Vehicle 2.0 Podcast with Scot Wingo

EP021 - CEO and Founder of Your Location Lubrication (YLL), Zach Zeller http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 21 is an interview with Zach Zeller, CEO and Founder of Your Location Lubrication (YLL); recorded on Thursday, November 7th, 2019. Scot and Zach discuss a variety of topics, including... How Zach got his start in the industry with YLL YLL’s last 10 years of growth, driven by their fleet-focused approach The creation of YLL’s proprietary high volume oil change system Spiffy and YLL joining forces for Fleet Management as a Service Zach transitioning into his new position as SVP of Fleet Business Development at Spiffy Zach’s thoughts on the Vehicle 2.0 framework from a fleet maintenance perspective If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript: Scot:    Welcome to the vehicle 2.0 Podcast. This is episode 21 and it's being recorded November 7th, 2019 welcome back to vehicle 2.0 listeners. We took a little bit of a fall break there on the podcast and are excited to be back with you here today. It's 50 we recently announced that we are merging with your location lubrication, also known as YLL. So we took this opportunity to have the CEO and founder Zack Zeller on the podcast. Zach has been working in the industry for over 10 years, so we're really excited to get his insights about the automotive industry and his experience. Welcome on the show, Zach. Zach:    Thanks Scot. Scot:    And I think this is your first podcast ever. Zach:    So it is. Scot:    So we're excited to land the big first interview here on vehicle 2.0 let's start off by you and I have had the opportunity to spend a lot of time together and I've got to hear your story, but listeners haven't. So tell us how you got into the automotive space. Zach:    Yeah, so, you know, I got into automotive, the mobile onsite oil change space by having a bad experience at a, at a brick and mortar business. So, you know, had to go get the oil changed, you know, trying to upsell and, and do all these services that I didn't think were necessary. You know, it was cold, snowy, and so, you know, after my experience, bad experience yeah, I needed to, the thought there had to be a better way to do oil changes, right. There had to be somebody that could come to my house and provide this service, you know, while I'm at, at that, at home or at work. And so I started looking around and this was about 10 years ago and couldn't find, couldn't find that service. So, you know, with some research and idea, I thought, you know, I'm, I'm going to go out there and do this myself. Zach:    So jumped on Craigslist, went out and bought an old 2000, two 40 Econoline van and it put some oil in it and filters and started going door to door and knocking on people's doors to, you know, offer this service. Quickly realized that doing it one at a time, I wasn't making any money. Right? It's pretty quick. So, you know, I determine that, you know, for, for, for a while L that you know, our opportunity was in, in the fleet business and where could I go to find large fleets? And that led me to Orlando, one of the largest rental car company locations in the U S so moved down to Orlando and start knocking on the door of the rental car companies. And that was kind of my first end. So, you know, start off by doing four, five, six, 10 oil changes a day. And you know, I could start seeing the opportunities there and seeing that there was at the airports, right. Large fleets, large concentration of cars. And that's kinda how I got started. So, you know, by, by doing the one and two a day to five to 10 a day to, you know, now we're doing, you know, several hundred a day at the, at large airport locations. Scot:    Yeah. Awesome. and then one of the things that's pretty interesting is, so first of all, congratulations. Most businesses don't make it like five years. You've made it 10 years. I'm very successful. That's awesome. One of the things that we got excited about is you guys can handle, you know, something like four to six oil changes somewhat simultaneously. Talk a little bit about, so you've developed some proprietary technology, we don't want to go too far into that, but you know, how did, how did you realize you needed to be able to do that? You know, that many oil changes simultaneously did to really capture the high volumes. Zach:    Yeah. So, you know, it started you know, I w the day I got a phone call that there was about 200 oil changes at, at the airport location there in Orlando. And I went out there by myself. It was just me and one van. And, and you know, I had thought I had developed a system that to work, to be able to handle that. And what I realized was about after 10 cars that the system I had developed couldn't handle high volume. You know, I mean it was good for the five, 10 cars and, and it just wasn't working right. So it was really that I, I realized that, you know, to service 200 cars to do it efficiently, to do it. So the rental car companies could put those cars back on rent that we need to develop a system that could be high volume, right. That that could do four, six, 10 cars an hour. You know, so those cars can get back on the road. And so that's where we, we started trying all these different systems. We went to different manufacturers and trying different ideas and you know, over the last 10 years, we think that we finally found the right system that allows us to, to do what we consider high volume oil changes. Scot:    Yeah, yeah. If you're doing 200 oil changes and it takes 30 minutes per, that's a hundred hours separate. Zach:    Right? Yeah. Just doesn't work. Yeah. Scot:    So there, you know, that's weeks and weeks of time, which, which doesn't work. Cool. So what locations are you guys in? So you started in Orlando and have expanded quite a bit. What are some of the locations where you're in now? Zach:    Yeah, so we start in Orlando and then you know, through, through word of mouth. You know, we expanded into Tampa. We went down to Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm beach. So we kinda cornered the Florida markets, Fort Myers, and we worked our way up to Atlanta and then kind of out to out the West coast. So then we, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver. So kind of the, the major, what we consider major airport locations is kind of what our target market's been. Scot:    Hmm. Okay. And then talk a little bit about, so you spend a lot of time with rental, large rental car fleets. How do they think about the life cycle? Like how often are they buying vehicles selling them and, and how, what does that life cycle like for those kinds of really large fleet owners? Zach:    So, you know, I think what we've learned in the businesses, you know, the rental car companies are in the business of buying and selling cars, right? And making money off those you know, they're, they're keeping them in fleet and renting them out to really for the depreciation. So they're an asset to the rental car companies, right? And so providing the service and maintaining the vehicles is in the best interest of them. Right? They want to maintain that value of that vehicle so they can turn around and sell for the most money. So what we found is, you know, they're going out there and they're, they're buying cars there, pain to maintain them. Right? And that's part of the, you know, it's part of the service we offered the preventive maintenance service, right? They want them to, first of all, they want him to be safe on the roads. Zach:    So, you know, they care about the tires, they care about making sure the cars are rentable and ready to go. And then, you know, again, trying to get the most value out of them at the end of their life cycle. And you know, they're only keeping them for six months a year, right? They're putting 30,000 miles on these cars. You know, and they've got a lot smarter people than me that can figure out, you know, the life cycle of these vehicles and, you know, when's the right time to send them to auction and when to sell them and, you know, so we're there to support them and to help maintain those vehicles to the highest standards. Scot:    Right. And then you started in preventative maintenance. And then if they go out and buy a bunch, you know, I think today you're actually dealing with a situation where they went out and bought a bunch and you have to help them on that and they and then when they get rid of them, do you guys do anything there? Zach:    So currently, no. Yeah, you know, we help them, you know, there's, there's times that they have an increase of business and they need to go out and buy cars quickly so they'll go out to the auction. Right. And the goal is to get those cars on the road as quickly as possible. So, you know, doing a safety inspection, and getting the oil changed and helping them there. But as far as, we haven't been able to get in that market of the D fleeting of the vehicles a lot of opportunity there. Scot:    Awesome. anything else kind of on the YLL history or, you know, so you've, you guys maybe give us, give us an idea of the scale of the company today. Zach:    Yeah. So, you know, 10 years ago, start off with, with one person, one van. And you know, now whileL he's just,just over a hundred employees, we've got just about 70 vehicles on the road. You know, and more in 12 cities. Scot:    So it depends on how you count cities. Yeah. Yeah. We get that a lot. Awesome. Well, we're really excited to, well, let's talk about you kn

EP020 - CEO of MuvMe, Inc., Steven Messino, and Senior Carsharing Consultant, Dave Brook http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 20 is an interview with Steven Messino, CEO of MuvMe, Inc., and Dave Brook, Senior Carsharing Consultant for Carsharing.US; recorded on Thursday, September 12th, 2019. Scot, Steven, and Dave discuss a variety of topics, including... Steven and Dave’s individual career paths in the automotive industry, and how they first met each other The seven primary ownership models, such as leasing, financing, ridesharing, carsharing, and subscriptions A present-day look at the carsharing space and the potential for a tipping point for more car-sharing miles driven than owned vehicles The key differences between gated and ungated carsharing Steven and Dave’s thoughts on the potential for autonomy, both in the carsharing space and the industry as a whole Be sure to follow Steven Messino and Dave Brook on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript: Scot:    Welcome to the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast! This is episode 20 and it's being recorded, September 12th, 2019. In this episode, we are excited to have two guests from the car sharing industry. First we have Steve Messino CEO of move me and he's joined by Dave Brook senior car sharing consultant. Welcome to the show guys. Dave:    Thank you! Steven:    Thank you for inviting us. Scot:    Oh, Steve let's start off with you. Let's we, we like to take listeners through a everyone's career path. So, so how did you get into the exciting world of automotive and car sharing? Steven:    Okay. Basically I was consulting in Silicon Valley for various companies, so I came across a car share that started around the same time around 2011, 2012 as get around and what you now know is zero. And they were in a very similar business. They were all doing peer to peer car sharing. Ended up working with them for awhile. Them I went and did a project with probably at the time was the biggest car sharing software provider in the world, which was not a vera out of Toronto. And during that episode, Oh, we need to be create demand. So he thought of doing webinars because lots of people had an interest in car sharing but did not know a lot about the business or the market. So I went and did research and found out who were the leading experts in the industry of which Dave Brook was one of them. Steven:    And the person who originally started the industry in the United States. So we, Dave and I ran a series of webinars. Oh, format, Avera. And then after, and we ended up finding a large number of people who wanted to get into the business. But it's very similar to a large number of people who want to start a laundry or a restaurant. Most of them didn't know a lot about it. And this got tied with Metta. Vera sold to enterprise, so there was no longer a major provider in North America. My phone rang constantly and I started talking to Dave and I said, we have all these people who want to do this. Why don't we offer them a package of, we'll teach them how to run once you've successfully run one days and we'll put together the technology and get them operational. And from that point on, David has been doing this or probably every major car share car company insurance company in the world, but I'm sure you'll be a little more humble. Dave, you want to give your additional background? Dave:    Sure. Thanks. I guess I'm a serial entrepreneur and in the mid nineties, I started reading about this a wacky idea called car sharing that was starting in Europe at the time. And it seemed like a, a, an interesting idea that would have some application here in the United States. So I talked to people in Switzerland that had been involved in their very earliest car shares 10 years before in the late eighties. And it was sort of realize that, well, this wasn't rocket science. It was pretty, you know, straight forward to moving parts. So I stepped off the cliff a couple of years ahead of anyone else and started car share in Portland, Oregon. I was financing it out on my own pocket to, it was kind of before the VC and angel investor world sort of got to interested in mobility and transportation things. Dave:    And after starting my company I was approached by another group of people from Seattle who wanted to do the same thing, only they wanted to do it on a much better finance scale than what I was doing. So I help them get going and after not to, after a couple of years it made sense for me to merge my company with what was flex car which had not only national aspirations, but did expand the in a 10 or 12 different cities all over the country. And they were going head to head with another company out of Boston that started two years after mine called Zipcar. And eventually the two merged and you know, under the Zipcar banner. And so that was the birth of you know, commercial car sharing in the United States. It, after a couple of years working for Flexcar, I decided that the corporate life was not, not for me. Dave:    So kind of weighted out my noncompete agreement and then started consulting and I had been approached by a fellow Shelby Clark who had this idea of using private cars, privately owned cars, your, your car, my car, and being a platform to rent out those cars to other people. The same car sharing concept. And so the big challenge for any car share starting is finding insurance. Cause most people don't understand. Most insurance companies don't understand the special requirements of, of car sharing. But so get around Shelby's company was a relay rides, which is now called we're o, t,U , R, o. And m. Again, almost at the same time another company was starting, which is get around know, which is the other peer to peer company. And they've grown. And so for the last 10 plus years I've been working with they're startups. I've been working with auto manufacturers, insurance companies, helping them understand the, the, the car sharing space where it fits into overall mobility and okay. And having a good time at it. And then it's, that's how I met Steve as he, as he said. Scot:    Very cool. So we definitely wanna dig more into that d what I find interesting is you guys were so early with the zipcars flex car you know, and then the f the iPhone came along, which really seems to have enabled these models to, to be a lot easier or at least more consumer friendly, right? Because with Zipcar, you'd have to Kinda go to your desktop, see what cars are there, run over there and hope that no one rented them out. Whereas with the phone now you have it all in your pocket and you can get more real time from a consumer's perspective, you know, know where the cars are. Steven:    Yeah. Right. That technology shift actually happened about June, 2012 if you watch that, nobody really bought applications on iPhones and android and all of a sudden in that period it just jumped. And then everybody wanted an app on their mobile phone. Dave:    Yeah, yeah. It it really did change things quite a bit. It, you know, the better, the more convenient you can make access to a shared car, the easier it will be for an individual to decide, well, this is so easy. I don't really need to own the car, spend all that money owning a car just to have it waiting for me out front. So it's a challenge for the operator to make it as convenient as possible. And you know, there's kind of multiple levels of convenience. One is finding the car and being able to reserve it. The next challenges, being able to kind of unlocked the car, you know, without having to go through a big a lot of steps and then taking the trip, returning the car and locking it up. And you know, that, so conveniences is what it's all about. And of course, keeping the car clean is the challenge for the for the car sharing operator. Scot:    Yeah, we're, we're learning a lot about that here, here on our side. So that's super helpful. Thanks for given the backgrounds. I feel like you guys are elder statesman of, of the industry. So it's going to be a fun discussion. And here on our podcast we call it the vehicle 2.0 podcast cause we've come up with this framework where we talk about the four of innovation that are just kinda crashing through the automotive industry. We talk about connected car electrification, autonomy, and then changing ownership models. Since you guys are really steeped in that, that, you know, car sharing side, we want to spend the bulk of our time there today. So, so let's start, you know, kind of the history is really good to know. And here we are, 2019. Steve, we'll start with you. Scot:    How do you feel, how do you think about the car sharing space? I'll look into it a little bit. There's you know, dug into this, there's some data points out there that say by 20, 30, maybe 10% of cars will be kind of, you know shared or not individually owned ownership. If that's a word and then a, I've seen another one that's the exact opposite where they'll say, you know, some kind of amazing thing, like 80% of cars will, will be you know, outside of the ownership as we know it today. Do you have a point of view on where we're going to be in kind of the next 10 years or so? Steven:    Well, this is actually a great question because I spend a lot of time, usually in the summertime thinking about where the market's going since I build technologies for it. And you always have to anticipate three to five years in advance of what's going to be coming. Dave and

