Subaru is the car company they’re talking about. In this episode, they say Subaru is putting off some electric-vehicle plans because of big financial impacts.
“In-house EV production” means the company is trying to make electric cars itself, using its own plans and factories. The episode suggests that’s costly, especially if people aren’t buying EVs as fast as expected.
“EV slowdown” means electric cars aren’t selling as quickly as companies hoped. When that happens, it’s harder for automakers to feel confident about spending lots of money on new EV projects.
Genesis is a luxury car brand made by Hyundai. It’s mentioned because the podcast is talking about which brands are selling more cars or gaining customers. The key point is that Genesis is positioned as a nicer, more premium option than regular Hyundai models.
EV registrations are basically a count of how many new electric cars got registered recently. The hosts point out that registrations can move up in one month even if the bigger trend is still down. They’re using it to discuss whether the market is improving or not.
The Subaru Uncharted is a Subaru vehicle that the podcast is discussing mainly in terms of how much it will cost. The point is that the price needs to make sense for buyers, or sales can be harder. It’s being talked about as a model Subaru is trying to introduce successfully.
The Toyota C-HR is a small crossover SUV, meaning it’s built to be easy to drive like a car but with more space and higher ground clearance. The podcast mentions it because it shares the same basic engineering foundation with another vehicle. That can help explain why two cars might feel or function similarly.
A joint venture with Toyota means Subaru and Toyota are working together on parts of the EV business. The hosts use it to explain why Subaru’s EV is based on Toyota-related underpinnings. It’s basically a partnership to share work and reduce risk.
Oversupply of inventory means there are too many cars sitting on lots compared with what people want to buy right now. If the cars are costly to hold or finance, the company may need to drop prices faster to sell them. That’s the idea the hosts are arguing in this segment.
Execution risk means the risk that a company’s strategy won’t work in real life. The hosts are saying that if automakers make more mistakes, things could get much worse fast.
A write-off is when a company admits an investment isn’t going to pay off as expected and records a loss. The hosts use Subaru’s EV write-off to explain why the company has less money available for discounts and incentives.
Incentive spend is the discount money automakers put into deals to help cars sell. The hosts are comparing how much more Subaru has to spend to sell EVs than it spends for non-EVs.
The Solterra is an electric vehicle, meaning it runs on electricity instead of gasoline. The podcast is talking about how expensive it can be to encourage people to buy EVs using incentives. That’s why the Solterra comes up in a discussion about EV sales and pricing.
This means Subaru’s electric-car plans didn’t work out the way they hoped. Because of that, they took losses and now they don’t have as much money to offer big discounts to sell EVs.
Day supply tells you how long dealerships’ current stock would last if sales keep going at the same rate. More days usually means cars are moving more slowly.
New vehicle inventory is how many brand-new cars are currently unsold at dealerships. If there are lots of them, it usually means cars are harder to sell right now.
Cox Automotive is a company that collects and reports data about car sales and dealer inventory. The hosts are using its report to talk about how many new cars are still unsold.
“Sell down” means dealerships are trying to get rid of leftover cars from the previous model year. It usually happens when there are more of those cars than people are buying.
Car companies sometimes have too many cars from last year sitting around. So they use discounts or promotions to sell them before the next year’s cars show up.
Ford’s F-series is their main line of pickup trucks. The hosts are saying Ford might be able to sell off older-year pickups more easily than other models.
Term
aluminum situation
In this context, the “aluminum situation” refers to supply-chain or production constraints tied to aluminum components used in newer truck designs. Those constraints can affect how quickly Ford can transition from one model year to the next, which then impacts how aggressively it must discount older inventory.
The Ford Bronco is Ford’s SUV that’s known for off-road capability. The hosts are pointing out that Ford has a lot of unsold 2025 Broncos compared with other models.
The Ford F-150 is Ford’s most common full-size pickup truck. The hosts are using it as a comparison point to show Ford has fewer leftover F-150s than Broncos.
The Ford Bronco Sport is a smaller SUV that’s meant to handle more than just city streets. It’s related to the bigger Bronco, but it’s designed to be easier to drive and park day to day. People talk about it because it can be a good choice if you want a Bronco look and some off-road features without a full-size SUV.
A service loaner is a car the dealer gives you to drive while your car is in the shop. Sometimes the manufacturer helps pay for dealers to keep certain models available so more people get to try them.
