June 3rd, 2026 | Chrysler getting new SUVs from Fiat; how dealers can counter AI advice

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Welcome to Daily Drive for Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026. I'm

a new way of building cars, starting with its revived Chevy Bolt EV. May's sales

bounce was real, but smaller than expected. And Chrysler is finally getting new products.

Plus, a Georgia Toyota dealer is building an AI playbook for the showroom floor,

and he's giving it away for free. We learned where these models can be very specific,

where they might lag. And unless I tell it specifically where to look and give it at

least some direction and some guardrails, I'm going to get a lot of general information.

And that general information, as a consumer, may not work out in my favor.

Let's run through all the news you need to know to keep up in the auto industry.

GM is quietly changing how it builds cars. At its Fairfax plant in Kansas City,

General Motors is assembling the revived Chevrolet Bolt in batches of 30 identical vehicles at a

time, making Fairfax the first North American GM factory to use the strategy. Plant director,

Michael Youngs, says building the same vehicle back-to-back simplifies supplier scheduling,

cuts paint shop downtime, and has meaningfully boosted first-time quality.

Sam Fiorani of Auto Forkast Solutions notes the approach works best at low volumes.

GM says it plans to carry the method forward when the Equinox and a new Buick crossover arrive at

Fairfax. More May sales numbers are in, and the market's first monthly gain of 2026 was smaller

than expected. Global data's preliminary report shows light vehicle sales rose just 0.6% to about

one and a half million, with fleet driving most of that growth. Retail sales barely budged up

just 0.2%. Ford was a drag on the market, with sales falling 14% on weaker truck and SUV volume.

Toyota slipped as well, posting its third straight monthly decline, but Honda was a bright spot,

with American Honda up nearly 10% on record hybrid sales.

And Fiat has unveiled two new small SUVs, the Grizzly and Grizzly Fastback, with global sales

starting later this year. Stellantis showed both vehicles to analysts last month and plans to

badge them as Chrysler models in the US, called the Arrow and Arrow Cross.

Here to talk about what that means for dealers who've been clamoring for new Chrysler products

is Vince Bonjr, who covers Stellantis and its brands for us at Automotive News.

Vince, welcome back to Daily Drive. Thank you.

All right, Vince. So what do these products mean for the Chrysler brand after years of

being starved for new products? Well, for dealers, it's just finally. After all these years,

they've been just a minivan brand. They've been struggling to keep attention and get customers

excited about that brand. But now they have these two. I mean, they're badge engineered Fiat's,

but they'll have some slight differences in the front end for the American consumers.

They'll be priced under $30,000. And so they should be pretty affordable

and generate some volume for that brand, which badly needs it.

Yeah. So Chrysler's, they have some momentum coming. They have the two, those two crossovers

I mentioned, plus another bigger crossover called the Airflow, which will be on a global,

still a one platform. And so, yeah, they'll have three more crossovers coming in a couple years.

So Vince, do we know anything about powertrain when it comes to the arrow and the arrow cross?

Well, at this point, we're not sure what the powertrains will be,

but the Fiat counterparts in Europe will have gasoline, mild hybrid, and battery electric

powertrains to choose from. And so that shows the potential for the arrow vehicles and

what they can offer American consumers down the road.

Gotcha. Now, what does this tell us about the positioning of Chrysler moving forward?

It just tells us that Chrysler is going to be the practical brand in the Salinas portfolio.

You know, you have Dodge, it's going to be high performance Jeep off-road adventure.

Ram is all about, you know, working trucks and vans. And so Chrysler has his own lane as an

affordable brand. So these new crossovers will be competing in that $25,000 to $35,000 space.

They should have some, some mainstream appeal there. And so, yeah, I mean, it's going to be

just really just an expansion of that brand, which, which badly needs these, these new products.

Perfect. Vince, thank you so much for joining me.

Yep, no problem.

Coming up, a dealer in Georgia is building an AI playbook for the showroom and giving it a way

to any dealership that wants it. That's next on Daily Drive.

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Welcome back to Daily Drive. I'm Kellan Walker.

When a customer at Beaver Toyota in Stockbridge, Georgia,

brought a chat GPT quote to the negotiating table,

dealer Daniel Gover didn't fight it. He used it and the sale was made.

Now Gover is turning that experience into a free white paper for dealerships across the country,

laying out how to respond favorably when customers arrive with AI generated advice.

Gover also runs Vink, a dealer education company.

He sat down with our own Mark Homer to talk about what prompted the playbook,

what he learned running hundreds of AI prompts across multiple models,

and why he thinks dealerships that embrace this shift will come out ahead.

Daniel, thanks for joining me. I want to explore what I think is a really interesting idea I

haven't heard about this is the idea that dealerships need to counter what to do

when somebody who might buy a car decides not to because chat GPT told it not to.