EP019 - Future of Ownership Deep Dive http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 19 is a deep dive into changing ownership models, recorded on Wednesday, September 4th, 2019. Scot breaks down the past, present, and future states of car ownership, including: The three phases of auto ownership; from birth, through the lease and financing adolescence, and into the digital present. Who will claim the largest share of the $1.2 trillion transportation industry in the US? A look at where car ownership stands today and identifying the largest shifts from traditional dealerships. Breaking down the pros and cons of every rising trend in ownership, such as ride-sharing, car-sharing, and subscription models. Conservative and radical projections for the impending shift in vehicle sales, expected over the next decade. The hopeful future, where you can turn your car into an autonomous taxi. We recommend following along with Scot’s presentation from the Auto Intel Summit, which you can download here. If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript: Scot:    Welcome to the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast. I'm your host, Scot Wingo. This is episode 19, being recorded on September 4th, 2019. We hope you've enjoyed the last six episodes, which we recorded live at the Auto Intel Summit. And today we are going to do our first in a series of deep dives. A deep dive episode is where we spend the entire episode. It's going to be a little bit longer, so that may take you a couple listens to get through, but we're going to do a deep dive into one of the vehicle 2.0 concepts as a refresher. The Vehicle 2.0 framework has four components. We talk about the electrification of vehicles, autonomous vehicles, connected car, and then last but not least, ownership. And that's what we're going to spend today on. This is actually a version of a presentation I presented at the Auto Intel Summit. This is going to be a unique podcast because it actually does have a pdf that goes along with it that will enhance the podcast. Scot:    So if you're listening in your car or while you're exercising, the audio will be fine alone. But if you are at a computer, you may want to pull up the PDF. If you go to our show notes, you'll find the link to that pdf there. And I do recommend you pull that up now. So we'll assume that you guys have found that and jump right into this. So one of the, I come from the ecommerce world and one of the things I found interesting about the auto world is in the ecommerce retail world, everyone is squarely on board with the fact that the pace of change is logarithmic now. So for example, Sears was started like 150 years ago and then now is almost bankrupt because that company did not keep up with the pace of change that's happening coming into the auto industry. You're looking at another industry that's kind of over right around a hundred years old. Scot:    And it's really interesting. I don't think I'm, as I've talked to folks from the various constituents of dealers and OEMs and whatnot I don't think that the industry has really caught up to that pace. So one of the things that I like to show is a chart which is for those of you falling along is essentially slide two, page two. And this shows the rate of adoption of different technologies. So what's happening is we as humans, you know, we wake up every day and we kind of work our work our eight hours and, and our awake for 12 to 16 hours and we go to sleep. And every day is very linear. A lot of the change we're dealing with is logarithmic. So logarithmic change happens in a, you know, powers of 10 effectively. So what used to take a hundred years can now take 10 years. Scot:    So I'll give you a real world example of that. So for example microwaves I remember I'm from a small town in South Carolina. I remember our first microwave was like $900 is a huge investment. And we were one of the first people in, you know, not only my neighborhood, but probably our city to have a microwave. Microwave's took a good 50 years to get to the adoption rate where they're at over 90%. Now. You'd go to Walmart, you know, now they're essentially a, and everyone has one. If you look at the adoption rate of this kind of technologies, what's happened in the last 10 years and this is because we've got all these platforms now, like smartphones and digital payments and whatnot, it's taking a lot less time for things to get to 100%. So if you look at social media, Facebook went from zero to over a billion users in about five years. Scot:    Uber went from zero to, you know, near a billion users very, very rapidly. So, so what we're dealing with is a rate of change that we as humans, and especially if you're in an industry that has been slower moving is frenetic. And I think that's a good backdrop as we think about these different ownership models. You know, will, how fast will these things happen and what should, should you do if you're in one of the, the industry and you're going to be impacted by that. So let's dig into ownership. So what we're going to talk about today is a little history about car ownership. I think it's always helpful to make sure we're all on the same page about where we're coming from. And then also in that vein, what's at stake, why, why should we even think about this, these new ownership models. Scot:    Where are we today with these models and then what's the future hold? So I think of the US ownership and kind of a model of three phases. The first phase we'll call that the birth of car ownership. And that's from 1908 with introduction of the model t by Henry Ford to 1945. So kind of post World War II. Then we go from 1945 to 2006. That's the ownership adolescence phase. And then last, what we're in now is what I call the digital phase, which is 2007 to 2019 let's dig into the birth phase. So in the birth phase, we had kind of the first cars coming out in 1908, as I mentioned. And those were essentially, you had to buy them outright. So there was no purchase plan or anything like that. But a an interesting company started called the Ford Delivery Company and they were the first rental car company and they did this per mile, so you would pay, you know, something like 10 cents per mile. Scot:    So cars were very novel. They wanted to get people in them. And they came up with this interesting kind of rental car model. So real cars didn't really become super popular until later, but that was the first introduction of that model of car ownership essentially is a, almost like a, a, a test drive, an extended test drive. Then in 1919 GMHC came out and introduced financing. So you used to have to pay for cars upfront and then they actually introduced financing so you could pay for them over a year. So that's kind of fun to think through, you know, all right. Now you know, let's say one of these cars was the equivalent of I don't know, $30,000. Essentially the financing back in those days was essentially in a, it was almost more like a Stallman plan to pay for it over a year. Scot:    Obviously a financing has changed dramatically over the years, but that was, those were kind of the ownership models in the early phases. So buying outright a financing was introduced. And then rental car, then we go into the adolescence. And so an after 1945 in the fifties, leasing was introduced, leasing was before then before the fifties, leasing was popular for commercial vehicles, but it had not been applied to, to non-commercial or individual ownership type models. A company called U s leasing came out and, and essentially brought that in. Did we had a really long period of time where there wasn't a lot of innovation and car ownership. So we go literally from 50 years, from 1950 to 1999. And the big innovation in 1999 is Zipcar. So Zipcar was founded by two folks that went on a European vacation. And they were really surprised and pleased that in, I believe they were in Germany where they found this car sharing model. Scot:    We're in Germany. They could go and find a, a car in a dock area rent that car and drive it around for the day and then return it. They thought that model would do well in the United States. So they founded the companies of car. So now we have the introduction of car sharing here in the very early days in 1999 now that brings us to where we're gonna spend the bulk of our time, which is the digital phase, which started 2007. I anchor this on 2007 because that's when the iPhone was introduced iPhone one. And if you remember, remember iPhone one, it was very controversial, a Nokia and Microsoft laughed at it and said you know, not only is it a terrible phone for making calls, but it's pretty much useless. No one's going to own these things. Boy, were they wrong? So the, the genius of the iPhone, and this didn't come along until iPhone two was the app store. So that's, that's where the iPhone became this open platform that exposed you know, caused the creation of a lot of these new models that we're going to dig into. So it's really important. And, and that's why I anchor the digital phase on the birth of the iPhone. Scot:    So what, what the iPhone has allowed to be created is a whole new model called ride sharing and ride sharing. Has an interesting history. In 2008 Uber Cab launched, which was essentially going to put an app overlay on top of the existing taxi infrastructure. That didn't work out very well. And then Uber moved to more of a model around black cars sort of limousine type vehicles. And

EP018 - Managing Director at Maryann Keller & Associates, Jeremy Alicandri http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 18 is an interview with Jeremy Alicandri, Managing Director at Maryann Keller & Associates; recorded live at the Automotive Intelligence Summit in Raleigh, NC on Wednesday, July 24th, 2019. Scot and Jeremy discuss a variety of topics, including: Jeremy’s journey through the automotive industry; from an e-commerce startup to automotive strategy with Maryann Keller & Associates. Dealerships combating margin compression following the first operating loss in over a decade. The current and rising impacts of carsharing and ride-hailing on new car sales. The acceleration of digital retailing as a solution for new and used car dealerships, including services like Carvana. Fair as a leader in subscription-based digital retailing If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript: Scot: Welcome to the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast! We are live podcasting from the 2019 automotive intelligence summit here from sunny Raleigh, North Carolina. It's Wednesday, July 24th, and we are excited to have on the show. Jeremy Alicandri. He is the, oh, we'll have to find out your title. You're with Maryann Keller and Associates. And what's your official title? Jeremy: Managing Director. Scot: Managing Director. Wow. The MD. Not a medical doctor. Thanks for coming on the show. Jeremy: Great. Thanks for having me, Scot: Yeah, I know you, I this shows your, you're crazy busy. So let's start by giving listeners an idea about your career path. We were chatting before the show about you and I share e-commerce. So that's kind of fun. And then I would love to learn more about how you got into your role. Jeremy: Sure. I just want to issue one clarification. You called it sunny Raleigh. It's hot, humid and sunny. So I do have a background in e-commerce. Actually before automotive, I started a company when I was 16 was a retailer. E Taylor ran that for about eight years moved into doing consulting services for a number of different companies both inside and outside of the automotive space. And one of those consulting opportunities led to a full time opportunity within automotive group where I was an executive for I guess about seven years. And then after that I went into consulting at a price Waterhouse coopers and then now where I am now at Marian Keller and associates. So we are in automotive strategy consultancy and what we do is we help clients both inside and outside of the automotive industry get a better sense of where it's going help them answer some of their strategic questions, do a ton of research topics and write papers and, and offered a detailed analysis to, to help them with whatever it is that they're thinking about. So that's kind of a little short summary of my background. Scot: Awesome. Are Most of your clients like dealers or are they the OEMs or are they the parts manufacturers or which part of the ecosystem do you touch? Jeremy: I'd say most of them are large companies. I touched the automotive space, so, so it could be a, a, it could be a large publicly traded dealership group. It could be a large part supplier and auto maker or lender. Even in short, so we're seeing all different types of companies come to us with with common concerns about where the industry's headed and they want to run some scenarios, bias. And that's what we, that's what we do. Scot: Very cool. Do you guys, are you kind of, I'm the type of firm that will actually publish a bunch of stuff or is it more we do publish thought leadership and be published Jeremy: A few papers, a in connection with the Auto Intel Council which is actually a, I guess a sub division if you will, to the auto intel summit. So the council and the summit kind of hand in hand. And then we also issue study. So earlier this year we issued a, a study on franchise dealer advertising where we interviewed nearly 400 dealerships and published where we think a dealership advertising is headed and where it is now and what's working and what's not working and kind of give a very granular level understanding to those that may be interested in that space. Scot: Very cool. And then here at the show you're a talk is tomorrow and you are talking about the the Costco car buying program, right. Jeremy: I'm going to Mc, I'm going to be interviewing the person that runs that program. Very successful program sold over 650,000 cars last year, which is really amazing. And yeah, we're going to be talking with Rick Borg of of Costco. Should be fun. Cool. Fun. 30 minutes. Scot: Yeah. So they don't give you a ton of time to do this thing, so it's hard to get it off all the data in there. This in the, if you don't know the answer to this, that's fine. But this is the Costco program is an individual dealers that are in there or is it powered by some other company? Jeremy: It's a, so it's individual dealers that are the ones that are actually providing the cars to consumers. But the types of dealers that participate those are some of the questions that I hope to find out tomorrow, the answer to because I don't know 100% Scot: On the show to report what we learned. So here on the vehicle 2.0 podcast, we have a framework where we talk about the four waves of change kind of coming to the auto industry. You are in the ecommerce industry as I was and you know, we've seen trillion dollar companies created out of the changes that have happened there in retail. But we use it, the framework that has essentially four components to it. So we've got the change in car ownership, connected car, electric suffocation, and then autonomy. You're out there talking to dealers or these kinds of things on their mind or it sounds like, you know, some of the reports you're putting out are more tactical, you know, like how do you do advertising in the franchise level and that kind of thing. Jeremy: Yeah. So you certainly touched on a lot there. Some of those what I would call very let's say high level trends, but essentially that's what they are probably still very far away, not, you know, on the, on the top of mind issues for dealers. I think dealers right now are more concerned about things like margin compression. Where for the first time since the great recession, the operating profit of the average dealer in 2018 was a net loss. Dealers are concerned about vehicle affordability. Vehicle prices are an all time high today, making them financially out of reach for many consumers. In fact, the average new car buyer is age 54 and has an income of $122,000 a year. Compare that to the rest of the U S and it's easy to see a tremendous delta in income. And NH dealers are also concerned about the effect of consolidation. Jeremy: Consolidation means that there's less and owner's going to be in the automotive retail space between now and 2025 and more dealerships are getting gobbled up into larger groups. So whereas we have an estimated 8,500 owners right now, within the next five, six years, we're probably gonna see about 6,500 and that's going to give a further economies of scale to some of the larger groups some of the publicly traded and also some of the privately owned dealership groups that may further jeopardize the small mom and pop mom and pop independent store and doesn't have access to the scale economies that would be associated with the larger group. So these are some of the issues that our dealers are really concerned about. And, and I would add that the, the biggest is the fact that more so now than ever before, automakers control the profitability of dealerships via incentives. Jeremy: So what we've seen here is that while the operating profit of dealerships in 2018 went into the red, again, this is the first time it has since a great recession dealerships are still profitable for as a net profit. Okay. And the reason for that is because of automaker incentives that favor dealerships to engage in certain types of activities that the manufacturer incentivizes. So that can mean investing in, in a project to improve the look and feel of the dealership. That can mean, and most most common, it means meeting certain sales quotas. So dealership may sell a cars for loss. Actually, it's quite common now, net profit. In fact, most new car price departments in the u s or dealers are not profitable. So dealerships will sell cars for a loss and then make up the money at the end of the year or maybe every quarter, every month through income incentives that come from the auto maker. Jeremy: And so when you have a dealership that loses money that that will be unprofitable without making sure that it does what the automaker wants. It's kind of a kind of a major concern, frankly for dealers. And another term for this would be stair step programs. It's kind of all similar, all group together where dealerships are concerned about how these these trends are going to ultimately affect their ability to, to grow and, and make money and, and, and survive just over the next five, six, seven years. I don't think anything cataclysmic is going to happen, but these issues are, you know, really what's on the top of mind for, for dealers as far as what you're talking about with I mentioned earlier rather autonomy and electrification. Maybe we can dig into each one. Depending, depending how, you know, like a brush on, yeah, I'm a, I'm a, you know, total newbie when it comes to dealers. So I imagine dealers have essentially three lines of business. They've got new car

EP017 - Founder/CEO and VP of Sales & Business Development at Rodo, Nathan Hecht and Patrick McKeever http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 17 is an interview with Nathan Hecht and Patrick McKeever, Founder/CEO and VP of Sales & Business Development at Rodo, respectively; recorded live at the Automotive Intelligence Summit in Raleigh, NC on Wednesday, July 24th, 2019. Scot and his guests discuss a variety of topics, including: The founding of Rodo as “the cheapest and easiest way to lease a car on the planet” How the Rodo app connects customers with the vehicle and lease price they want The challenges of Rodo expanding their dealership network and customer base How the current digital shift impacts car dealerships and who will survive the impending drop in new car sales Subscription services as a fusion of leasing and carsharing, and their potential for growth moving forward If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript: Scot:    Welcome to the Vehicle 2.0 podcast. We are at the 2019 automotive intelligence summit here in Sunny Raleigh, North Carolina. It was rainy yesterday. So you guys are getting to experience the, the real Raleigh. It's July 24th. And we're really excited to have on the show. A couple of folks from Honcker. They're from Manhattan, so excited to have folks from the big city down here and in Mayberry of North Carolina. So we have Nathan Hecht. He is the founder and CEO. Welcome. Nathan:    Thank you. Thanks for having me. Scot:    And he brought along his partner in crime, Pat McKeever, who is VP of Sales and BD. Patrick:    That's well said, Scott. That's correct. Thank you. Scot:    Also in our pre discussion in charge of keeping Nathan out of trouble. So it's good to have a,. Patrick:    That's my main job actually. Scot:    You go with, come with security. Nathan:    He's not kidding. Scot:    Uh so Nathan, tell us about you know, the founding, I'm a fellow entrepreneur, so I'd love to hear the founding story and all the background on yourself and how you got into this. Nathan:    Sure. Thank you. So the founding of the company is actually real interesting. It was actually from a personal experience in trying to lease a car in New York. I went into a local car dealership and basically went through the runaround of trying to choose and price of vehicle for a monthly lease. It took about five hours to ultimately realize that I don't, I don't even think I'm going to take this car after, after this whole experience and during, during the five or six hours that I was in the dealership I was searching for a way to do the same thing online and quickly realized that there was no way to do a new vehicle transaction on the Internet. And in my case specifically at least. So at the end of that day did a little more research and I I committed to trying to do this and that's how the company started and as they say, the rest is history. Cool. How long ago was that? That was about two and a half years ago. Half years ago. Cool. Scot:    Awesome. And then Pat, how do you intersect into the story? Patrick:    Oh I had met Nathan from a previous my previous place of work where we played in the, in the automotive data dms data space and actually had approached Nathan had learned about the company in today. If you have a need for dms data, we can help you. He said, no thanks. But we kept in touch and at that point kind of kept an eye on him and he was starting to get some, some traction, a real traction and I immediately saw sort of the need or the hole if you will. Patrick:    There had been other services out there that could present a savings to the consumer, but at the end of the day, and I'm a huge leasing fan, both of my cars are currently leased and have been leased for the last 10, 12 plus years. I saw kind of the fit immediately. So we met in Brooklyn about a year and a half ago and I think I made an offer at that first meeting. I'll pretty much maybe the next day. I think it was the next day. We, we had a really good sort of connection where similar but very different at the same time. And we work well together. So it's been a, it's been a blast. It's all, it's been about a year and a half. It feels like 10 years, but but it's been an awesome ride so far. Scot:    Awesome. So I, I also have a lot of co-founders and partners. Usually I'm described as the arsonist and they're the firefighters that kind of what you guys have going on here, probably like the fires you get to put them out. Patrick:    That's pretty well said. Yeah. Yeah. Scot:    So Nathan, you had the idea you wanted to solve this. So give us kind of some highlights. Over the last two years, Nathan:    I knew nothing about car leasing, car financing almost zero about the overall industry. I actually was an investor in a, in a solar panel integration business right around 2008. After I sold my previous company and one of the companies that we did this solar panel array for was a very large Mercedes Benz, Mercedes Benz dealership in Queens. And the owner Michael Cohen was just a really friendly guy and as I started to think about this business, I said, who do I know in auto? And I knew nobody. And I said, okay, well I'll reach out to this Guy Michael Cohen. I went to one of the operators of that business that I was in investor and I said, can you make this introduction? He said, sure. I met Michael and I told him about what we were doing and I'll never forget it. Nathan:    I think this is the first time I'm actually saying this publicly. We were sitting around his board table and he goes, you sure you want to do this? And I was like, no. He goes, I'm warning you. This is really, really hard. And I don't, I don't even know if anybody can solve it. And by that he meant providing an accurate monthly lease payment for a consumer in real time on an app and then actually giving the consumer the Amazon experience of completing the transaction. And that just fired me up and I was like, Yup, I'm going to do this. I had already spoken to my team that was working on me with something else and I said, we're going to sort of pivot into this. And again, most of the team were actually based in Israel engineers, developers and so on. Nathan:    And they were like, Carly seeing what there is no car leasing there. They had no idea what I was talking about. And we just dove into the deep end of the pool from day one and started to figure it out. And Michael made some introductions and very quickly learned how this works. We understood, but we, we started to focus on, on the, on the technology side of it and we then focused on the brick and mortar side of it and then the consumer side of it and so on and so forth. And slowly over time things started to come together. And finally we needed to sign up a few dealers because we're a marketplace. And I was like, okay, so this is like an entirely new beast. How am I going to do this? I'd never come in, you know, face to face with a, with trying to sell something to a, to an owner, principal at a dealership. Nathan:    And myself and my creative director said, you know what, let's do this. We took screenshots of the app, we put them onto a big whiteboard type of placard and we printed them. And I walked into these car dealerships in Brooklyn, New York, a a fine Jewish kid with the Omnicon has had into these car dealerships. And I said, can I speak to the owner please holding up this big placard of screenshots of an app? And they was like, you need a car, can I help you with a Honda? And I was like, no, no, no. I want to show them something. And believe it or not. Some first general managers came out and they looked at it for a mint and they said, what are you selling? And then I eventually got to own our principals. They looked at it, they immediately saw the value prop and what we were doing and how different it was. It was available on the Internet at the time. And some of the largest regional dealer groups in New York and New Jersey and Connecticut signed up very, very quickly once they saw the value prop. And then we slowly grew from there to where we are today over a thousand dealerships and approximately 15 markets and hundreds of thousands of consumers using the app. And it's still really, really early days. So there's a, there's a long road ahead. Scot:    Awesome. So so I'm gonna ask a bunch of Newbie questions to make sure I understand. So you guys go into the dealers are you competing with their alternative leasing thing or are you partnering with that? We're part, we're completely partnering with them. So, if I'm a Mercedes and I have a Daimler finance thing that's doing the lease, you guys partner with those guys to make it easier for the consumer. You're not, you're not competing with example.  Nathan:    So we’re a marketplace where there’s the dealership on one side offering their vehicles and their consumers on the other and our technology right in the middle that sort of makes this an incredibly fast, seamless lease transaction without ever talking to a dealer without ever walking into the dealer. So we're really the first company to take what is normally such an arduous brick and mortar process and, and turn it into a seamless online experience. Scot:    Do I have to be kind of like outside of the dealership to do this or can I be in the dealer using the app? Nathan:    You can be anywhere is when, as long as you've got Internet you know, and you can download the app or go to the website. You can be