The Acura ZDX was a special Acura model sold around 2009–2010. The host is using it as an example of how brands try to get people to try a car by putting it in loaner fleets.
Days supply is a way to measure how many days the cars sitting on lots could last before they’re sold. If it’s higher, it usually means dealers have more cars than they can sell quickly.
Average listing price is the typical price you see advertised for new cars. If it goes up, dealers are generally asking more; if it goes down, they’re asking less.
It’s a way to estimate how fast sales are happening after removing seasonal effects. It turns a short-term number into an annualized “pace,” so trends are easier to compare.
Honda is one of the brands used to compare inventory levels. The hosts mention Honda’s “day supply” number to explain how tight the market is for buyers and sellers.
General Motors is mentioned as the other side of a comparison. The hosts use it to contrast how different automakers are performing amid affordability and inventory pressures.
This is about who has the advantage. If cars are scarce, it’s more of a seller’s market; if there are lots of cars to choose from, it’s more of a buyer’s market.
The Dodge Ram 1500 is a pickup truck, usually used for hauling and towing but also driven like a normal vehicle. The example given is a 2008 model with a lot of miles, which shows that some Ram trucks can last a long time. People bring it up because it’s a common, practical truck to own.
Car
1934 Mercedes-Benz 500k
The 1934 Mercedes-Benz 500K is an old luxury Mercedes from the 1930s. It’s famous with collectors, partly because it had a supercharger and it looks very distinctive with that long, classic hood.
The Renault Wind is a small car with a convertible top, so you can drive with the air coming in. The podcast mentions that wind noise can be a problem, especially at higher speeds. It’s a practical comfort issue people should consider before buying a convertible.
Mystery shopping is a research method where someone poses as a typical customer to see how businesses respond in real conditions. In car retail, it helps reveal differences between online advertised pricing and what dealers will quote directly.
Term
AI in a room full of car dealers
They’re using AI to help contact dealers in a consistent way. The goal is to make the dealer responses easier to compare.
OTD means the final price you’d actually pay when you buy the car. It includes the base price plus things like taxes and dealer fees, so it’s easier to compare dealers fairly.
The Nissan Titan is a big pickup truck. In this episode, they’re using a Titan listing to show how the final price can change based on dealer add-ons and fees.
A dock fee is an extra charge dealers add for handling the car when it arrives. It’s one of the fees that can stick around even if you negotiate the price.
A protection package is extra add-on stuff the dealer tacks onto the price. It can include things meant to protect the car, and it can raise what you pay.
An “A-rated dealer” is a dealership that scores well for being upfront about pricing. The point is to help buyers avoid surprises and extra charges.
LIVE
It's noon here in Venture City, New Jersey, and our nation's capital, Washington, D.C.,
and this is Carriage Live for Friday, May 15th with your hosts, me, Ray, here hanging out in my
living room, and it is lovely, I might add, and my son, Zach, hanging out with his life ring in
Washington, D.C. That's an awfully big ring. Let's talk smaller rings someday there, young man.
How are you doing today, handsome? Happy Friday, everyone. Doing fantastic.
Thanks so much for tuning in for another episode of Car Edge Live. Subaru Hada Mazda
can't lower prices fast enough. The latest data from Subaru is crazy. We're going to break that
down in just a second. We have so much to cover today. We're going to jump into it in just a
moment, but a friendly reminder, folks. CarEdge.com. Today's show is brought to you by us and only us.
You said it, damn it. I don't like saying it. Us and only us.
Damn it. There it is. Thank you for that, Pops. We're here to help you if we can help you out with
anything. Car buying, car selling, anything. We're here to assist you. In particular, folks, click
on Car Buying Service in the top of our navigation. You get a free consultation call with our team or
meet our incredible team of concierges to learn more how we can assist you. Dad, the big story
this morning, we have yet another automaker losing a ton of money and delaying their investments.
Subaru delays in-house EV production after a $362 million charge in tariffs fuel
90% profit plunge. Let's just recap really quickly here. In the past week or so,
Mazda sales have plummeted 17% year over year, and they have delayed their investments. They've
came out. For the first time since they've gone public in 1957, they lost $2.6 billion big ones
with a B. Subaru. Latest story, we'll start there, Dad. But there's a theme here of what's
going on in the auto industry. What's going on with Subaru? We'll start there.