The larger sense of it, zoom out for a minute. What we've discovered is there's a great need

for confidence in our consumers. We know that there's an issue in general with confidence being

just in its own slide backwards. There's a great need for dealerships to show reciprocity

and build loyalty. Just because somebody bought a car from me doesn't mean that I

deserve any loyalty from them. But the more that I bring the full power of the dealership

to the customer to show them the benefits and how much the dealership can do for them,

that's what we're working on. So we've been working on just that aspect of it

to show you that you've purchased a car from us, you service a car with us. Here's things that we

want to build out and give to you that are just because of that. And so just because of the business

that you've done with us, we want you to be able to come back to us. We want you to be that sort of

advocate for it. So Daniel, tell me about the customer who said no because of chat GPT.

Okay, yeah. So this was a client that was identified by the loyalty department, someone who

had purchased a car from the dealership in the past, had been servicing it, and

they had presented some options to this customer about if they would be interested in moving into

another car, customer said yes, and had already explored those options. And the customer then

went home and then in the follow up later on that day, the customer told the salesperson

that she put the deal information, the quote information into chat GPT and Claude, according

to what she told us. So multimodal, you could say. And we were at a difference then at the

total amount that the dealership had given her versus what the two AI models had.

So from that point then, what happened? Did you meet the deal that the chat GPT and Claude

wanted the customer to have or did the customer walk away?

No, that's where the thesis was born. We asked the customer, we asked her to look at everything

that we're giving at no charge, right? There's a dealership has a program of benefits called

Beaver benefits, and there was no charge to these. So we simply asked if the input that she had given

to both those models included what she was getting from the dealership for free. And she

agreed that she had not, that the input was more general as what was just on the deal sheet,

and didn't include anything specific about the dealership.

Did she say yes? Ultimately, wouldn't you counter?

Ultimately, yeah. Ultimately, we said, is it fair to think that the two models did not consider

these items? And for what we're asking at a difference figure, do you think that that's

worth it? Do you think even if you asked chat again, do you think it would agree? But do you

think in your own mind, do you think you would agree that chat didn't value these things? And

it's certainly worth the small difference figure that we're at. She did agree. She did buy the car.

And that's really how we got started with our first live fire test.

What I'm really intrigued about is the idea that salespeople have to now counter customers who

will take chat, GBT or Claude or other generative AI over them. So is that new? And if so, when did

that start? And has it happened again? It's probably been happening more than we've realized.

And I think certainly it's going to become more and more common. I think, like I said,

I think it's been happening without necessarily somebody being forthright and telling us that.

And I think the fact that they would tell us is to our benefit. I think that's fair. AI is in

every aspect of our lives. It's fair that customers ask about a car purchase. They ask it about

so many things. Is that a positive development for the sales team at a dealership? Or is that a

point of concern? Whether it's positive or a point of concern is all dependent on the preparation

and the willingness of each individual dealership. I believe that there is positive to it. Personally,

I do believe that there is positive to it. What do you see as the positive? It's going back to

what we're talking about with the aspects of reciprocity and loyalty. The reason I was mentioning

that is because these are going to become key things to play into how we market our dealership.

It's going to come full cycle because what we want is reproducible results.

And what I want is for salespeople and service advisors to be able to work with a customer

and their AI model and say, I'm glad you asked my AI all sorts of things all the time. I think

that's fair. Did you ask AI about servicing your car here? Did you ask your AI about buying a car

here? And what I mean by that is that the dealership would have a concrete system of

provable tangible benefits, things that they do for their customers, why their cars are priced

the way that they are, what they take into account. All of these things that we may know how to speak

to now need to be written. So it's like taking a refreshed look at the old Y buys that we have

on our site. These are now one in the same very important to working with models like that in

the dealership because you want chat to say that. Are the sales teams and dealerships ready for this?

I think it's not the smallest change, but I think that once we understand it and accept it,

the worst thing is for people to start fighting with it, right? Or fighting with the customer

because they use chat or generative search. Dealerships need to understand that we're a lot

of people working on making their sites crawlable. It's important that we understand that crawlable

is not always credible. We need to add credible information to the dealership on our website.

We need to make sure that every person in the dealership knows to speak to these things.

Now, I think the customers have given us the same playing field. Let's work in your AI,

the same place where you ask the question, but let's frame the prompt a little bit more fairly

about specifically where you're buying the car and everything you're getting when you buy the car.

Are sales teams fighting this or are they? What have you heard? Have you talked to other

dealerships about this? This is very, very new. It's starting at Beaver and they're very much

accepting of it, obviously. They're very, very open-minded, very willing to do this. Same mindset,

the customer has given us the same playing field to work with them on. There's less of a

paralyzation of choice because you're presenting me with different information. Let's work with

your information source to do that. In my mind, I think it's pretty reasonable and I think that

other dealerships may even find more creative ways of doing this. I'm certainly not saying this is

the only way to do it. I think that dealerships ultimately it's a small lift and not only would

it make the salespeople feel better, but people like buying cars where people like going to work.