EP016 - Automotive Research Leader at Deloitte, Ryan Robinson http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 16 is an interview with Ryan Robinson, Automotive Research Leader at Deloitte; recorded live at the Automotive Intelligence Summit in Raleigh, NC on Wednesday, July 24th, 2019. Ryan and Scot discuss a variety of topics, including: The digital transformation of the car buying experience How declining consumer confidence in autonomy has created a cooling trend  Common use cases for AVs, such as geo-fencing in cities The electric vehicle battery of the future: is it lithium ion? Measured impacts and projections of ride hailing and carsharing The potential for connected car as a revenue stream If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript: Scot:    Welcome to the vehicle 2.0 podcast. Today we are recording live from the automotive intelligence summit. And we have a real special treat for listeners. We have here live on the show, Ryan Robinson, and he is from Deloitte where he is the automotive research leader. Welcome to the show, Ryan.  Ryan:    Thanks Scott. Yeah, glad to be here.  Scot:    Cool. Well, let's start off. I would love to hear, you're obviously deep in the auto space. Would love to hear a little bit about your career path and how you ended up in this space. Ryan:    Well, it's, it's a, it's a bit of a long story. So I started off with a kind of a boutique consultancy in the automotive sector in Toronto, in Canada where I'm from. And from there I moved on to a pwc where I did some vehicle forecasting work on the sales and production side in Detroit. And then I got a chance to move back to Toronto with JD power and I was with them for eight and a half years before I got an opportunity to join Deloitte. So that was three and a half years ago. So it's a, been a bit of a whirlwind. Scot:    Awesome. So we've you know, we've, we've read a lot of your, your research and it's been really helpful for us. Kinda, I'm relatively new to the auto industry, have obviously had a car for a long time, but my, my previous life is e-commerce. So I'll also, it's interesting that Deloitte cuts across both. I can kind of like feel the, the influence there of kind of, you know, understanding digital, you know, coming from like the retail world that I like. I do. Then you guys are pile out of that to your research on, on the auto side, which actually helpful. It's helpful for me, at least audience of one at least. Ryan:    So I sit inside a a thought leadership center here in the U S and I've got a counterparts that that, that cover off on the retail space consumer products and and also the travel and hospitality sector. So, you know, we get together on a, on a very regular basis and we're always looking for kind of synergies to kind of crossover our research. And and I think that's, it's actually a good a segue to get into, you know, what I think is happening in the auto space particularly with where the consumer is concerned. Cause I think there's, there's a lot of crossover and convergence when we talk about how consumer expectations are being taken from one sector over into another. So, and I think it's having a, a pretty dramatic effect on how vehicles are, are a retailed going forward. Scot:    Yeah, let's jump into that. So a, I'm a big fan of the research that talks about the value oriented consumer into convenience oriented consumer. My e-commerce buddy Casey Luba over at Deloitte talks a lot about that. The cost, the bifurcation and then as it is, are you seeing that, you know, we've, you know, so Carvana for example, has made it insanely easy to buy a car. It kind of applying that e-commerce level of experience to, to that. Ryan:    Yeah, I mean certainly there's, there's a level of of digital transformation that's impacting the, the car buying experience. In terms of the, the retail bifurcation analysis. It's, it's a little more difficult to, to think about it in the automotive context. Cause for a number of reasons, one, over the years there's been a, a real a real significant shift down market from some of the luxury brands to, to try to attract and, and discover new customers, if you will and get them on their, their product ladders. There's also a lot of a lot of segmentation or sub segmentation of the consumer basis caught on. So to try to identify you know, what, what would be a a pure kind of budget brand versus a luxury brand. It's not so clear cut anymore in in, in order to apply to, to, to that kind of analysis. So I'm a bit different. Scot:    Okay, cool. Well, here on the vehicle 2.0 podcast, we have a framework where we talk about the four big changes coming to vehicles. So we have changing ownership, connected car, EV and AV. I'll, I'll give you kind of, you know, spin the wheel and pick your favorite topic amongst those are you know, we'd love to hear your thoughts on, on those. Yeah, for sure. Sure. Ryan:    So so we should, we can dig into say the autonomous space first. And we, we do a a global consumer survey. Every year we talked to, last year we talked to this are they, I should say this past year we talked to about 25,000 consumers covering off on 20 different countries. And we asked them a variety of questions around some of these, what you might call the case technologies, right? And in terms of the autumn the autonomous space, something very strange is happening. I think on the one hand, when you, when you see technologies coming into view for the consumer, as they get more information about them as the as they get more comfortable with them you tend to see consumers really gravitate towards them. And our data is telling us something quite different. And we think it's got a lot to do with the, the small number of of accidents involving autonomous vehicles in the last 18 months to two years. Ryan:    Considering that we're in a space now where the ubiquity of of social media and the echo chambers that get created around some of these topics it doesn't take very many of these you know, sometimes very tragic incidents to, to really have a, a negative impact on the consumer psyche overall relative to that technology. So as far as the percentage of consumers that don't think the technology is going to be safe it's it's actually flattened off, actually leveled off a year over year from where we were last year. So I think it's a, it, it's indicative of a bit of a cooling trend. The consumers are really taken a second thought on this, on this technology and whether or not they're really bought in going forward. Scot:    Yeah. So That's interesting on the consumer side, when, when do you think the technology will be ready? Do you have a point of view on that? Ryan:    Yeah, it's, it, you know, for as many people that that talk about this, this technology in the space, that's probably how many opinions you're getting to yet. It's interesting though, if you're, if you've been going to the consumer electronics show like I have for a number of years, it's fascinating to me how that conversation has changed, or at least the tone of that conversation has changed. So two years ago, for example, even as, as recently as two years ago the, the, the messaging was, you know, this is, technology is right around the corner. You better get ready for it because, you know, it's almost here kind of thing. And now I think we're starting to get just this past January a lot more maybe realism being injected into that conversation. So you know, I've, I've been hearing you know, thoughts around 20, 30, 20, 35, even 20, 40 before we start to see, you know, any kind of a real penetration for that technology. Scot:    Interesting. Yeah. And I saw at ces this year, a lot of the, it went from a kind of a general use case to very specific, you know, this could be on a corporate campus, this could, you know, there's a lot of talk about long haul trucking. So, so it seems like they've pruned the tree down from, you know, any point a to point B to very specific use cases as well. Ryan:    Yeah. On the one hand you, you, you have those kind of very specific geo-fence kinds of applications which I think are fine. I mean if the, if the, if the location that we're talking about is very well mapped it doesn't, it doesn't change very much. In terms of the in terms of the, the routing and things like that sure. I think that makes it a lot easier to, to find a use case for it. The thing about long haul trucking I've always been of the opinion that that would be a very good use case because it, it really does cut down on the number of variables involved. I mean everybody is going in the same direction. Everybody is, you know, going at it at relatively the same speed. All you really have to do is figure out kind of the last mile when they get off the, the highway itself. Ryan:    But when you ask consumers whether or not they're comfortable sharing the highway at, you know, 65, 70 miles an hour with, you know, a multi ton vehicle that's driving itself, you know, they're, they're actually quite skittish about that reality. Yeah. It's hard to ask that question in a positive way. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Cool. So how about electric vehicles? Do you see that kind of being closer on the horizon? Yeah, I mean, on the other side of the, of the technology coin I guess is, is electrification. And, and you know, we, we look at it as a bit of a spectrum. So, you know, electrification could mean, you know, anything from hybrid to kind of full battery electr

EP015 - Director of Automotive Analysis at IHS Markit, Mike Wall http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 15 is an interview with Mike Wall, Director of Automotive Analysis at IHS Markit; recorded live at the Automotive Intelligence Summit in Raleigh, NC on Wednesday, July 24th, 2019. Mike and Scot discuss a variety of topics, including: His 16+ years of experience in automotive industry forecasting and trend analysis with IHS Markit. The role of IHS Markit as a leader in automotive research and insights. A realistic breakdown of EV adoption, from the US to China. Cities where AVs will likely compete with mass transit in the 2020s The true impact of changing ownership models on new car sales The rise of AV and EV partnerships between automakers in the industry If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript: Scot:                      Welcome to the vehicle 2.0 podcast. We are live podcasting here from the 2019 automotive intelligence summit from Sunny Raleigh, North Carolina is Sunday today. Yesterday was rainy, so it's good to deliver that to the attendees is Tuesday the 24th and we're excited to have on the show. Mike Wall. Mike is Executive Director of automotive analysis at IHS market. Welcome to show. Mike:                    Thank you Scott. Appreciate it. Scot:                      Cool. Well uh I have I come from the ecommerce world and I wasn't really familiar with you guys, but now I've been in the auto world. You can't kind of swing a cat without hitting your research, so it was really excited to have you on the show. But for folks that haven't had a chance to check that out, maybe give us a little bit of background about yourself and then IHS and, yeah, absolutely. We'll jump in. Mike:                    Yeah. So I've been covering the auto industry for IHS over 20 years now and spent some time in the supply chain. So working with an auto supplier, large tier one supplier, but over the last really 18 years or so, really working in them more consulted consultative phase, you know, working with in forecasting realm, forecasting, late vehicle sales, light vehicle production working with suppliers, automakers, financial firms, pretty much anybody with an interest in stake in the industry. And I just market, we are a broad and diverse business intelligence from coming, covering a wide variety of, of really business verticals, energy chemical financial markets. And in one of our larger verticals is automotive as well. So we've been steeped in research and analysis and covering this industry. Scot:    Very cool. And then you have a certain cadence that you publish for things? How does that work? Mike:                    We do! It does vary depending on the, the discipline and the are the, the forecast itself. But our production forecast is an example, is updated every month as well as our powertrain forecast. We do have very wide and deep powertrain forecasts and we forecast vehicle sales down to the model level. All this is very granular and it's also global so you can see it both globally and regionally all the way down to some very minute levels of detail including model level detail call. Is your role kind of North America or do you remind goal is, I work very much with, with all of our various diverse groups around the world, but my primary background has been in North America, certainly is where I cut my teeth in the forecasting space as it were. But we have folks on the ground all around the world that do the forecast themselves and then we globally coordinate it. Mike:                    So just a great group of colleagues that are really trying to cover this ever-changing industry. And where are you based out of? I'm based out of Michigan. I'm, I'm actually on the west side of Michigan. Grand rapids. Our automotive headquarters is our, one of our major offices out of Southfield to suburb of Detroit. We have several hundred folks working out of that location. IHS market as a broad group is actually over 14,000 employees. But our automotive practices is quite large in and of itself. Scot:                      Cool. so what are you speaking about here at the show? Mike:                    So I'm basically going to kind of give everybody hopefully like a 10,000 foot view of the industry as a whole, particularly focusing on the u s market. What's the sales outlook touching on some of the mega trends that, that we've been hearing about a lot. So electrification, mobility as a service, autonomous driving where we see the market playing out for that. We'll also sprinkle in some global trends as well in some, some global dynamics because it's hard to talk just about us without having a broader context of how the market's behaving or how the industry is behaving in other markets as well. So this is a, a, it is a very interesting industry in that there are a lot of different drivers impacting it and some of them are very tactically focused. Like, you know, we've got to sell pickup trucks if we want to pay for everything we want to do in, in the next 10, 15, 20 years. So there's very tactical side of it. And then there's a very strategic megatrend side to it too. Yeah. Intersect. Scot:                      So in the vehicle 2.0 framework, we talk about four topics. We talk about changing ownership connected car and then electrification and autonomy. I'll give you kind of a toss up. Which of those do you, would you like to jump into first? Mike:                    I think electrification would be an interesting one to jump right into. Yeah. Because, that is where we're seeing the amount of, there's, there's activity in all of those categories. So I don't want to, I'm not trying to diminish any of them, but boy, in terms of electrification, if you were to ask me three or four years ago, I would say, yeah, there's a lot of talk around electrification, but you know, we still haven't necessarily seen as much of the rubber hitting the road as it were. The capital being spent. Well that's changed mightily over the last few years. And we are seeing the capital being deployed and in fact we're on the cusp of seeing a multitude of new electrified vehicles being launched. Mike:                    Now that begs the question, will there be consumers are you know, ready to buy right now? Last year, I think the market was about 1.3% was true fully electric vehicles. Now the devil's in the details there as to when that inflection really starts, but for sure there won't be a lack of offerings. And that's the interesting thing. You look at a Tesla who has really just done a fantastic job kind of assuming leadership in that, in that space. Now we'll start to see some and other initial a competitors starting to enter in. Scot:                      Yeah. And then I, I know it's a small percent, but if you start, you know, I've seen some reports where if you look at a certain slice starting to be material like you know, there's like this 50 to $60,000 where has that disrupted some of the German makers? And there's this kind of reaction. Mike:                    No, absolutely. So when you look at, when you look at that space, and again, tussle is a great example with that. They've come in and entered that in really started to disrupt the luxury category as an example. And it's not, you know, shouldn't be as a surprise that we see new players coming out, whether it be Jaguar, I pace Adi, each run new sort of existing luxury players saying we're getting into that, we're jumping into that space. We, you know, we need to have compelling offerings and they're coming to market some very, very solid offerings in their own right. But it is very material in those, I don't want to, I don't want to diminish that either by saying those was 1.2 1.3% when you start sliced slicing and dicing it down the vehicle segments. Yeah. Boy, it's, it's important in the automakers see the need for it as well, frankly, because a lot of times we can sometimes think of the u s almost in a vacuum and maybe get constrained by, Oh, you know, it's not a huge percentage rate just yet. Um too. There's growth certainly. But then when you look at Europe and you look at China, we're really other Asia, a lot of growth coming down the pike. So it behooves the automakers to have that sort of broader strategy to be thinking about it. Scot:                      Okay. And then within EV, do you guys project when will it like a 10% or number or anything like that? Mike:                    That's a good question. It depends on the market. That would be my first, my first caveat. But when we look at the u s market, the North American market as an example, we see that as probably closer to 2028, 2030 timeframe. Whereas if you look at China in and Europe, it's going to be, it'll be sooner than that. It'll be an advance of that. And part of that is we've got a government and regulatory decrees and, and rules and regs coming down the pike in Europe and in China as an example that are really helping to foster that acceleration as it worked. It's not that we're not focused on it here. We sure are. When you look at the California resources board and Carb, but at the same time we're a little bit at loggerheads between that and cafe and, and there's still that is yet to be fully vetted yet or fully decided and once we get some more resolution to that, we could see some additional acceleration on that front as well. Scot:                      Cool. Awesome. What do you want to talk about next? M