Well, I think the theme is EVs cost money to develop. That only works when there's a big,
big, big, big market for it. Right now, at least in the United States, that market isn't as big
or as robust as everybody had hoped. There is even some amount of EV slowdown, even in Europe,
so that EVs just aren't selling quite as well as everybody had hoped they would at this time.
Subaru said, hey, it's great. We've got our commitments with Toyota for EVs. We'll continue
with that, pushing our very own EVs, not so much. Dad, if I may, we have now, look at the list here,
of automakers that have lost market share year over year. It's right here. Toyota, Ford, Honda,
Hyundai, Subaru, and Mazda all had slower sales year over year than they did last year.
Double digit declines in sales over at Ford and Mazda. So EVs part of the story. EVs part of the
story. There's only Honda and Genesis were the brands that actually saw sales gains year over
year. Think about this for a second, Dad. They have cars that they've invested in. For example,
you go back to that Subaru headline. I don't even know if most people who tune into the show
know what this is, because I didn't even know what it was, and I work in this industry. The
Subaru Uncharted. They spent money to build a thing called the Subaru Uncharted. Let's take
a second here. Let's go ahead. Let's go back over to Car Edge. Let's shop new cars. I don't even
know. We're about to find out together. $41,000, $45,000, $44,000. Okay. So Subaru built
a $40,000 Uncharted, and now they got to figure out how to sell this thing because it's not selling.
Well, it is. No, but it is. Okay. Subaru's EV registrations were up significantly in April.
Okay. I believe it was a total of 1,800 vehicles, but it was up significantly.
Now, the Uncharted is built on the same platform as the Toyota CHR or whatever the hell it is,
and it is part of that joint venture with Toyota. But actually, many manufacturers saw an increase
in EV registrations in April. That's not to say that EV registrations aren't still down
dramatically. How do I reconcile with that? Because when I put the headline for today's show,
in every ounce of my body, I believed it. I believe that Subaru, Honda, and Mazda can't lower their
prices fast enough. They have an oversupply of inventory, expensive inventory, and they can't
sell it. Let me ask you a question. Please. Is it they can't lower their prices fast enough,
or they won't lower their prices fast enough? I feel like their hands are kind of tight. Again,
I've been doing this for six years. You've been in the auto industry for way more than six years.
I mean, we're talking 45 plus years of your life at this point. Closer to 50.
90% profit plunge is like nothing I would ever expect to come from Subaru. It comes the same
exact week where Honda reports their first ever loss and Mazda sales are down by double digits
year over year. You know me. I love to read between the tea leaves. Okay. What did you see
when you're right between those tea leaves? Come on, man. You got to call me out on that.
What I see, dad, is an industry in despair. Truly. If these operators, what I mean by
operators, I mean the executives that run these big automakers, if they make a handful of more
wrong decisions, they could be a Nissan territory. That's what it says today. The execution risk in
their businesses just got so much higher. They do have an oversupply of inventory. I'm thinking
Mazda dad with Joe Lewis from JC Lewis. The guy's underwater with cars. He's got too many cars.
I think we're starting to see the same thing happen. Honda might be a little bit of the
exception here, but yeah, dad, we're going to look at the day's supply of inventory.
These are brands that have limited inventory relative to some of their domestic peers,
yet they're still losing money. That's, we're going to learn all for me.
But what's the root cause of the losing money? When you dig deeply into that Subaru article.
The root cause, and I know I read the comments. People don't want to hear it,
but the root cause, the major portion of that 90% plunge is tariffs. Now,
what do I mean when I say that? It's the manufacturers doing the best they can to
eat as much of those extra tariff costs as they can without passing them on to the consumer.
And that cuts into their profit. Okay. How much, dad, do you know,
I'll put you on the spot here, how much did Subaru take in tariff costs for the year? Do you
remember? What was it? 1.2 billion? 1.4 billion. Okay. Subaru would have passed on an additional
$1.4 billion in additional costs to customers and increased MSRP's, things like that.
And they were one of the ones that actually increased their MSRP's to compensate for some of
it, to offset some of it. But still internally, they ate $1.4 billion worth of the tariff costs
so that they wouldn't have to pass even more on to their customers. Now, how long can you do that?
