit,

you're not sitting on 10 rooftops. Now at the same time, if you do have a large partner and the

partner can deliver it, maybe it's easier and more seamless, but I would definitely look at

at least one or two vendors at every size just to see what's out there. Come back for our bonus

episode of Daily Drive for more on that conversation with Yuri Dmitko, Chief Information Officer at Fox

Motors. That will be available Sunday morning. That's Daily Drive for today. I'm Kellyn Walker.

Thanks to automotive news executive producer Jake Near, as well as our own Molly Boygon,

John Hunter and Richard Chuitt for their reporting for today's podcast. You can get the latest news

on retail tech, fuel economy standards and everything happening in the auto industry at autonews.com.

We'd love to hear from you. Let us know you think of the show when the topics we covered today.

Send us an email at DailyDrive at autonews.com or leave us a voicemail at 313-444-2774.

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Dec. 4, 2025 | How dealers should shop for AI tools; Trump unveils relaxed CAFE standards

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