EP014 - Co-founder and CTO of ACV Auctions, Dan Magnuszewski http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 14 is an interview with Dan Magnuszewski, Co-founder and CTO of ACV Auctions; recorded live at the Automotive Intelligence Summit in Raleigh, NC on Wednesday, July 24th, 2019. Dan and Scot discuss a variety of topics, including: The road from Dan’s upbringing to establishing a startup community in Buffalo, NY How ACV Auctions serves dealerships with real-time, 20-minute auctions The technology behind the scenes at ACV Auctions, from condition reports to payments & titles His experience with blockchain and co-founding the Blockchain Buffalo group His role as an investor and advisor for Drone Energy, an industrial IoT and smart grid solution Be sure to follow Dan on Twitter and LinkedIn. If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo. Transcript: Scot:    [00:51]    Welcome to the Vehicle 2.0 podcast. We are live at the 2019 automotive intelligence summit here in big beautiful Raleigh, North Carolina. It's Tuesday, July 24th, and we are really excited to have a special guest on the show. We have Dan Magnuszewski,and he is the co founder and CTO of ACV auctions. Welcome to the show, Dan. Thanks for adding me. So appreciate you. We're doing this at lunchtime, so appreciate you kind of skipping lunch a little bit so I know sacrificing the lunch and, you know, pretending the fast. Yeah. Awesome. Uso let's start with your background. We'd love to know, you know, as a fellow technology guy, you know, did you do comp sire engineering and then take us to how you ended up, at ACV auctions? Dan:     [01:42]    Sure. So born in in really raised in Buffalo, New York as I was going through school always had an interest in computers. I initially wanted to be an astronaut, but it was, wasn't good at math, so I said, okay, well I can work on, you know, you know, computers and stuff. That's cool. And then, you know, that, that, that's my contribution. So I got really interested in computers. In high school we had a Cisco Network Academy course and this is kind of like 97 through 2001 took some web design classes. And then like I said, this is go network academy. And so I got into networking graduated high school and was going to University of Buffalo for computer science. The summer leading up to it, I was fortunate to get an internship with a a regional bank and I was working in their network operations center and writing software that was helping monitor the network and you know, the systems and things like that. Dan:     [02:46]    So worked, worked there throughout college. And a couple of years after I left there, went to a kind of a growing startup in buffalo called Synacor. I was there from, you know, there was about a hundred people and when I left a little under, four years later, there were about 350 people prep and we're preparing for IPO and all this other good stuff. They tried the first time, it was 2008 when they're attempting that. So yeah, not, not quite the timing. So I left there. They, they IPO a couple years after I left, but so I left there and to go do a startup with a buddy of mine. We did that six months in, went to south by southwest, didn't necessarily launch. So kind of went around and started becoming a technical cofounder for hire worked with people out of the west coast, New York City, Chicago who had an idea and had some money and were looking for someone to kind of make this into a real thing. Dan:     [03:50]    So I would, I'd really take it, take the product idea, like work through it, figure out what the MVP is, really try to focus it and then would go and build it. So I was doing that for a while and kind of along the same time, I was doing a lot of things in the in the local community around how are we building, you know, startups and coworking and a whole bunch of other stuff. So, so I was doing that and we were opening, well, a couple of people were opening a an incubator in buffalo in five point $2 million seed fund and you know, so that was really the first of what a first of the incubators and things like that in Buffalo. So a kind of career shifted a little bit and went into venture capital and how do you build businesses? Dan:     [04:38]    And studied under a couple of guys who had a Jordan lovey around triber who had built a couple very successful companies and with Softbank capital in New York. So I was working with them and kind of understanding how do you build a business, how to vcs, look at investing in companies how do you pitch your company? How do you do all these different things that just building how do you build a great business, but then also how do you then go and pitch it and raise capital and things like that. Did that. And so after a while it felt like it was kind of sitting on the sidelines a little bit, you know, trying to help mentor companies and things like that. But I wasn't really fully getting my hands dirty at the end of the day. So I had an itch to kind of get back into it. Dan:     [05:24]     I was working on some things on the side. And then somebody applied to the incubator they, they had just moved to buffalo from Albany and basically say, I have this idea and I, you know, I was a used car dealer. I went and I was selling 50 cars a month and it was a nice little business, but I'm running around all these auctions all the time. And so he moved to Buffalo, worked at a, at a decent sized new car dealership and saw a lot of inefficiencies in their wholesale process. And he's like, you know, I, as a, as a used car dealer, I would love to get access to this inventory where they're taking a couple of photos and just putting it in their dms. I would love to have, I would love to have access to this. So it's like, I have this idea and you can get a push notification and you know, you can buy this inventory ahead of time. Dan:     [06:14]    And it was really, you know, so it was really the initial, a seed of ACV auctions. How do you take mobile phones and mobile adoption, smartphone adoption in the industry was, you know, starting to really pick up, you know, my, my dad's a used car dealer and as I was building it he still had his flip phone, so it was like just around as we launched that he ended up getting a smartphone. I think I kind of forced them a little bit into it. So so, so the timing seemed right. So I talked to him. I said that, yeah, this, this makes sense. I could build it. Let's start working on it. So this was about five years ago, so it was a summer of 2014. We just started kind of nights and weekends, started talking to dealers started talking to some investors as well. Dan:     [07:07]    And but really it seemed like, you know, we had something there. So by the end of 2014 we left our jobs and sold our houses, downsized, and we were all in a building the product. And so kind of that first half of 2015 we were building the product, going around trying to sell it just in the buffalo market. That was going to be our initial launch market. And we had 250 dealers signed up and January 1st of 2015 we were sitting around one day we were like, okay, let's just, let's just launch it. You know, the app was an app was out there, people are asking for it and we're like, you know, Shit, let's go do it. So, so we did and a sold our first car and you know, we were kind of off to the races from there. Scot:     [07:56]    Yep. So, so for listeners that don't know, I've learned a lot about this coming from the ecommerce world, it seems crazy, but most auto auctions you, you bring the vehicles with you, like physically you put them on a car carrier. So I'm a dealer and I have 50 cars that have been sitting on the lot for a long time and I want to wholesale them. So I put them on a travel trailer and I go to usually a location that's out in the middle of nowhere because these places take a lot of land. So I'm near a city, but usually like 50 miles outside of the city. And then I, I, you know, I unload my cars and they go into these lanes. And then there's you know, there's this kind of phase set up time. So there's like a day or two where you set up and then the auction starts and then you have literally other dealers, kind of a big group of dealers walking down a lane and they're kind of like, all right, now I'm at car number 84, and it's a red, you know, Toyota Camry. Scot:     [08:44]    And then you have a little auction right there. And then someone went quote unquote wins it and then you're onto the next vehicle. And then, you know, the winners take all their cars back with them. You know, they'd load them up onto a travel trailer and they'd take them back. Yeah, yeah. And that's, you know, really there, you know, you're, you're kind of moving the car twice. You've got the super inefficient, you know, walking down a lane, it could be raining and you know you don't have, you know, an old nurse, there's almost no technology in these things, right? There's no alert that kind of says I've been looking for a 19, you know, a low mileage BMW or anything like that. Dan:    [09:18]    Yeah. And you know, that's really the core of the inefficiencies. So my co founder, Joe he was on the road three, four days a week, a hundreds of miles in different directions nobody at, at his, his lot doing what he needs to do to make money, which is selling vehicles. Dan:     [09:36]    And even when you get to the auctions, you know, multiple lanes, there could be five cars you want to buy and they'r

EP013 - Auto Intel Summit Recap with Joe Overby http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 13 is an interview with Joe Overby, Senior Editor of Auto Remarketing & Auto Remarketing Canada; recorded live at the Automotive Intelligence Summit in Raleigh, NC on Wednesday, July 24th, 2019.  Joe makes his return to the podcast to talk with Scot about all of the happenings at AIS; from their favorite sessions and what was covered to the diversity of this year’s show.  If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript: Scot:               [00:56] Welcome to the vehicle 2.0 podcast. We are live recording here at the 2019 Automotive Intelligence Summit from sunny Raleigh, North Carolina. It's Wednesday, July 24th. It's been a long day. We're here at the end of the day, end of day two. So two thirds are a little bit more than that through the show. And excited to have Joe over beyond Joe is as a reminder to listeners as senior editor of auto remarketing. Also, you're the first guest we've had on the show twice. So, so you're famous. Joe:                [01:24] That's awesome. That's a come back, man. I feel special. Scot:               [01:29] So in addition to your role there, you guys put on this show. So you've been kind of, you know helping with a lot of the content and everything. So we thought we'd check in now that we're through the bulk of the show can get a read from you. What's been kind of the topical top of mind with it? Joe:                [01:45] Yeah, I, I think I think yesterday some of what stood out to me kind of in the, in the general sessions at least was the cybersecurity. It was, I, I don't know if scary is the right word, but the the ability of, of hackers to be able to generate, to get into you know, dealership systems and automaker systems and, you know, even even you, our personal data or personal credit card information, I think it was really eye opening, especially that, that last panel a with or that last a fireside chat with Ryan Bachman. GM financial. I thought I thought, you know, I, I got to sit in on your session yesterday, Scott. And I thought it was a couple of things really came up in that session that was interesting to me that just the I think it was one of the first charts you showed with how fast the rate of change and digital automotive has been compared to what I would the last 50 years prior. That the retail model is just you know, changed so quickly. And then you know, I think look Scot:               [02:52] At how fast Carvana came out of nowhere. Like I've never heard of them two years ago, maybe 18 months ago. And you know, you've got the Joe:                [02:59]  Vending machines everywhere and, and you know, everyone here is talking about their experience. I, I'm new to this digital retailing that's kind of, it has been a big topic that I've picked up on. Yeah, absolutely. And I thought, I thought today, you know, really was a big kind of digital, digital retail day. The particularly that dealer panel where we, we had four, four dealers and the, the president of the North Carolina auto dealers association talk about for a good bit of their time, you know, on the panel they talked about the digital retail experience and how, you know, I believe it. Okay. I think it might've been the, the gentleman from, from flo who talked about how dealers have the infrastructure and an inventory to do digital routes, the best of that to do their best position that guests to do digital retailing. Joe:                [03:52] And you know, they had some, some interesting thoughts on Carvana as well. And you know, as part of that panel and then also a couple other, you know, just discussions was the fact that I guess the key to digital retailing, you know, whether you're a dealer or whether you're, you know, Nordstrom's or whomever is offering kind of a blended experience between the online and in store based on what the customer wants. And I'm sure you've seen some of the same things with any commerce's. We, there was a long phase where we called it Omni channel and now they call it harmonized. So omnichannel was kind of trying to just like make your inventory counts work across online in the store, just kind of the basics x's and o's. And then harmonized is things like I add something to my cart on a tablet and then I go into the store and the sales associate can like know what's in my cart. Joe:                [04:47] So it's interesting to see the same conversations going on here. The dealer network makes it more complicated. It's almost as if every store was its own little business. Yeah. So imaginary Nordstrom's was independently owned and operated in a way, you know, a, or a franchise. I bet that's gonna make it really hard because you may have one dealer that's kind of, you know, within a, an OEMs world, far along the spectrum. But then another one's not. If the consumer starts at the OEM site, they're gonna have very different experiences. They go into different dealers. So it feels like a lot of it's going to have to come down from the OEMs. And I haven't heard a lot of talk about them. And it's interesting too, because a lot of these digital retail, you know, providers that work with dealers, you know, if a dealer wants to do digital retailing and you know, they work with one of these tech providers, you know, to do so, you know, you have these companies that are providing it on a dealer level, kind of a dealer group level, and then also the OEM level. Joe:                [05:46] So it's, it's Kinda, it can be, you can imagine where the messaging kind of gets mixed up in that process. Yeah. Yeah. The consumer wants to look across inventory, right? Yeah. You don't just, you don't, as long as the target, you're looking at it, you know, the target store is within 10 miles and you're looking for a very specific thing. You have some flexibility there. So it's gonna be interesting to see how that Nav, how that evolves. Yeah, absolutely. The another, another thing that jumped out to me today was it was also during that, that dealer panel where the head of the NC auto dealers association, Bob Glazer, he asked the panelists, the, the dealers when they thought, you know, he was using Raleigh as an example when Raleigh would have fully autonomous vehicles on the road. And, and you know, one of them said, Oh, you know, 2020, 23, another one set out, it'll be like 20, 40. Joe:                [06:41] And then the woman from crossroads automotive, who's there, she's there, court corporate counsel. She said, you know, this is the lawyer speaking to me, but never, you know, she said it's the insurance companies will be playing a bit of a, her term was, you know, having a punting match on who's going to take liability. So I think that that just illustrates some of the, you know, I don't know if I would say never, but it illustrates some of the complicated you know, issues out there with autonomy. But I think you could say the same thing about, to certain degree about subscription and other shared shared usage models. You know, who's gonna take insurance liability, who's going to pay for x, Y, and Z. I think those are, those are issues that are going to be raised for sure. Yeah, it's interesting. I can kind of argue either side. Joe:                [07:31] I see, I totally see your point. But on the other side, if you believe some of the stats, like even just kind of the level two in three stuff reduces accidents by like 80%. The insurance industry should be happy for autonomy and you know, I think they have a business reason to get around it and say we'll take on more liability because the liability we have today is going down by 80 or 90%. So that's how I talked myself into the other side of that. Again, and they, I think one of the one of the panelists or not panels, one of the sessions talking about the, you know, there's insurance companies now that are working with some of these subscription platform providers to figure out, you know, they, they to write specific policies that, you know kind of all the different usage cases of subscriptions in it and what kind of policy that driver would need and the you know, companies would need to do those types of things. Joe:                [08:24] So to your point, I think a lot of the companies are seeing it as a business opportunity. Yeah. Okay. Any other big trends? Well, I think that one of the funnel sessions was interesting to me. The the startup portion where they were talking about, you know, just opportunities for collaboration. And Quinn Garcia, who the managing director of, of autotech ventures mentioned that, you know, a lot of times we see startups as, or they're referred to as disrupting, but you know, in a, in in many ways they kind of help solve problems within a traditional industry like automotive because they, they have the ability and willingness to, to innovate and move quickly. The other side of that, he said they're challenged. Scaling can be a challenge, but what they're really good at is innovating and, and, you know, changing you know, being willingness to change and, you know, company we refer to lift, you know, and their their ability to work with some of these more traditional players in automotive. You know, for working with dealerships, for example, to provide loaner fleets or transporting service customers to and from dealerships. I thought that was an interesting point. And as a side note, I thought it was interesting that when he was