I don't know. How many years do you think? Not too many more. Not when you see your profits go down
by 90%. So I agree with you in this sense. I think most manufacturers, because of some missteps when
expensive and B, you can't afford too many of them because too many of them will spell doom for your
business. So they really have to be judicious in how they spend their money moving forward.
It is interesting though, dad, because you're right, we can quantify the impact of those bad
business decisions and the impact of something that was out of their control, which is tariffs.
Yes. Tariffs cost them $1.42 billion. The write-off for Subaru's EVs is $362 million.
Yeah, that's like a drop in the bucket under the $1.42 billion.
Tariffs cost them four times as much as the wrong decision on EVs. That's the way that I look at
this. Yes. And so it is interesting because Subaru is, I think it wasn't at the Forester, dad.
The Forester was the one that they increased the MSRP on significantly year over year, wasn't it?
There were, I think, a number of their vehicles that they had increased their MSRP significantly
and it impacted sales. And then the other takeaway from that article was that
suddenly the cost to move the EVs that they have, the ones that are in collaboration with Toyota,
the incentive spend to move those and Subaru typically spends less to move vehicles than
their competitors, but the expense to move Solteras and other EVs incentive-wise was in excess of
$8,600, where their average on the rest of the product lineup was $2,799, which is, that $2,799
is probably $500 below what industry average is for non-EVs. So if your profits plunge 90%,
it makes it even more difficult for you to subsidize through incentives
the vehicles it takes that you desperately need to get rid of.
That's why I say they can't lower prices fast enough. They literally
can't do it. They can't afford a big incentive push right now. And that's one of the interesting
conundrums for these automakers is because of their paying all these tariff related costs,
they're paying for the right off of their EV initiatives that failed. They literally don't
have the money sitting around to underwrite incentive programs like they may have done in
the past. That's a fascinating dynamic. Can you imagine in all these major manufacturers in their
corporate headquarters, where now they're turning over the sofa cushions looking for whatever coins
and cash they can find that have fallen out of people's pockets? Having run a business once
when I had my Gulf USA store in Mesa, Arizona, I can tell you that as you are running out of money,
you are limited as to what you can do to remain in business. I mean, I suffered losses for five
years before I declared bankruptcy and went out of business after I basically lost everything that
I had in an effort to try and keep the business open. You need money. You need the cash to make
it work. And if your profits are down 90% because some of your expenses have gone up dramatically,
you can't do that forever. You can't continue to operate that way forever. So to paint a picture
where everybody's turning over the sofa cushions looking for coinage, every one of these manufacturers
is looking for ways to save money. At a certain point, there's nothing left to cut. The only thing
left is to admit you're done. I've been there. I've done that. It is distressing when you finally
have to admit defeat. But these manufacturers, they need to figure out sooner rather than later
because later might mean they don't exist anymore. Happy early birthday to Justice. He's off because
his birthday is on Monday. So Justice is around. Happy early birthday to him. I'll wish him in
the chat a happy birthday. It's on Monday. Dad, let's switch gears. It's kind of the same story,
but different data. The latest numbers from Cox Automotive came out for new vehicle inventory,
day supply, and we're going to review that. But before we do, May 14th, 2026,
new vehicle inventory holds steady in April as automakers sell down model year 2025 inventory.
That's the funniest line ever. Yeah, it is because it's May 15th, May 14th, 2026. I'm going to just
pull up over here. We check it all the time back at CarEdge.com on the car search. We're at 178
thousand left over unsold new cars as of May 15th, 2026. I'm going to scroll down here. The brands
that make this up still forward. Holy cow, man. Ford still disproportionately has the most unsold
new cars still out there. These are 2025 cars that have not sold. No wonder, Dad, with 69
thousand of the 178,000 over a third of them are unsold Fords. No wonder they're doing employee
pricing right now as a gimmick to try and sell off this inventory that they can't sell. You can
see the other brands on here as well, but that number is down significantly. I think it was,
what, 300,000 unsold 2025s? What was it, maybe a month ago? Three weeks ago? No, it was 200,000.
A couple things here. One is, and absolutely, we find it to be an absolutely hilarious headline,
the fact that automakers are selling down model year 2025 inventory in May. That's crazy.
I hate to break it to many of these manufacturers, but the 2027 model year, for many manufacturers,
starts in late August or early September. This is the fifth month, damn it. August is only the
eighth month. We are not that far away from the 2027 model year introduction.