The more the employees can talk about why this is a great place to buy a car and why we do these

things for you, like real things, they'll be happy about it and obviously customers would

benefit from it as well. In my mind, viewing it from this angle, this is an entirely positive push

for us. Do you remember the incident that we talked about? Do you remember what kind of car

the customer wanted to purchase? I want to say it was a Camry SE. Was it the customer male or

female or older, younger? Female and I would say over the age of 50. Interesting. So tech

savviness isn't necessarily age-specific. Well, and that's an interesting point about tech savviness,

right? Because there's tech and then they're savvy. And that's sort of the whole thing that we're at

with chat and answering questions is how specific we were with the prompt. And for the most part,

I think everyone is using that question and answer feedback in some form in whatever model they

choose to use. And ultimately, people are going to get better and better at asking better and

more specific questions. So in the background, what I did is I ran a multimodal study,

probably not big enough to be called a study, but roughly 250 prompts over three of the larger

LLMs. And the goal was to see where is it useful? Where does it provide general information? So

really, to be able, the same thing we've been saying for years, we search for cars the same way

our customers search for cars, we search for information the same way our customers search

for information. So we did that. And we learned where these models can be very specific, where

they might lag. If I don't give it specific information, specific prompts, or specific guard

rails, we know that it's going first of all, it's going to want it presupposes an answer. So depending

on how I pose the question, it's going to want to presuppose an answer. And that can influence the

answer that I get. And unless I tell it specifically where to look and give it at least some direction

and some guardrails, I'm going to get a lot of general information. And that general information

as a consumer may not work out in my favor, because it's taking an average of all the information

it can find. With that in mind, these kinds of challenges are opportunities for entrepreneurs.

So I'm getting the sense that you did something in your capacity within Q. Is that correct?

In the capacity with both, yeah, absolutely. With both. So what have you created or pushed to

create to respond to this? So I've given the preliminary playbook of AI in the showroom

to Beaver and working on working on a bit of a white paper that we can then

publish in part of our education department at VinQ. VinQ does a lot to educate dealers,

regardless of if it has to do with the product we offer or not. This is just about towards your

success. And I would like it to be collaborative. In other words, I wouldn't like this. I'm not

trying to say that this is the only source of information. The methodology that I used for it,

the prompting that we use for it, you know, I want to document all of that and make it easily

consumable for people to see so that they can expand on it and make it better and better. And

so ultimately this becomes not a great exchange of information that could possibly, if done correctly,

make things faster and reduce friction. And you're right, dealerships are entrepreneurs.

It's entirely entrepreneurial. So to be clear with what I think you're doing is you're basically

developing a white paper that you want to share with other dealerships about how to respond to

customers shaped by their AI. Yeah. And generally I would say how to respond favorably.

How to respond favorably instead of the hostile or defensive.

Absolutely. And this paper is based on, you mentioned 250 prompts. What does that mean?

So I wanted to try and ask as many of the common broad-based questions. So starting from things

like is this a good deal? What should my finance rate be? What does this, what does the lease mean?

What is, you know, what should my trade be worth? How do I know if I'm getting a good deal? So as

much of these sort of like general prompts across the different areas that the dealership would

encounter. So from the sale of a new or used car to the trade-in to the finance office,

and then asking these questions and seeing which model responds how and where. But the broader

theme is simply that the answers are always going to be somewhat too general, unless I give it specific

information about the dealership that I'm buying at. And that dealership has something tangible to

offer up. Daniel Govair spoke with our own Mark Homer. You can find more on this story at autonews.com.

That's Daily Drive for today. I'm Kellan Walker. Thanks to Automotive News executive producer

Jake Nier, as well as our own Vince Bond Jr. and David Phillips for their reporting for today's

podcast. We also had reporting from Andrea Milan of our sibling publication, Automotive News Europe.

You can get the latest news on dealership tech, Silantis and its brands, and everything happening

in the auto industry at autonews.com. We'd love to hear from you. Let us know what you think of the

show and the topics we cover today. Send us an email at dailydrive at autonews.com or leave us

a voicemail at 313-444-2774. And if you enjoy the podcast, remember to like, leave a review,

and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

June 3rd, 2026 | Chrysler getting new SUVs from Fiat; how dealers can counter AI advice

About this episode

Kelly Blue Book

look-to-book

Chevy Bolt EV

Fairfax plant in Kansas City

batches of 30 identical vehicles

first-time quality

Chevrolet Equinox

fleet driving

retail sales

Fiat Grizzly Fastback

Chrysler Arrow Cross

Chrysler New Chrysler

badge engineered

Airflow

crossovers

one platform

powertrains

mild hybrid

battery electric

Dodge Ram

Camry SE

question and answer feedback

multimodal

prompt

LLMs

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