EP012 - Electric Vehicle Analyst at EVAdoption, Loren McDonald http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 12 is an interview with Loren McDonald, Electric Vehicle Analyst at EVAdoption; recorded on July 1st, 2019. Loren and Scot dive deep into the world of EVs, including such topics as: The growth of total EV market share in the U.S., broken down by state. Exploring Loren’s CARMA EV adoption framework. Breaking down lithium-ion vs solid-state batteries, as well as their 7-year cost trajectory. Emerging companies like Rivian and Workhorse, who are pushing for EV usage in non-traditional segments. The expansion of EV charging infrastructure, including where charging stations are growing and where they’re still needed. Tracking federal EV tax credits as they begin to phase out. Check out Loren’s work at EVAdoption.com, as well as his book Gas Station Zero! If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript: Scot: [00:56] Welcome to the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast. This is episode 12 and it's being recorded July 1st, 2019. Welcome back Vehicle 2.0 listeners. Uh, we're recording this here in early July. Hopefully this has given you some content for your July 4th travels. Uh, in this episode we have a real exciting treat for you. We're excited to welcome on the show, Loren McDonald. He's the author of the book "Gas Station Zero", editor and contributor to EVAdoption.com contributor to Clean Technica and an all around EV expert. Welcome to the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast. Loren! Loren: [01:31] Great. Thanks for having me, Scott. Really excited about the conversation today. Scot: [01:35] Yeah, me too. We've, uh, I've, I've been a f a Twitter follower and, and read a lot of your content. Um, you know, I think what I've found as I've dug into, I come from the ecommerce world and as I've dug into this world, uh, there's, there's not many people that actually have original content. There's a lot of republishing of the same kind of stuff. And, uh, what I love about your content is, you know, very originally sourced and in a lot of unique thinking there. Before we dig into that though, um, let's talk about your career path. What, what got you into this automotive motive space and writing on this topic? Loren: [02:10] Yeah. So I, I'm, you know, complete outsider, if you will, to the, the automotive and in EV world. I started my career in marketing and PR way, way back in 1984. So 35 years into kind of my, my marketing consulting career have been, uh, you know, CML marketing executive consultant at, uh, a variety of companies over the years. Mostly sort of BDB professional services. But the last a sort of 15, 20 years in the marketing technology space, um, and really kind of the last 15 years spend functioning as a, as a marketing evangelists are flying around the world. Uh, speaking at conferences, meeting with clients, doing a lot of writing and research and stuff. And ultimately that's, you know, kind of the transition to what I'm, I'm doing in the electric vehicle space. Uh, about five years ago I started a blog where I was writing about all things green. Loren: [03:04] The use the, the name Loren Green. If, uh, you, uh, older people on this, they'll get the, uh, the connection there with Lauren Green, the old a actor from the high chaparral. But, uh, what I was doing was writing about a bit of everything and sort of the green space, everything from how to reduce, uh, you know, packaging and, uh, increase recycling and reduce use of water. This was back in the days of, uh, the drought in California, solar power and electric vehicles. And what I quickly found was as I couldn't sort of be an expert on all of those topics and I decided, uh, to sort of pick electric vehicles and that was the one that I was sort of most intrigued by about how are we going to sort of solve this problem, right? Well, what is going to drive people to actually want to, uh, uh, you know, transition to electric vehicles. Loren: [03:58] So that sort of when I started about three years ago, uh, the Evie adoption site and as you mentioned also sort of riding for clean, technical, etc. And so really have, you know, taken my career as sort of a marketer and consultant and strategist and somebody focused on research and data and have tried to focus, uh, on that aspect of them solving the problem, using data of when, you know, when are consumers going to, uh, you know, adopt, uh, electric vehicles, uh, in a, in a really significant way. Well, and is this your first full time gig now or are kind of still a hobby? Wish it was Scott. I'm working towards that. Um, but, uh, it, it is something I do is sort of, uh, on the side, if you will. So a lot of, a lot, a lot of weekends, uh, uh, and, and, and evenings and things like that. Loren: [04:55] But, uh, you know, instead of, uh, instead of being out working in the yard or, or riding a bicycle or spending time with my wife on weekends, I'm uh, you know, chained to my laptop, writing articles and doing great research. But I have to ask, uh, do you drive an Evie? I do. At the moment we actually have two Tesla model essence. Uh, so, uh, got our first one, two and a half years ago and actually just picked up or actually it was delivered to our house. Uh, the second one last, last Sunday. And I've gone from the low end model s which had, uh, about, uh, 200 and a little under 210 miles of range to one that now is 335 miles of range. And so I'm really excited to, uh, put that to the test on road trips when we take our daughter back to us college in southern California later this summer. So a show, we'll, we'll, we'll dive into these and road trips a little bit later in this conversation. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, I'm a, Scot: [05:58] I had a model s or a pretty early on in 2012 and then a side graded to a model three, so, so also live in that as la UV lifestyle with you. Loren: [06:07] Nice, Nice. Scot: [06:09] Cool. We're here on the podcast. We have a framework for the Vehicle 2.0 framework where we talk about the four big changes coming to the auto industry. We talk about connected car changing ownership models, uh, autonomy, and then of course, uh, evs. So we want to spend the bulk of our time with you talking about evs. I thought it'd be good to kind of, you know, talk about kind of from a timeframe perspective, uh, where you see things today in the u s and then we can kind of expand from there. Loren: [06:36] Yeah. So we're, we're really quite, quite early for any, uh, sort of, uh, techie geeks. I, I refer to this, we're probably in the palm trio phase. I don't know. Scott, did you ever own a palm trio? Uh, I did. Yes, you did. Yes. And you'd know what I'm talking about, right? We're, we're in that phase of, of where primarily sort of early adopters and I, and I use technology and, and I'm a big fan of, of um, uh, the sort of that w what's commonly known as the technology adoption curve. This idea of how consumers, basically, with any sort of new technology product, they start off kind of the innovators, uh, you know, really, uh, only, uh, for geeks people that are willing, uh, and can afford to sort of pay more for products they want to, uh, own or drive, whatever the latest and greatest thing is. Loren: [07:29] And then it Kinda goes up ultimately into, um, what's called sort of the, you know, early majority, late majority then, then, then laggards. And in, in most markets in the u s and around the world, we're still in that sort of innovator phase of, you know, kind of under two and a half percent. Um, it obviously varies dramatically by market, but in, in the u s today across the u s worried about 2%, meaning, uh, two out of every 100 a new vehicles that are purchased across the US today are electric vehicles. And when I say electric, um, I'm including in that both what we call PHEV plug in hybrids. Those are things like the, the Chevrolet volts and the um, the Ford fusion energy where it has a small battery pack and you can uh, uh, drive on a what's typically anywhere from sort of 20 to have a little under 50 miles range on electric. Loren: [08:30] And then gas engine kicks, kicks in, but you can then recharge that battery, um, by, by plugging it in at home or the workplace or whatever. And then a, what we refer to as be evs, battery electric vehicles. And those are things as you and I talked about, the Tesla model s uh, and three, the Chevrolet Bolt, uh, many, many other factors that, uh, only have electric motors and battery packs is so fully electric. And, um, so again, where we are today in the u s is, uh, is about 2%, but then when you break the country down, it is sort of, we have a fascinating picture, Scott, in that it varies sort of dramatically by sort of state and market. So California finished 2018 at just under 8%, meaning, uh, you know, that almost, and we should hit and we actually hit the 10% in the last few months of, of 2010, we'll probably finish 2019 little under 10%. Loren: [09:31] But in essence, in California, across the entire state, one out of 10 of every new vehicles purchased, uh, is an electric car. And, uh, and most of them, in fact, about 40% of them are, are the Tesla model three these days. But then if you go to a state such as, you know, Oklahoma or Louisiana or whatever it is, it's like 0.2, 2%. And so literally what we have is we have this sort of huge dichotomy and chasm in the United States where you have California, where people are literally buying evs at a rate of 40 to 50 times that of people in, in so

EP011 - Announcements, News, and AB 5 http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com The Vehicle 2.0 Podcast is back for the summer! Episode 11 is a news-focused episode, recorded on June 25th, 2019. We start off with an exciting piece of Spiffy news, which kept us busy during a several-week-long break. From there, Scot rounds up an array of industry news and explores their impact on the Vehicle 2.0 realm, including: Introducing Spiffy’s Fleet Management as a Service (FMaaS) model. Fiat Chrysler following Ford’s lead with the Uconnect Market, a new in-vehicle commerce platform. California’s AB5 Bill and its impacts for Uber/Lyft employees. Hertz launching their own subscription service, Hertz My Car. Mercedes-Benz expanding their subscription program, amidst brands like Cadillac shutting theirs down. BMW speeds up their electric vehicle rollout schedule, plans for 25 EVs in 2023. GM CEO Mary Barra says the Cruise AV unit is committed to safety, rather than being first on the market. If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript: Scot:  [00:56] Welcome to the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast! This is episode 11 and it's being recorded Tuesday, June 25th, 2019. Scot: [01:04] Welcome back vehicle 2.0 listeners. We had a little gap in episodes there and I apologize for that, but we are ready to get back on at least a biweekly schedule here with our little summer pre-summer break that we took. Um, we have a lot of exciting guests lined up in all of our favorite topics, so look forward to bringing you guys that soon. The main reason we took a gap was something that I want to start off with today. This is gonna be a news episode and we're going to kick it off with Spiffy's big news. So today we are actually announcing that we have raised over $10 million in funding led by Tribeca Ventures. Scot: [01:40] And then over the last year we've been stealthily opening fleet-oriented cities, so we're excited to announce that we're now in 11 markets. We have our first five markets, which were Raleigh, Charlotte, Atlanta, LA, and Dallas. And now we've added an additional six: New York City, Washington, DC, Seattle, Phoenix, Denver, and this week we opened Tampa. The last thing we're announcing today is our new service for fleets that we call "Fleet Management as a Service" (FMaaS). Working with fleets for the last couple of years, we realized they are looking for a comprehensive solution to all their challenges that integrates software services and a green orientation. So we'll be covering in fleeting. So services such as pre delivery inspections, re-conditioning and fueling, uh, and then through preventative maintenance, which is obviously wash and oil where we're known for, but adding a lot more capabilities there around tires and other PM activities. And then finally, the last cycle, last part of the lifecycle is d fleeting. So as these vehicles are leaving fleets, we can help there too. Uh, so reconditioning them, listening to them for auctions and defueling are some of the areas where we're helping fleets with. So excited to get that out there. That's been keeping us really busy here at Spiffy and we're glad to have that out in the news today. Scot: [02:59] With that, let's pivot away from spiffy and talk about the news in the industry. So as you know, the vehicle 2.0 framework has four components: connected car, changing ownership, electrification, and autonomy. So let's start with connected car, a lot of activities here. Since we last talked to you, Spiffy announced Ford had their announcement about connected car and they were in there with Amazon and Spiffy was included as well. So a lot going on in connected car, a Fiat Chrysler announced a new marketplace called you connect market that's part of their in vehicle marketplace platform. Scot: [03:39] Uh, and they talk about how customers can skip lines and save time by ordering food, beverages and reserve tables. They're launch partners are shell, Domino's, Park Whiz and Yelp. So it's gonna be interesting to see how, how some of these things are delivered. Should they be in the dashboards? Should they be in the OEMs APP or should they be separate apps with OEM connectivity? A lot activity, they're going on. A report came out in June, um, from the transparency market research firm, uh, about the connected car and they say that the connected car device market will surpass 20 billion by 2026. Uh, in there, uh, I definitely recommend that report. We're going to link to it in the show notes. A so in there it's pretty nursing. They talk about how by 2023, uh, OBD to dongles will essentially be, you know, uh, slowed down substantially as that's the kind of the point in time when they see the lines crossing where the automakers connected car capabilities will surpass kind of the what's called the retrofit devices that are out there changing ownership. Scot: [04:42] A lot of news this week. So, uh, here in 2019 we've enjoyed the IPO of both Lyft and Uber. And now there's just, yeah, there's a daily drumbeat of news coming out of those. Um, the, the one I wanted to talk about that's really interesting and a lot of people in industry are keeping their eye on is we have this larger gig economy. So not only do you have ride sharing like Uber and Lyft, uh, but all the food delivery, um, even like Amazon utilizes 10 99 drivers for delivering a bunch of its packages, uh, et cetera. So, so that, that Gig economy 10 99 is a really interesting part of the economy. Well, California has a law called in in the works called ab five. Uh, and this is actually passed kinda half of where it needs to go. And what it would do is it would dramatically tighten the rules around who can be treated as a 10 99 contractor versus a w two employee. Scot: [05:37] Uh, essentially when you read the rules, a Lyft, and Uber drivers would squarely be in the target here and they would move over from 10 99 contractors to w two. So this would subject them to all the normal employee rules, such as a 12 minutes, $12 an hour minimum wage, a daily and weekly over times, et cetera. Uh, what's this mean for Uber and Lyft? Well, one analyst, Ross Sandler at Barclays did a really kind of interesting back of the envelope here. So Uber has around 3.9 drivers globally. Half of those are our domestic and he estimates about six to 7% of those are effectively California trips. Lyft has 2 million drivers, all domestic. Um, so he believes they have about 15% of their businesses, California, so about double the exposure of Uber. Um, and then when you, when you kind of take the math, they're essentially, this would increase Uber's losses by 500 million, uh, annually. Scot: [06:33] Uh, 13% increase in Bern, uh, and then lifts 290 million or a 24% increase in Bern. So Wall Street's kind of keeping a very close eye on this and it's gonna be interesting to see how it plays out. Um, at the same time as these, since these guys have gone public there, they're working on their unit economics and trying to show investors that they're improving those. Uh, so for example, Lyft has been increasing. Uh, it's, uh, it's take rate, which means less pay for drivers. Uh, so for example, in the, uh, Xcel and black car segments, which are the larger vehicles and the limousine segment, um, they've decreased the pay out to drivers five to 6%. So there's definitely this showdown happening between the ride sharing companies and drivers, uh, and municipalities like California that we'll be keeping a really close island. Uh, another interesting, uh, segment of, uh, the changing ownership is subscriptions. Scot: [07:28] So these have had mixed results. So a lot of the OEMs came out with subscriptions. Um, Mercedes for example, this month announced they're actually expanding their program to add it to Atlanta. I believe that launched a national and now they're, they're adding more cities at the same time. Earlier this year, a Cadillac pulled back their offering. Well a new company threw their hat in the ring this month and that hurts. They launched my car, which is their subscription service. Uh, so if you go to hertz.com/hurts my car, uh, you can read all about it. They have two tiers to have $1,000 a month here and a $1,400 a month here. Uh, that's expensive. But when you read what's included is pretty interesting. So it includes insurance, all maintenance, uh, and there's really just kind of a month to month commitment and you get to swaps per month. Scot: [08:15] So the different tiers you have different classes of vehicles. So essentially tier one is kind of like that. Um, the, the one tier below kind of where you can walk up and get any fancy car. Um, and then the 1400 a month, uh, includes a lot of the hurts of select a vehicle choices. Um, this is targeted towards folks that, you know, um, have a lifestyle where, uh, you know, maybe most of the time they want to commute or tech car and then they want to go away for a weekend to the mountains and get an SUV or they want to go to the beach and get a convertible. So folks that are really kind of looking to swap out cars as part of their lifestyle and have everything taken care of them. So kind of that, that super convenience oriented consumer. Um, it's going to be, we'll keep an eye on the subscription programs and, and keep you posted on what's going on there. Scot: [09:02] Uh, let's move on to electrification. Uh, our next episode is going to be a heavy focus on electrification. So we want to save a bunch of time, uh, with you for tha

EP010 - CEO at TransLoc, Doug Kaufman http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 10 is an interview with Doug Kaufman, CEO at TransLoc; recorded at the TransLoc office on Tuesday, May 7th, 2019. Doug and Scot discuss a variety of topics, including: Doug’s journey from getting a PhD in Psychology to becoming the CEO of TransLoc. How TransLoc went from being a pet project by NC State students to being acquired by Ford Smart Mobility in a 14 year period. Exploring the micro- and macro-level impacts of connectivity in mass transportation. Defining the staggered path towards an all-electric and autonomous industry, as well as the role that TransLoc plays as a part of Ford’s plan for the future of automotive. How transformative 5G technology will be for automakers and software companies alike. Be sure to follow Doug on LinkedIn and Twitter! If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript: Scot: [00:51] Welcome to the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast. This is episode 10 and it's being recorded Tuesday May 7th. Welcome back Vehicle 2.0 listeners! This week on the show. We are really excited to have Doug Kaufmann. Doug is the CEO of TransLoc, which is a subsidiary of Ford. Welcome to the podcast, Doug. Doug: [01:13] Thanks Scot. It's my pleasure to be here. Scot: [01:16] Doug, you and I have known each other, but listeners don't have that benefit. Let's start off by going over your career path. How did you end up as CEO of a division inside of Ford? Doug: [01:26] Sure. So if I go way back hitting the way back machine here, I actually went to graduate school to get a PhD in psychology. And while I was in graduate school, um, I started making websites for my students. This was before the recourse management systems. And yes, I'm actually that old, uh, and my students really started taking to it and I was getting burnt out with graduate school and I decided when I finished, instead of taking a faculty job, I was going to take what I had made for my students and turn it into a business. I thought this internet thing would be something. So I said, hey, let's make it a business and I can always come back to teaching later. Um, that was very young, naive thinking. Yeah. And so I, I did, uh, I was actually called alley dog.com. It still exists today. Doug: [02:11] It's a resource online resource for college level psychology students. And um, while I was doing that, I met folks that had just founded a company called blackboard, which became the dominant player in the learning space. And they said, hey, we're making this move from software to the web and this thing you built for psychology, we want to do the same thing. Um, but for every subject matter that's out there, can you provide content for every subject matter? And it was just me by the way. Yeah. And I said, well, how many subject matters are you covering? And he said, 253. And I said, no problem. Of course I had no ability to do this at all. Yeah. One thing led to another and they said, why don't you forget about that? Why don't you come and join blackboard and let's build this thing together. They were very much a startup at the time. Doug: [02:56] And so I did, I went to blackboard and that was a phenomenal experience. That was a rocket ship. Stayed there for a couple of years, right before the IPO I left because the entrepreneurial spirit was calling and I left to start another business. And that put me on a path to starting a series of companies, um, where I would s found them, lead them and exit sometimes good exit. And sometimes not so good exits. Um, when I left the last company I founded, which was called spring metrics, I told a few people that I was going to be leaving soon. And one of them said, hey, you should check out this company called TransLoc. They are small company, but they're doing really interesting things and you might work with them. And so I asked what they did and the person told me they build technology for mass transit. And I said, that really sounds awful. Doug: [03:48] I don't know that I could come up with something that was more boring than that and this person assured me just go talk to them. Um, and when I talked to one of the board members and the founder, I really started to see the power of what translate was already doing in the early days and how impactful transportation is to people's lives. This was eyeopening for me. Um, and so I thought, this is definitely something I can do for two years before I go start my next company. And, uh, that's how I ended up at TransLoc. And that was more than seven years ago. Scot: [04:17] Cool. And then, so seven years ago you joined TransLoc and then how, how old was the company when you joined? Doug: [04:23] Company was founded in 2004 and this was 2012 and I, I did not get hired as the CEO. Um, I got hired. The founder was still the CEO, although he was not operating day to day. So he hired me and one other person to co run the company together. And then two years later I became CEO. Scot: [04:44] Very cool. Awesome. Um, and then, uh, what was your Undergrad in? Was it more technical or also Doug: [04:51] no, my undergrad was, was also in psychology. It so psychology all the way through. Scot: [04:58] Yup. We'll uh, selling one of the core things of being a CEO is selling, right? You're, you're always selling employees or investors or whoever. Yeah. Um, so psychology is good for them. Doug: [05:08] Oh, not only is it good for that, but people ask me all the time, I don't understand how you go from being a phd in psychology to being an entrepreneur or a CEO. And I actually think there is no better degree for being a CEO because everything in the company is about people, even the technology comes down to the people, right? If you've got amazing people and they're putting the right situations and you nurture them properly, they're going to build the best technology and they're going to figure out how to sell it best and what have you. So my job really is like chief psychology officer much more than chief executive officer. Yeah. Yeah. Scot: [05:41] Very cool. Um, so, uh, let's talk about TransLoc. So my understanding is it started back in ‘04 by some NC state guys to kind of like solve this pretty big problem of we have these buses at NC State called the wolf line and uh, you know, so you know, a lot of times you'd go out there and wait for an hour or so for this bus to come. Wouldn't it be a more awesome if you had an APP for tracking, is that, does that kind of the right startup history story, right? Doug: [06:07] Yeah. It really was simply answer the question, where's my bus? Yeah. And at the time, there wasn't even apps, right? 2004, it was can I open a browser on my computer and see where the buses, and so Josh Whitten, who was the founder, um, went to the, went to the wolf line and said, why, why isn't there something like this? And they said, well that technology doesn't exist. And he said, well, that, that can't be because I play online games with people in real time across the world. And so he said, if I build it, will you buy it? And they said yes. So he enlisted the help of Dominic fish off another person at state and they built the first version of what we now call real time, which answers the question, where is my boss? Scot: [06:50] Cool. So then, um, so then that seemed to be popular and has expanded to a bunch of other universities and then yeah, then I think it went on into municipalities cause then, you know, it's a logical extension for the city buses to, to have this kind of technology. Doug: [07:04] Yeah, it was, it was actually fairly slow going in the beginning. Um, I mean, even when I came in, 2012 company had 38 customers and have customers being transit agencies, not writers. Right? So that's who we sell to. And you know, the way Josh told the stories to me about the early days as he would meet up with a transit agency representative, typically the decision maker, someone that runs the transit agency and even say, look, I have, I've built this technology, you can see it here on my computer. And it allows you to put your entire system online and show writers where the buses are in realtime. Isn't that amazing? And they said, oh my God, no, we don't want that. Why would we want that? Now people can see if we're running late, if the bus is going too fast, too slow, what have you. So there really was a process of educating the market of how valuable this would be for not only writers, but also for the transit agencies. And then it, then it really did take off. Yeah. Scot: [07:58] Cool. And then you came on board, um, and then you, um, you know, uh, maybe tell a story, but you saw a lot of value in, you know, a ramping that up would be a lot of value in the data. And then thinking about multimodal transportation and a lot of things like that. So we're, where did you take transload to up into the, the Ford acquisition? Doug: [08:16] Absolutely. So interestingly, Josh, when Josh was trying to sell me on joining the company, his pitch really was about sustainability. That if we make transit work really well, people will get out of their cars, get on a transit, and then we'll have, uh, you know, less greenhouse gas, less carbon emission. And that was great, except for me, what resonated more was understanding just how many people were dependent on transit and how bad the service was. Not because transit wasn't trying really hard, but it can only do so much. And so I learned about how many people have lit