This is desperation for these people. I've told the story many times when I worked for the
Penske organization. Come January 1st, I wasn't allowed to have any of the previous model year
vehicles still in stock. On January 1st, 2026, if you were at a Penske dealership, allegedly,
not even allegedly, but you were expected not to have any more 2025 inventory,
new inventory available. They needed to be gone. I don't know that Penske is that unique compared
to these manufacturers that they're suddenly going, okay, well, we still have May, June,
and July to get rid of. Come on, man. This is 2025 inventory. You're about to introduce 2027
inventory. What's going on with Ford? You've been thinking it would be easy for Ford to sell
those 2025s, especially if they're the F-series because they have a shorter to 2026 F-series
because of the aluminum situation. Let's look. If I select Ford, give it a second, it's limiting.
Now, I'll be able to see the model breakdown of what their leftover inventory is. It looks like
a ton of Broncos, Dad. Yes. Out of the nearly 70,000, 25,000 are Broncos. 26,000.
Only 8,200 are F-150s. They've got 1,700 leftover lightnings.
Well, they could still have 1,700 leftover lightnings a year from now.
2,500 leftover must-. No, Dad, I mean, it's disproportionately,
it's pretty clear story. It's disproportionately Broncos and Broncos sports. If you're out there
and you've ever thought about buying a 2025 Ford Bronco four-door, two-door or sport,
I mean, you're playing with house money. That dealer is desperate. Employee pricing is not
good enough. You do not accept employee pricing. You should be able to get a better deal than
employee pricing. Of course.
Yeah. To me, I don't know how a Ford dealer, if you are a dealer sitting on these,
I don't know how you haven't panicked yet. I don't know how you haven't looked at your inventory
and figured out a way to manage it better. I bet you a lot of these are ending up as service
loaners, Dad. I would imagine a lot of them will. Ford will pay the dealers to put a lot of these
vehicles in service loaners, especially the Broncos. That's kind of like when in the,
what was it, 2009, 2010, when Acura came out with the ZDX and they just sat and they paid each
dealership a lot of money to put them in the service loaner fleet with the hope that if you
gave them out, maybe somebody would come back and go, that's really nice. I'd like to buy one of
those. That rarely happened, but that was the theory. Let's keep it moving here. Here's the data.
Yes. Current state of the new car market. There are 2.86 million new cars in inventory,
78 days supply. The average listing price has ticked up above $49,025. Again, this is the
Cox Automotive data. Now, let's compare this to last month. Last month was 2.89 million. Just a
couple more vehicles on dealer lads. Clyde was 79. Again, today is 78. The average listing price
ticked up by about 400 bucks. It was $48,667. Again, where we are today, $49,025. Year over year, Dad,
the picture looks a little bit different. One year ago, there were 2.49 million new cars in
inventory, 66 days supply, and an average listing price, again, around $48,600. Again,
to be clear here, where we are today, 2.86, 78, and 49. Inventory has built up year over year,
hasn't really changed that much month over month, but we do have a significant amount of inventory
out there. A day supply that even though it's gone back, it's increased significantly from
where it had been earlier this year. It's still elevated as compared to where it was a year ago.
Yes. The expectation is and was, the projection for the year was that new cars,
they would probably sell somewhere between 15.8 million and 16.2 million vehicles, new vehicles
this year, which would begin a little bit from last year. So far, I think through the first
three months, we saw that exact type of decline happening. I don't think that April was significantly
better to suggest that sales are going to move up. The seasonally adjusted run rate, Dad,
was 15.9 million last month. Two months ago, it was 16.3 million. A year ago, it was 17.1 million.