EP009 - Partner at McKinsey & Company, Kersten Heineke http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 9 is an interview with Kersten Heineke, Partner at McKinsey & Company; recorded on April 26th, 2019. Kersten and Scot discuss a variety of topics, including: Kersten’s career path at McKinsey and the creation of the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility. Differences in car sharing, ride hailing, and other ownership models between Europe and North America. The future of connectivity, including data sharing with cities/municipalities to improve infrastructure. Latest developments with electric vehicles and predicting the rate of customer adoption. Interesting and realistic use cases for autonomous vehicles, including robotaxis/shuttles and long haul trucking. Exploring the transition from AV geo-fencing and regulatory issues to complete autonomous mobility. Be sure to follow Kersten on LinkedIn and keep up with the latest from the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility! If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript: Scot: [00:51] Welcome to the vehicle 2.0 podcast. This is episode nine and it's being recorded Friday, April 26 2019. Welcome back vehicle 2.0 listeners this week on the show. We are really excited to have Kersten Heineke on the show. Kersten is a partner at McKinsey where he leads the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility in Europe. Uh, there he focuses on connected cars, autonomous driving, shared mobility, as well as the impact of all these developments on organizations across all industries. Welcome to the show. Kersten. Kersten: [01:29] Thank you so much for having me! Scot: [01:31] Cool. Let's, let's start off by kind of understanding how did you end up in the world of mobility? Kersten: [01:37] Well, I started at McKinsey doing a couple of engagements in, in banking initially and then I said, okay, banking is not really what I want to do. I need a physical product, something you it can be passionate about. And I went into automotive and did a couple of projects in an automotive, mostly traditional stuff and growth plans, expansion plans, material cost optimization, you know, the things that a consultancy is famous for and in some ways, and then we started getting more and more requests about automotive from automotive companies going into the new topics. So be that mobility, shared mobility. Also the question on what the impact of connectivity is and then eventually how you can make money with topics like eight us eventually autonomous driving. And we said as McKinsey, we need to approach this from a different angle because these disruptions, I was so significant that we need to build up our own perspective on this. Kersten: [02:32] And we created the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility as a, as a think tank. And I said, yeah, this is what I want to work on. This is much more exciting than trying to find 50 cents and some tiny piece on the car somewhere and trying to optimize the cost. I want to work on the future topics that can change the industry, but also can make our daily lives better. And I got the chance to dedicating 95 to 99%, so almost every, every single minute my day to these future mobility topics, um, started out a bit broader on all of the topics and then eventually when deeper and deeper and concentrated more on autonomous and connected and also shared. Um, and then I was fortunate to be allowed to take over even a leadership role in this McKinsey Center for Future Mobility. And that's sort of been the last couple of years of my career and it's, it's been a great ride so far. Scot: [03:23] Awesome. Uh, and then, um, I imagine, you know, when you, when you have a center that means something within the world of McKinsey, is there, is there kind of a whole team dedicated to this? And, and, uh, also, uh, I know you're in Europe, but do you, do you work with your colleagues and in the u s for example on a lot of this or does all the thought leadership come out of your, Kersten: [03:42] so as always when the Kinsey had set up a virtual organization, if you will, uh, and we do have colleagues working on future of mobility in, in Europe and the US also in Asia where we do have a team in China. We do have a team in Korea and one in Japan, one in India. And we do have a team for South America. And how we structured it is we usually have a couple of partners leading the charge in each of the continents. Also, we do have a couple of partners leading the charge in each of the topics we cover. So in an autonomous connected, electric and shared. And then there's a huge team of consultants around me to dedicate anything between 50% to a hundred percent of their time on these topics. And the entire group across all the continents, across all the topics within McKinsey has roughly 200 people. So it's grown tremendously over the last couple of years and months and we intend to grow it much further simply because the requests we're getting are now also not only from automotive companies, but increasingly so from outside of the automotive space. And we simply need to grow further to make sure we can keep up with the demand. Scot: [04:46] Yeah, that was actually going to be my next question. So, uh, I was going to guess, it's kind of obvious you're probably working directly with the manufacturers and people right in the heart of, of the bullseye there a of mobility. Um, what are some of the other types of customers that are interested in what's going on that or there abouts bid outside of that, that core? Kersten: [05:05] So we have, they have a couple of suppliers as well in there. We're interested, so automotive suppliers, um, there's other companies in the financial space. So can we ensure us that, I wondering how the change in car ownership is going to affect their portfolio. There was a lot of telco companies, um, that, I'm wondering what, what is our play there? How does five g maybe positively affect this? What can we do? The cities getting more and more interested in this and also public transport providers where any kind of mobility service provider interested, there's um, uh, tech companies. There is a even startups that got come to us for advice on sort of the market model and how they can, um, how they can optimize their portfolio and what their go to market strategy is going to be. So it's uh, an energy companies obviously interested in how electric vehicles are going to affect their business. Oil and gas companies similarly interested in this future of mobility, how their businesses impacted. So you could almost say it's, it's everybody, um, who, who somehow makes a product that is being transported somewhere or who was dealing with people that need to get to their respective establishment. So it's a broad, a very broad client group interested in this topic or on these topics. Scot: [06:24] Very cool. So, uh, here on the vehicle 2.0 podcast, the whole foundation is this framework where, uh, and uh, you know, since we came up with this framework, I've discovered everyone has one but, but in ours there's a, we, we look at kind of these four, I think of them as these ways of innovation and I come from the ecommerce industry and what you find is these waves just like waves in the real world, Dave, they kind of compound. Um, so there they're in in their own right, they're powerful, but when they compound, then it just really accelerates the rate of change. Um, so the four we look at our changing ownership models, connectivity, electrification and autonomy. Um, and I wanted to start with the new ownership models because that's how I found you. I was kind of, you know, really beefing up on all these new ownership models and read some of your, your reports that were excellent. So it's just wanted to start there. What's your point of view of where we're going on ownership? Kersten: [07:15] I think that's a, it's an exciting question and it's probably one of the key questions that keep the, some of the OEMs and also us awake at night. The Times I think he'd be honest, I say it depends. So it depends. Are you a, are we talking about people in their 20s or even though any 30th if in major cities while we talking about people in their fifties and sixties that live somewhere in the countryside. And in the end we believe that ownership netnet, um, on the whole is going to go down. At least when you take a look at the developed or the more developed countries, why simply because in cities and even in some use cases you have less and less reason to own a car and owning the car will also become less attractive going forward if you factor in what congestion, if you factor in, uh, probably charge us for production that you're creating. Kersten: [08:03] And at the same time also the increasing offer of subscription models of car sharing. And then as you said before, when you then throw an autonomy into the mix and you make car sharing or he hating autonomous and it becomes even, uh, even easier to use these services instead of owning your car. However, if you're now living in a rural area or if you're living in and the part of the work that this may be, you still still growing strongly and the car ownership, um, fingers will still roll for the next couple of years. So even for the next 10 years, we do see car ownership growing in a white chair and a white part of the world simply because it's either under penetrated or because it will take longer for the offers of car sharing. He hailing and then also autonomy to eventually ge

EP008 - ICRS Recap and Industry News http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 8 is a news-focused episode, recorded on April 25th, 2019. We start off with a recap of last week’s International Car Rental Show (ICRS) from Karl Murphy, President and Co-Founder at Spiffy. After talking with Karl, Scot dives into a variety of recent news items, including: Smartcar, who we featured in Episode 3, has accused Otonomo for allegedly stealing from their API documentation. Recent study shows that consumers are ready to make payments via connected car dashboard. Getaround expands outside of US with acquistion of European counterpart Drivy. Ford invests $500 million in EV pickup truck maker Rivian. China is pushing EVs to make up 20% of total auto market by 2025, while the US is expected to hit 7%. Tesla reveals hardware chip for their Full Self-Driving initiative. Uber S-1 discloses $457 million in R&D costs for autonomous vehicles, flying cars, and other “technology programs”. If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript: Scot: [00:51] Welcome to the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast. This is Episode 8 and it's being recorded Thursday, April 25th, 2019. Welcome back Vehicle 2.0 listeners this week on the show. We are going to take a break from all the guests we've had on. We've really enjoyed and learned a ton in the last arc of gassed. And we're going to cover some news here in the automobile industry related to Vehicle 2.0 in last week's episode seven, we had Chris Brown from Bob Business Media and he is the editor of auto rental news where they think a lot about the changing ownership models out there. And if you recall, he curates the international car rental show, also known as ICRS. First, uh, to kick off this news episode, we have the co-founder of spiffy our very own Karl Murphy and he's gonna give us a trip report, a fresh off the heels of his trip to Las Vegas last week to the show. Welcome to the show, Karl. Karl: [01:52] Thanks Scot. Scot: [01:53] So you were in Vegas last week at the trade show. It's our first time ever going to this trade show. We were a, uh, we were an exhibitor, um, and uh, you know what? Uh, so it was a great show for spiffy and enjoyed a really exhibiting there. Uh, but that's not what we want to talk about today. What are, I know you were able to peel away and see a bunch of the content. Um, what were some of the trends and topics going on at the show? Karl: [02:16] Sure. So it's, uh, an interesting show. It had a mix of both large companies like Avis and Hertz and Ford and Toyota and small entrepreneurs. You know, companies like spiffy that makes software and entrepreneurs that have small fleets, maybe 10 or 20 cars and they're renting to a, uh, small Mitch. So it was interesting to talk to global companies and small folks. Um, it's uh, like three quarters us attendance and maybe 25% international. So we spoke to people from Brazil and Australia, Canada, a couple of Europeans were there. And so it's, it's interesting to get their perspective. It's, it's interesting, you know, um, their, their challenges are the same year. They all sort of a, from a vendor standpoint talk about the same things and want the same things. Karl: [03:01] Um, it was well attended. It was at the, you know, it was in Vegas at the Paris hotel in a, from a, from a provider's standpoint or vendor stand standpoint, really high quality attendees. It's like the people who showed up at our decision makers, they were running the fleet or they're the CEO or their, you know, sort of at a, at a corporate, you know, if they're smaller company, if it's a corporate level, it's sort of the, the decision maker or sort of one level away. So there wasn't a lot of um, you know, sort of distracting boost traffic, people looking for chotchkies and that sort of stuff. Nobody, nobody cared about our pens and penguins. They cared about our service and um, and sort of the things that we're doing to help fleet operators provide better preventative maintenance. Scot: [03:43] Cool. So, um, uh, so when we had Chris on the show, he talked about a lot of the different trends. Um, it feels to me having come from the ecommerce industry that, that it must feel a lot like a kind of retail shows where everyone, you have kind of the, the, you know, the, the industry stalwarts there kind of a little bit in shell shock and then this whole new group that kind of sees the future. Uh, did you get a vibe that, you know, folks are in denial about what's going on or is everyone kind of onboard with it? Karl: [04:12] Uh, there's like two camps, right? So there's the accepting the changes in the industry and the, and the changes in mobility that are going on and that, that Uber and Lyft exist and those companies are gonna be around for awhile and they impact the rental industry. Uh, clearly, um, the large auto companies see those guys as a threat to people taking, you know, taking their business. Um, there was an enormous amount of, uh, small entrepreneurs and small, you know, I mean it could be 2000 cars. It's sort of a small fleet, um, to, you know, maybe 20 or 30, but small entrepreneurs looking to get into, uh, you know, the changing mobility landscape. So they're either subletting, sub leasing cars to Uber drivers on a, on a short term basis. You know, it could be a day or a week or a month depending on sort of their model. They're software companies, they're providing all kinds of software to solve those problems for entrepreneurs. Karl: [05:06] Um, you know, some of those were companies that didn't make the comp competitive cut against Uber and Lyft and they repackaged and rebranded and now they're trying to help smaller entrepreneurs who are delivering services. Um, and, but there's clearly like there's some definite old school companies trying to solve old school problems. Um, I attended a, um, for like 10 minutes, there was a presentation on the, the um, sales characteristics and recruiting profile of a high performing counter agent, you know, and, and, and essentially, you know, they just want to sell you insurance, right. Um, and get you in, you know, they want to take you from the, the Toyota Tercel to the Tahoe. And then add, you know, double secret, leave the keys in the road, incentives at grid, coordinate insurance. You don't owe us anything. Um, and, and I, I was here for like 10 minutes. I'm like, you know, it's sort of like you who's selling buggies today, you know, like, I need somebody really good to sell buggies. Karl: [06:02] Um, because as a client I don't ever want to have my, my car rental customer experience breaks down when I go see the counter agent. Yeah. It's like the opposite of what the customer experience should be. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I just want to like get keys and go to the car and drive away. Like you have my Amex and you have my id and my driver's license and I'll give you a retina scan and a fingerprint if you want. I would put a track, I mean, I'm sure you have a tracker on the car already. Right? And there's some of that stuff too. And, and so there's this dichotomy of there's all this connected car data and they talked about being able to shut down cars, you know, because I guess there's some issue where people will, you know, they'll rent in San Antonio and drive to Mexico and strip the car apart. Karl: [06:38] And, you know, you never, you never see the vehicle again. They, that's, that's a problem the industry for them. Um, and I was like, you know, this, this is sort of a wasted, you know, this is a 1970s, um, uh, session versus, you know, sort of impact of micro mobility and, and, and, and there's a lot of opportunity for it. I think. Um, you know, as the previous guests said, you know, there's all this data being shared that cities and governments are looking forward to, to reduce traffic problems. Um, and, and that, you know, I think that's a way for the industry to get on the side of, of government, hey, we got all this data. We can, we can better route traffic or we can charge different fees for different access points and when there's rush out and that sort of thing. Scot: [07:22] Yeah. Um, I saw a fair amount of Twitter traffic around. Um, there's a lot of pundits that come to these shows and kind of share their vision into the future. A Cox auto's has a, an economist there. Uh, it must be nice to have an economist. We don't, we're not big enough. It's 50 to have our own economist yet. Karl: [07:39] That's you, Scot. Scot: [07:40] Yeah, I'm a, I'm a couch economist. The uh, uh, what, what were some of the trends he was talking about and they've certainly been really active in this space. Karl: [07:48] Yeah. So it's interesting. They, they, uh, so at a, at a high level, they thought, um, GDP was like in the high ones, so like one five to, to sorta depending on, um, trade tensions, Paris and that sort of thing, you know, x, some sort of a dramatic positive or negative impact on the economy, you know, terrorist incident or some crazy tax cut or something. He was outside of things we can't forecast. He thought he was sorta like, here's my bets. Like one, eight, one, nine. Um, and then, uh, at the car level, it was interesting. I just don't, I don't really think about this stuff, but he's like, the average cost of a new car is going to tick over $40,000 in the next year or so. I can 2019, maybe 20, 20. Um, and it's, it's being driven by the desire for consumers, for larger cars, SUVs and trucks. Karl: [08:38] Um, and

EP007 - Executive Editor at Bobit Business Media, Chris Brown http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 7 is an interview with Chris Brown, Executive Editor at Bobit Business Media; recorded on Friday, April 5th, 2019. Chris and Scot discuss a variety of topics, including: Chris’ journey to being the editor of three publications and producer of two tradeshows. The impact of car and ridesharing on the car rental industry. Weighing the changing ownership models for an idea of potential winners with consumers. How electric and autonomous vehicles will affect car rentals and auctions alike. What the future holds for the existing dealership and OEM framework. The road for convenient in-app connectivity to simplify the car rental process. Be sure to follow Chris on Twitter and LinkedIn! If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript:   Scot: [00:51] Welcome to the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast! This is episode seven and it's being recorded Friday, April 5th, 2019. Welcome back, Vehicle 2.0 listeners! As I've been personally learning all I can about the changing ownership models for cars and how the real car industry works, I found the content from auto rental news to be really important and awesome. My favorite items are the blog posts from the executive editor, Chris Brown, who we're excited to have on the show. Auto rental news is owned by Bobit Bbusiness Media and they have over 20 publications and trade shows that cover fleets, rentals, dealers, and oddly enough salons. Chris Brown is executive editor of business fleet, auto rental news and fleet forward and he also produces the international car rental show and the fleet forward conference. Chris, welcome to the show. Chris: [01:46] Thanks for having me Scott. Scot: [01:48] With all those responsibilities that you must be extremely busy, so we really appreciate you taking time to talk to us about your view of the future of your vehicles. Chris: [01:59] Sure. Well, my position kind of affords me having my fingers in a whole bunch of different pies and where transportation is going and yeah, we're just a little busy over here. Scot: [02:11] I have to ask what's the intersection? Was Salons, I was super curious about that. Chris: [02:15] You know, it, it's basically was a diversification strategy. In typical B2B media company fashion, not our eggs are in the transportation basket. And two of our biggest magazines in the company are a modern salon and nails magazine. Scot: [02:35] Cool. You get to, you get to learn all about, if you get burned out on cars, you can go learn about a whole other topic. Chris: [02:41] There's plenty of nail polish around for us to take advantage of. Scot: [02:47] Cool. I definitely want to jump into, you've, you got a lot of really good views on where we're going in the car industry, but before we jump into that, would love to give listeners a little bit of background on how you got to where you are? Chris: [02:59] Sure. Well I joined Bobit over 15 years ago, jumped in as the editor of Business Fleet magazine, which is goes out to small commercial fleets. soon after that, I took control editorially of auto rental news and, between the intersection of auto world news and business fleet can kind of triangulate what's going on and different parts of the transportation space. And along with the auto world news comes, you know, managing the international car rental show, which is convening and a week and a half. So that's been a huge part of what I do. And then, as well, we're really getting into how fleets are looking at new mobility solutions and, we have the fleet forward conference in that regard. That's happening in November in San Jose and we will be launching a brand, a website fleetforward.com in May. Scot: [04:08] Oh Wow. I look forward to seeing what you, what you guys put on there. Yeah. So, so to give listeners an idea of kind of the, the scope of, of your reach there, how many readers, and if there's anything you don't feel comfortable sharing, obviously that's, that's fine. But, you know, how many readers do you guys have on the publications and how many folks come to the conferences? Chris: [04:29] Well, you know, the, the best way to look at Bobit that is that we're the largest fleet publisher and authority and have been for over 50 years. Perhaps in the world actually. We reached over 250,000 commercial and government fleets and small business fleets and work trucks and heavy duty trucks. Heavy duty trucking being, our, our largest publication. And the whole universe, ends up to be 18 million vehicles. And, you know, in typical B2B fashion, we do that through news industry trends, market intelligence, you know, events, great articles and you know, the car rental show is you only show specific to the the auto rental industry in its entirety. And we'll get over 800 people this year, in April, April 14th through 16th in Vegas. And we draw folks from all over the world. Fleet forward is really just kind of a baby right now. We'll get 200 plus in its second year, come, come November in San Jose. And that's really a for the forward looking fleets that is commercial and government fleets that are looking at, you know, new mobility solutions to implement their fleets. Scot: [05:47] Very cool. So definitely encourage listeners to check those out. I know a full disclosure, we're going to be exhibiting at the show next week, so we're excited to be first time at that. Chris: [05:58] Yeah, well we're attendance is looking great. There's a ton of energy. I'm really glad that we've kind of both a really a great show for for 2019. Scot: [06:08] Awesome. So thanks for the background. I think that really helps set the stage for the main discussion. and a here on the podcast we look at a framework that we call vehicle 2.0 where we look at kind of these four ways of innovation that are kind of sloshing through the industry, connectivity, new ownership models, electrification and automation. and you've written a lot of really great content lately around the changing ownership models and I know that's near and dear to your heart. we'd love to start there. so when we look at the rental car industry, when I talked to folks I spend a lot of time talking to venture capitalists and stuff. I think they have this intuition that rental cars would be down like 10, 20, 30%, but they're actually up. why do you think that is? People assume it's down because they think Uber and Lyft are taking pretty serious share from the rental car companies. but apparently, you know, is that happening and why are the rental car sales up? Chris: [07:05] Well, I think we have to look at the market and say that Uber and Lyft have definitely taken a bite out of the rental car market, but, it's mostly in certain certain areas that we'll talk about. And, and also, it certain rental lengths, the shorter rental lengths, like the one day rentals is more where it's affected. and those are the least profitable, rentals as you can imagine, just because you have to turn over a car for a one day rental like you do for a five day rental and all the attendant costs there. You know, urban markets have certainly been affected, as well. That being said, I mean we did see, a strong demand that led to a record year for car rental, last year in the USeclipsing 30 billion in total revenues. And that was done on a overall fleet size. Chris: [08:10] That is, means that there was more revenue per unit, which is a really good sign for rental to, you know, I mean the, the, the more traditional rentals of, you know, multiple people have family, you know, needing, needing access to, you know, places that are more than 40 miles away, and, and of triplink's that are greater than a day is still very real and still very growing. It's growing with a good economy. So, I think that's really what's keeping the rental industry afloat in terms of the demand side. Now let me add one more thing. certainly, where, you know, if you can't beat them, join them. there is an insatiable need for Uber and Lyft drivers to have reliable transportation and rental has been playing a part there in, in renting cars to Uber and Lyft drivers. and that's, it's a growing segment as well. Scot: [09:17] Interesting. Do you know, do you happen to know, so 30 billion is pretty impressive. Do you know the year over year growth rate of that is kind of like GDP and that three to 4% range or is it kind of different? Chris: [09:28] So the growth rate, I know that the growth rate is accelerated, believe it or not, over the growth rate from 2017 to 16 and 2017 to 2018 so that's healthy. In other words, I had sort of intuitively a expected a growth rate to, to shrink there and you know, I do know it at what, what percentage? I don't know off the top of my head, but I do know that that was a slight acceleration over previous years. Recently. Scot: [10:02] Yeah. Accelerating growth and improved, unit profits is kind of the, that's the sweet spot. So that's good for the industry. Yeah, it certainly is. Cool. So, appreciate your perspective on that. And if we kind of go to the 30,000 foot view around ownership, do you have a point of view where you think ownership around vehicles is going to go in the next five to 10 years? Chris: [10:23] Well, really it's, it's really a tale of environments, I think. I mean, you look at major cities compared to suburban, rural ex urban environments. And you know, it's no secret that the changes are coming in in cities a lot quicker

EP006 - Chief Technology Officer at Designated Driver, Walter Sullivan http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 6 is an interview with Walter Sullivan, Chief Technology Officer at Designated Driver; recorded on April 2nd, 2019. Walter and Scot discuss a variety of topics, including: Walter’s career path from Microsoft to Designated Driver, which launched last October. What Designated Driver offers to the autonomous vehicle space, as well as Walter’s thoughts on the implementation of AVs. How the transition to 5G will positively impact companies and startups moving forward. Realistic expectations for the current shift in car ownership, with reports showing up to 80% of new cars sold in 2030 being owned by fleets or shared services. Regulatory hurdles for Designated Driver, as well as autonomous vehicles at large. Defining the future tipping point for electric vehicles to outperform internal combustion engines. Be sure to follow Walter on LinkedIn!  If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript:   Scot: [00:52] Welcome to the vehicle 2.0 Podcast! This is episode 6 and it's being recorded. Tuesday, April 2nd, 2019. Welcome back, Vehicle 2.0 listeners. I am a serial entrepreneur and my first company, which I started way back in 1995, worked really closely with Microsoft. That was called stingray software. And I worked real closely with the Visual C++ team and that is where I met today's guest, Walter Sullivan. So doing the math on that, it's over 20 years. And then my career took me to eCommerce and Walter's took him to the automotive world. And now I am in the automotive world. Walter is now the CTO of Designated Driver and I really look forward to hearing more about what he's done since we last talked to probably 15 years ago. And I'm excited to have him on the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast! Walter: [01:49] Awesome. Thanks Scot. You're making me feel old. Scot: [01:52] Well, I didn't say we met when we were 12. Walter: [01:55] That's true. Okay, good. Good point. Scot: [01:56] So, I know your career path and I had a couple of highlights in there, but I'm sure there's a lot more on the journey. Tell listeners about your career path and how you ended up where you are today. Walter: [02:11] Yeah. Great. Yeah, so I, as you mentioned, I started my career at Microsoft. I spent really 25 years there in different capacities. Started up building development tools, which was where I was lucky enough to be able to work with you and a number of other really interesting people. So that was a lot of fun, that was sort of my first half of my career at Microsoft. Second half I moved into our embedded operating system group and started leading parts of a emerging team there that was building embedded technologies for vehicles primarily for, you know, navigation systems and infotainment or entertainment systems in those vehicles. And from there, I took an opportunity to move to a German automotive software company called Electro Pads. I opened up a research and development office for them down in California. So until that time I was living in Seattle. Microsoft is in a suburb of Seattle essentially and moved down to California to the San Francisco Bay area, open up a research office, spent a few years running that research office and last November, left that to start a new company, designated driver. Scot: [03:29] Very cool. So if anyone listening has Windows Mobility in their car, they can call you for tech support. Is that how it works? Walter: [03:40] Yeah, pretty much. Exactly. I'm sure you'll poke, give him my phone number at the end of that. At the end of the podcast here. But yeah, I built a number of systems for Ford or Kia, BMW. quite a number of car makers. That platform, actually, even today is still in quite a number of cars being, probably no longer that helpful from a support standpoint. Scot: [04:05] Okay. All right. We'll have to go online and figure it out. Walter: [04:11] Probably. Scot: [04:12] Cool. Or ask Clippy Walter: [04:13] Or ask Clippy. Exactly. Scot: [04:15] So let's talk about designated driver to, I know it, I know the name from the, context of, you know, obviously if you're out drinking you need a designated driver. but, but tell me more. That's not what you guys do. Tell me what you guys do, do. Walter: [04:33] Yeah, I mean, the name, it comes a little bit from that idea. Designated driver is really about providing, what we call tell operations for autonomous vehicles. And, and let me break that down just a little bit, is we're sort of moving into this world of autonomy. Vehicles that are carrying passengers are good. So, or other, other things, many of them will start to become more and more autonomous. And which is I think great from a shared mobility perspective and a usage perspective. And you know what to think. There's a lot of promise for the technology, but a is we're actually getting closer to the commercialization of that. The realization is that there's still some scenarios where we just haven't been able to train or develop autonomy systems to, to handle correctly. And this is where it designated driver comes in. So we provide the designated driving services. I'm a human foreign to autonomous vehicles that needs that human assistance essentially. and so the, the name is a play a little bit on the, on the concept. Have you been out drinking too long and you're really not safe for you to drive home because there are situations where maybe it isn't safe or just not feasible for an autonomous vehicle to drive itself. So that's the, that's the basic background. Scot: [05:58] Cool. Let me, let me give you a kind of a scenario just to see if this is, if I'm, if I understand it. So I saw the CEO of Waymo earlier this year said he doesn't think we'll ever get to 100%, and he cited weather. So for example, when it rains, the rain makes it very hard for the lidar to see the, you know, not only the surroundings but the, the lines in the road, for example. so is that a scenario where you guys would automatically kick in and a human driver somewhere would kind of take over or in some way augment what they view is doing? Walter: [06:29] Yeah, I think eventually we do get to something like that. I, I do think that a lot of weather conditions that we struggle with today in autonomy, we'll figure out how to solve. there's, there's new generations of sensors coming that can address some of that. There's better, you know, there's additional training for the, for the machine learning and artificial intelligence systems that we're working on to, to improve that. So, so maybe that specific scenario, we'll eventually get addressed. But conceptually that's exactly it. So things that I think quite a lot about art or when a autonomous vehicle pulls up onto a road that is closed because of construction, you know, maybe there's a path that the construction workers are guiding vehicles around the construction area, but that path may violate road rules that the autonomous vehicle has learned and, and hold sacred so to speak. Walter: [07:28] And we might need a human to actually step in and either tell the autonomous vehicle it's okay to break a certain road rule or in fact the human may actually just, step in and drive the vehicle as if they were sitting in the driver's seat of the vehicle and just remotely maneuver through, through the, through, in this case, the construction site. But in addition to that, there are maintenance facilities or, or other kinds of really kind of specialty purpose environments that have vehicle might be to operate that an autonomy system will just never be trained for because it takes quite a bit of effort and money to train an autonomous system to drive through a specific environment. And sometimes the return on that training investment just won't be worth. And then I think the last, the last scenario and the one that, we also picked quite a bit about is these things are still vehicles and they will still be operating on roads with human drivers. Walter: [08:28] And there's still the possibility that there will be collisions and accidents and, and, other kinds of failures other than vehicle, a flat tire or something like that. And then the autonomy system just won't really be able to cope with those kinds of circumstances very well and kind of human will, we'll be able to take over a vehicle and maneuver it into a safe location for a tow truck or for whatever the, you know, the action that needs to be taken for that vehicle. So there's quite a number of these scenarios where, where autonomy just would never even be able to, to handle it in any case. Scot: [09:03] Cool. And then where are you guys in the development of the solution? Is this kind of Napkin diagram stuff or do you have deployments or you're an in kind of in the middle there? Walter: [09:13] Yeah, we're, so we are beginning our first deployments. It just kind of to maybe give you a bit of the history in the company. We started the company October of last year. As I mentioned, I joined 1st of November, you know, we spent the last four or five months kind of building up the core technology and two weeks ago in San Jose at, invidious what they call their GTC, their GPU technology conference, we'd launched the company kind of formally. So maybe some press that you've seen recently is really sort of the result of that that company launched. But it, in that launch we drove, participants in a car around the convention center in San Jose from our of