So it actually went down significantly. Yes. So it is trending as far as manufacturers are
concerned. It's trending in the wrong direction. And we all know why it is trending in the wrong
direction. And it's mentioned in every article that we ever read, one of the headwinds is affordability
except nobody ever addresses it. Well, one way they're addressing it, which we should talk about
today, is the Dealer Track Otter Credit Availability Index is the highest it's been in
in those recent readings since June of 2022. So one way to address affordability is give more
people more access to credit, which is another story we talk about frequently here. But this is,
if I may come all the way back full circle to where we start on Subaru, Honda, Mazda, these are
brands that are stalwarts of growth and profitability. And quite frankly, the opposite of
Ford and General Motors, these Japanese brands have done super well in the United States. They
are also dead. The brands that when we look at the day supply of inventory, which again, the lower
day supply, kind of like the less consumer leverage you have, the more of its seller's market versus
a buyer's market, these are some of the names that are fairly low. They're below at least
Subaru and Honda. Honda has a 48 day supply. Subaru has a 78 day supply. If they're losing money
and struggling the way they are, and they're operating at least from an inventory management
standpoint, better than their peers, it continues to reinforce me. That's precarious. That's not
sustainable. I don't know. I just don't see a path forward. Or I see a path forward, but if they
make some mistakes, they could be really screwed. What it says is we can't afford to make any more
mistakes. Being an automaker and a car dealer right now, the stakes just got higher. You can't
afford to make mistakes like you used to be able to. You don't have as much leeway today. That's
because there's so many other outside factors that are impacting it that when you think about it
a year ago, or 15 months ago, that some of these factors weren't even on the horizon,
perhaps at that point in time. One of the reasons that inventories up significantly compared to
the same month a year ago is a year ago, there was a lot of pull ahead purchases in April to try and
whatever price increases there was expected to be because of tariffs. That's one of the
reasons inventories significantly higher this year compared to last year, because we haven't had
anything that has created a herd mentality where people think, but we have to get out there now.
There's nothing that is forcing people to move up their purchases. They're just
quite happy to wait at the moment. Certainly seems that way, Pops. It certainly seems that way.
We'll be spending more time talking about what's going on, obviously, with the new car market over
the coming days and weeks. You can be sure of that. Let's come here to the chat. From John,
thank you for this, John. Incredibly thoughtful and kind. I have a 2008 Dodge Ram 1500 with
215,000 miles on it, and I refuse to buy a new truck. The amount I put into the truck for repairs
and maintenance is less than the down payment or monthly for a new one. Keep up the great work.
What John just said, they're dead. Not only is there like attic data, there's data data. The
average age of the US fleet keeps getting older and older. What's the average age of the car on
roads over 12 years? They're twice in 12.3 years now.
More and more people doing this? More and more people can't afford to jump into the
market whether it be new or used because the cost of vehicles is too damn high. It's really
there's so many government mandated safety features that have to be part of them.
All that technology ultimately costs money. Everything costs money, but it is something
needs to be done to help bring down the cost of, if the cost of new cars could be lower,
then that would put downward pressure on the cost of pre-owned vehicles.
We certainly need to get pre-owned vehicles more affordable for more people. It is harder and
harder for many people to find themselves in a position of being able to afford new or used cars.
Almost sounds like Subaru, Honda, and Mazda can't lower their prices fast enough.
From Rich, we appreciate it. Great. Look upon a fellow classic, the 1934 Mercedes-Benz 500k.
Let's see what Rich has us going. I hope that they didn't cost 500k back then.
That would be worth like probably 100 million today.
Yeah, these classic cars. All right, Rich, let's take a quick peek at this. Ready, Pops? Here we go.
Oh, wow. Let me zoom this one. Oh, yeah, I could do that. Oh, that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's when
cars were cars, but then cars are still cars that they just don't look like that. I mean that.
I was going to say, what the hell is that when cars were cars?
I know. It just got like a classic look to it. It's got that 12-foot hood.
Yeah, really?
I mean, I think that's a damn good looking car. If it wasn't for the hearing aids,
I would love to drive around in a convertible, but it's that wind noise in the hearing aids that
gets amplified. That's just terrible. All right, folks. I want to turn our attention to something
I posted over on LinkedIn the other day. Sorry to make this a professional network moment,
but if you're not following me and my dad on LinkedIn, please do. We build in public. We're
open about this. I posted something, Dad. It's causing quite the stir in the auto industry right
now, and I want to share it with our community here so they can know what's going on. The other
day, back on Tuesday, I keynoted an auto industry event. It should come out on YouTube next week,
and I can't wait to share it. I mystery shopped 100 car dealers with our AI in a room full of car
dealers. What was super interesting about this, guys, is that while I did this, where is it?
92 of the 100 dealers we contacted got back to us within 24 hours. 62 provided some sort of price
information. A third of them actually gave us OTDs like we asked for. Now, many of the dealers
ended up sending back breakdowns that had different prices than what they had advertised online. I
want to show everyone here. There I am doing my best Steve Jobs impersonation. We ended up, Dad,
I'm going to pull over the live dashboard. Being as transparent as we possibly could about this,
we ended up grading dealers based on their performance. This is part of what we do with
our dealer ratings and reviews. You can see here, Dad, one of the dealers listed this 2021 Nissan
Titan for sale at $24,998. The OTD they sent to us had a $1,595 protection package in their $1,000
dock fee. Then the AI agent negotiated, got an $1,100 discount, but still the dock fee. Also,
just notice here for a second here, we're talking about affordability crisis. This is a used 2021
Nissan Titan with 110,000 miles on it. That's 30,000 bucks. This is crazy. That's not the point.
The point is, we then publicly graded this dealer a D. You all know this. We have our dealer reviews,
which I encourage everyone to use, and we grade dealers based on how transparent they are. They
got a D, right? This wasn't all about naming and shaming bad dealers. It was about demonstrating
the potential here. Here's Genesis of Annapolis. Here's their online advertised listing. It even
has their dock fee in it, Dad. Then you know what? Their OTD was the exact same. You know what?
They get graded and A. What a crazy concept. Anyway, I share this because it's getting a lot of love
over on LinkedIn. I encourage, if you're part of our community and you're part of this crusade
for transparency, my name is Zach Shefska. Find me on LinkedIn. Engage with that post.
We are definitely bringing some noise here for what it means to be a transparent car dealer out
there and why, at the end of the day, that's all we can ask for. It's just be transparent. Don't
bait and switch. Well, you don't have to go on for too long. I just thought I was, I'm very
I want to share it. I think it's wonderful. My comment was that, you know, am I happy to see
what's going on? I think that would be an understatement. I love it. My dad has the cutest
comment, which makes me smile every time. It's like, how can I not be proud of what we're doing?
My dad comments on my LinkedIn about how happy he is. It's very cute. I love what we do, Dad.
Well, but my point was going to be is I don't get why there are still so many
dealers out there that just don't want to move forward and change how they operate.
But to be clear here, there's now becoming a growing incentive to do it because we're going
to educate anyone and everyone that you should do business with A-rated dealers.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, you should. If you, you know, and I know we have map views,
so if you're looking in your local area and you're looking at a couple competitors, maybe,
you know, it's two Honda dealers or two Toyota dealers, and one of them is a C or a D or an
A-rated one. Well, I would think if it were me as a consumer, I don't want to waste my time with
the C, D, or F-rated one. I want to go to the A-rated one. So, you know, hopefully there are
some consequences for the bad actors out there once customers start looking at the various
ratings and say to themselves, okay, let me go to somebody that's got an A-grade as somebody,
as opposed to somebody that's got an F-grade. Yeah, and to be clear here, this is all just
about transparency. It's not about if it's a good price or a bad price. Maybe we'll do something
about that in the future. For now, we're just trying to make it impossible to get around the
car's rules, right? Like, if you don't advertise a legitimate price, car edge is going to call you
out. So, anyway, pretty cool stuff. Really proud of that. Again, over on LinkedIn, I'd be thrilled.
Thrilled if you engage with that and share your comments and your thoughts there.
Otherwise, we're back on Monday with more Car Edge Live. Appreciate everyone.
You know, appreciate everyone tuning in and spending time with us here today. And yeah, tune
in again on Monday. Yeah, absolutely. Have a great weekend, everybody. We'll see you back here at
... Eastern Time Inventors City, New Jersey. And in the meantime, just enjoy yourselves.
Have a great day, folks. See you on Monday. Love you, Dad. Love you too, Hanson.
About this episode
Subaru, Honda, and Mazda are dealing with EV demand softness and tariff-driven cost shocks, leaving them squeezed on cash and unable to cut prices quickly. Hosts connect Subaru’s tariff-related profit plunge and EV write-offs to constrained incentive spending, while pointing to oversupplied, expensive inventory that dealers struggle to move. They review Cox Automotive inventory/day-supply metrics, show how model-year 2025 stock is being discounted, and argue that shoppers’ leverage rises when inventory sits longer.
Today on CarEdge Live, Ray and Zach discuss the latest news from Subaru, Honda, Mazda. Tune in to learn more! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com
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