EP005 - VP Marketing & Alliances at Ridecell, Mark Thomas http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 5 is an interview with VP Marketing & Alliances at Ridecell, Mark Thomas; recorded on March 29th, 2019. Mark and Scot discuss a variety of topics, including: His career path through corporate technology companies to the startup world with Ridecell. Defining the history of Ridecell, their mobility platform, and the companies who use their technology. The evolution of station-based and free-floating ride sharing, specifically with companies like GIG and Zipcar. Shifting from private car ownership to public options and how the impact will be felt across the industry. Realistic use cases for autonomous vehicles, such as ride hailing, fleet rebalancing, or nighttime trucking. The importance of software in vehicles that are becoming increasingly connected. Be sure to follow Mark on LinkedIn! If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript:   Scot: [00:51] Welcome to the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast. This is Episode 5 and it's being recorded Friday, March 29th, 2019. About a year ago, someone I knew in the industry was texting me feverishly. He was at the Center for Auto Research trade show in Detroit and he kept saying, “Scot, there's a speaker here and you have got to talk to this guy. He is saying a lot of the same stuff that you are pretty passionate about, and he has great sites.” So here we are, a year later, and I'm really excited to welcome to the show, the VP of Marketing and Alliances at Ridecell, Mark Thomas. Welcome Mark. Mark: [01:28] Thanks Scot. Scot: [01:29] Cool. So Mark, let's start off by going over your career path. How did you end up in the world of mobility? Mark: [01:36] It's a interesting, My career has been pretty much full time in silicon valley and just starting off with the desktop revolution and apple, the Internet revolution with Netscape, and the mobile revolution for many years at Nokia. And my last few years at Nokia I was part of the, the here division, the maps division where automotive was a really big part of it and realized that this is a chance to really connect some of my passions, which are leading edge technology and my love for vehicles. So after some time at Cisco heading up their connected car initiatives within the marketing organization, I joined Ridecell as the head of marketing and alliances. Scot: [02:23] Cool. So you're a hardcore consumer electronics guy. I always like to ask, how many CESs have you gone to? Mark: [02:30] You know, they do tend to blur, but probably over the course of several decades. Scot: [02:35] Cool. Mark: [02:35] I love how CES though has become car electronics show. It's great. It has really out there. Yeah. They're having to move the Detroit auto show, from the week after to sometime in the summer because it was just to becoming too competitive. Scot: [02:52] Yeah, it is funny. So we've had, you know, I don't think 20 years ago we would have guessed that cs is the one show that would survive all the, you know, we used to have the computer shows and then the software shows and we even had internet shows and a CES is been kind of the, the, the survivor of all. That's pretty amazing. Mark: [03:11] Yeah. I've got to say I don't miss COMDEX. Scot: [03:14] Yeah. Yeah. Me either. Standing in lines for like eight hours to see Bill Gates give a 10 minute little thing about some, some new gadget. Mark: [03:23] Hey, I think I was there. Scot: [03:25] Cool. So let's, let's, let's learn more about Ridecell. Obviously it was you saw something really amazing there to come from a lot of these really big brands and do a startup. Tell us a little bit of the history of the company and, and what Ridecell does. Mark: [03:40] We were founded in 2009 in the Atlanta area, a great place to find wonderful tech engineers, great talent. Definitely though there was a shortage of capital out there, when the company was looking to raise some VC money, so they uprooted the founding team and moved out here to San Francisco. About two years later started one of the first ride hailing companies called summon. Right up there in the beginning days with, with Uber and Lyft. I think that the company had about 2,500 drivers, working in the San Francisco Bay area. And you know, as the company was looking at, you know, where this market's going to go and think there's the understanding that this is going to be massive race to raise capital and expands. And rather than being, you know, the third company pushing in, ride hailing, the intent was to become the first company to offer a white labeled end to end platform or other companies that needed to get into the ride hailing or in the future car sharing businesses. Scot: [04:54] So I've made a career of building companies that sell pickaxes and not, not, you know, doing the digging. So, so I think that's a good strategy. So if we flash forward to the day, I kind of think of you guys as mobility in a box. So, obviously if I wanted to start a ride sharing company, I could use your software but, but I think there's a lot more interesting use cases there. Can you share with us some of the ways people are using the platform that, that maybe you didn't think of it originally? Mark: [05:19] Yeah. Let's, let me take the first part of that, which is Ridecell provides. we, we have a full shared mobility cloud. And in the same way that, you know, back in the day since we're reminiscing, people would create their websites by buying sandboxes and getting some rack mount space and screwing them in with load balancers and really have to take control of the entire hosting and domain as a differentiator. Now nobody does that. Everybody just uses AWS or Google cloud or Microsoft Azure. We're the equivalent for that. And the shared mobility space, you know, having the benefit of having been in a pure play software company since 2009, we focused on building a complete share mobility clouds so that if somebody wants to create a ride hailing service or a car sharing service or a dealer based test drive service or you know, a hotel, car rental service, all of those things can be easily started using the Ridecell mobility cloud and then, you know, then the companies can, can focus on building their differentiation on top of what we offer. Mark: [06:44] So it's very much all of the underlying bits and pieces that really allow you to create a service which, you know, it's taken us years of expertise to, to form. We've got about 150 people working on the company and over a hundred of them are engineering and QA teams. So it's it's a bit of an undertaking to really make it easy to use and easy to launch a service. Scot: [07:11] Awesome. Are there any examples you can share of companies and how they've used the cloud? Mark: [07:16] Absolutely. Companies that, that like to work with us are those companies that realize they will need to transform or risk becoming the next Blockbuster Video. And so the, for instance, the Automobile Club. If private vehicle ownership goes away, then do we really need an automobile club? And I think that their view is maybe not. So the AAA of northern California, I came to us and said, look, we'd like to have a product relevant to millennials, people who don't own cars. Mark: [07:56] And so they, within six months they were able to launch a new brand called Gig. Sort of stands for, you know, they marketed as "get in and go." It's a car sharing service and it's the modern kind of car sharing service. I think in North America when we think of car share, we think of Zipcar and the little signs behind it. It says Zipcar lives here and you reserve it ahead of time and you walk down to it and then use it for your errands. But you always have to bring it back to the station and you have to bring it back on time or subject to those potential late fees. The modern style of car sharing is one which is called free floating or some time in people call it one way car sharing so that you can walk to the car, get in it, drive to your destination, park it and park it in a residential zone, parking in a meter. Mark: [08:51] Typically it doesn't matter because these cars generally have all access parking passes for a city. And so with Gig, they have the ability to you know, walk up to a car, unlock it, get in, drive, park it. They can even park it in a metered spot as long as it's not one of those like, you know, 20 minutes green meter zones and then leave the car and the next person that's downtown shopping and see is it pops in it and takes it and drives it. So it's a much more convenient way to use use car sharing. and you know, it's something that's really allowed them to create a product line that, has become very successful. They started with 250 cars, now they're up to 600 cars in the San Francisco Bay area. Then you know, they've gone from two cities, Berkeley and Oakland to five, now they're alive and Berkeley, Oakland, Alameda, and then San Francisco as well. The first free floating car sharing company to get a permit for San Francisco. So it's, you know, this is really exciting times is the city governments or figuring out the real value of using car share services. Then of course the next horizon is in creating services that aren't for internal combustion engine cars, but for EVs and it's really the electric vehicle may become the real hero use case for carshare fleets. Scot: [10:21] Very cool. I'm curious. So if you, you're really good at kind of branding some of

EP004 - Senior Director of Special Projects at Carvana, John Hanger http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 4 is an interview with John Hanger, Senior Director of Special Projects at Carvana; recorded on March 26th, 2019. John and Scot discuss a variety of topics, including: John’s career path, including his trek from CEO of Car360 to being acquired by Carvana The origins of Carvana and its impressive performance in the used car retail space Exploring the Carvana customer experience, from buying online to vending machines and vehicle delivery Behind the scenes look at how Carvana continues to evolve for its customers and employees Carvana subverting expectations of buying, selling, or trading a car Growth of car subscription services and the impact on traditional ownership models Where connected cars, EVs, and AVs realistically fit into the near-future of the automotive industry Be sure to follow John on LinkedIn! Those interested in reading more about the topics we cover should check out The Banks Report, an online source for analysis in the automotive industry created by award-winning journalist Cliff Banks. If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript: Scot: [00:51] Welcome to the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast. This is our fourth episode and it is being recorded Tuesday, March 26, 2019. So when we started the podcast, we said, let's put on the whiteboard some of the coolest companies in kind of driving innovation around what's going on around cars and the vehicle 2.0 framework, and one of the top companies on that list was Carvana. So we are very excited to have on the show today, John Hanger. He is the senior director of special projects at Carvana. John: [01:25] Yeah. Hey Scot, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here today. Scot: [01:29] Absolutely. So you and I have known each other for a while, but the listeners haven't, haven't they don't know you. So I'd love to hear your, your career path. How did you get to be the senior director of special projects at Carvana? John: [01:43] Cool. Well I'll keep it short because otherwise I start feeling old if I go over too many details of my career path, but in a nutshell, I have a electrical engineering and a physics background of all things, but decided right out of college, I didn't want to do that. So I went into consulting with what's now Accenture and then just through some happenstance really I got involved with what was then a enterprise software group was at Accenture and I found what I really liked to do. So I helped launch a product within Accenture, both here in the US and in Europe. Got a tremendous amount of experience at a young age, then left to do my first startup back in the early nineties. And have done a sixth sense, either a, as a founder or as a early employee slash executive, the most recent of which was an Atlanta based company here called car 360, which did 3D imaging and augmented reality around automotive retail. John: [02:47] So making it easy for people to really go beyond snapshots to interactively explore and understand things about a car before considering a purchase car. Three 60 was in turn acquired roughly a year ago in April of 2018 by Carvana. That brings us to here, today, where I worked for Carvana and special projects role, which, which basically just means I'm working on a number of risk skunkworks projects that, if I can use the term startups within Carvana, that we're building some exciting things as an innovator in the space. Scot: [03:29] Cool. As a fellow entrepreneur, I'd love to learn more about the car 360 stories. So did, was this technology you came up with or is it out of one of the, I know you're in Atlanta, is that out of like Georgia tech and then, you know, did you guys go to the venture capital route? Tell us a little bit about that journey. John: [03:46] Yeah, so car 360 is actually a very fascinating startup story. I was not the founder. The founder's name is Bruno Francoise. Bruno originally founded the company as Egos ventures. His original product was not what the car 360 product ultimately became. It was instead a mobile app that allowed a person to set their iPhone five on a table, press a button and it would, modulate the vibration of the vibrator within the phone in order to spin the phone in a 360 degree circle and take basically a 360 selfie in the room. They were sitting in and, Bruno appeared on shark tank and his original investor, coming out of that shark tank appearance was Mark Cuban. You know, the company did well for a couple of years, basically 99 cents at a time selling the, the app. but ultimately, like most consumer apps, you know, they saw a huge spike in demand and then an equally large drop in demand and found it was really tough to, to, to make a go of it. John: [04:53] So, so smartly they, they took the proceeds from that a burst of success and started building something that was a bit more of a, an enterprise play. What became ultimately car 360, my involvement came when, when the company had had just the first taste of success, but was really struggling to, to build, an enterprise business. Bruno's a, a genius inventor and technologists. But, you know, the company had grown beyond his ability to run it. I was brought in basically to, to help the company acquire financing and continued its growth. We were able to raise an a round, after a period of venture Atlanta, in 2017 we raised that round was led by BIP Capital here out of Atlanta and it was only less than a year later when Carvana acquired car 360. So it was a relatively quick acquisition, which has not been my experience in my previous five companies, but it's worked out great. Ron Is really a fascinating company to be a part of. It's incredibly fast growing and even though it's nearly a $2 billion company in revenue, it's still very much a startup in terms of how it operates. Scot: [06:10] Very cool. So I definitely want to talk about Carvana but, but I have to ask the question. Is the technology integrated into the Carvana platform at this point? John: [06:18] The immigration is very close actually to launching. Obviously our engineers have been heads down just under a year since the acquisition, working to make that happen. Right now, I think that the current status is that the, the car 360 power pieces of the technology are visible only to a really small percentage of visitors to Carvana.com on the experimental basis. And then, the way that Carvana does things, it's still ramped that up to a hundred percent of users, you know, as we get the kinks worked out. So we're imminently ready to announce that that's visible to everybody, but it's a pretty exciting time as you can imagine for the car through the former car 360 team here to see the technology, you know, fully integrated incorporated into the Carvana website. Scot: [07:05] Awesome. I'll look forward to seeing how that, that goes. so let's, let's kind of go back up to 30,000 feet with Carvana. You know, I think I mentioned on the podcast and I can't turn on the TV without seeing an ad now. and so I think a lot of people kind of know what you're doing, but I'd love to hear kind of from the horse's mouth, how you guys think about Carvana and what the company's kind of mission is. John: [07:27] So Carvana was only founded in 2012, so it's still a very young company. The company was founded really with the idea to, to change the way that people buy vehicles. in the same way perhaps using the Amazon analogy in the same way that Amazon changed the way that people buy books. Carvana set out to change the way that people buy cars. So rather than a physical dealership where a person goes to a look at and test drive vehicles and then ultimately make the purchase and do the financing, Carvana's model is a hundred percent online. So consumers shop online, they take advantage of the various advanced technologies that Carvana is delivered to, to make that possible. When they find the car they want, they placed the order, the cars typically available as early as the next day, just depending on where that car is in the country and how long it takes to get to the shopper. The car is either deliver on a truck to the customer's driveway or to their place of business or in certain cities where we have them. We have what's called vending machines, car vending machines, and the customer can choose to have the car delivered to have any issue. Scot: [08:42] Yeah, we have one of those in Raleigh and it's kind of a genius thing because it's on this highly trafficked area and it's very eye catching because most, most times you're not driving around and seeing a giant car vending machine. So, so I think it's a, it's a genius marketing trick and technique. And then, I haven't had a chance to, to get up close to one. Tell us how that works. So my understanding is you put like a giant coin in there. It's all, some of it's kind of showmanship. I understand, but isn't it essentially like a European parking structure of some kind that you guys have converted to do this? John: [09:15] Yeah, it's a really cool idea and, you know, on the face of it, it looks a little gimmicky, but, I've been blown away by how, how much our customers actually enjoy it. The way it works in a nutshell is the vending machine, first of all, is not where you go to shop for cars. It's not like a dealership where you go and look around and test drive various cars. It's where you're taking delivery of the car you've already purchased

EP003 - CEO and Founder of Smartcar, Inc., Sahas Katta http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 3 is an interview with Sahas Katta, CEO and Founder of Smartcar, Inc.; recorded on Thursday, March 7th, 2019. Sahas and Scot discuss a variety of topics, including: The origins and purpose of Smartcar Sahas’ experience pitching to investors Smartcar attending hackathons across the country Impact of software developers on the future of connected cars, vs innovations from automotive brands and companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon How Lyft looks to change traditional car ownership in light of their IPO filing Growth of electrification in regards to range and convenient recharging, including Tesla’s V3 Supercharging announcement Realistic expectations for the wide use of autonomous vehicles Be sure to follow Sahas on Twitter and LinkedIn! If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript:   Scot: [01:00] Welcome to the Vehicle 2.0 podcast. This is our third episode and it's being recorded Thursday, March 7th, 2019. Today on the show, we are excited to welcome Sahas Katta, CEO of Smartcar. Welcome to the show, Sahas. Sahas: [01:16] Thanks for having me. Scot: [01:17] Yeah, so let's start off. Um, you and I have known each other for a little while here about six months. Um, but the listeners don't know you. So let's start off with a little bit of your career path. How did you become the CEO and Founder of Smartcar? Sahas: [01:30] Yeah, absolutely. So my background, I grew up in a Silicon Valley, uh, studied computer science and engineering at UC Davis. And as I was growing up, I was someone who'd always be tinkering on my family or parents, cars, not per se on the engine itself, but actually oddly enough, more on the, uh, software and infotainment side of vehicles trying to figure out how to get lossless audio codecs, deploy on my stereo system or create a way to play videos on my infotainment system or things along those lines. I never really thought the world of software engineering would really collide with automobiles or mobility. A few years later after I had left UC Davis, I ended up, uh, on a weekend deciding to try to build an application for a car, uh, just for fun and realize that that was actually very difficult to do and, uh, uh, decided I want to do something about it and started prototyping and trying to build a car platform. And that was kind of the early genesis of a Smartcar coming about and me ending up starting that company. Scot: [02:42] Cool. The, uh, so I've met a lot of people in Silicon Valley. You're, I think you're the only person I've ever met that's actually from Silicon Valley. How is that? Is that, uh, is rare for most people as it has been for me? Sahas: [02:53] I think so. Um, uh, it's been very exciting being here just because a lot of the founders do know are all Silicon Valley born and bred, but there are people from pretty much every corner of the world who are building really incredible things. So, uh, it, it is pretty exciting to get to work with at least people. Scot: [03:12] Yeah. Awesome. Um, so give us a little perspective on Smartcar how, what's your kind of elevator pitch when you're at a cocktail party and people ask you what you're building? Sahas: [03:21] Yeah. Smart car is the API for your car. Uh, if you're a software developer, you can write a couple lines of code after reading our Api docs on our website and you can actually do a lot of really incredible stuff to your car. Uh, whether that's, uh, getting the location of the vehicle YLC over the Internet. It's a domino reading or even sending signals to the Karta lock or unlock it stores remotely over the Internet so it could write it literally a couple of lines of code on your computer and the car in your driveway will magically unlock. That was something that was very difficult to do. And we somehow figured out how to turn it into a process where developer can go from start to finish in making that happen. And no matter no more than a few minutes. Scot: [04:06] Awesome. And then I should have said it at the top of the show, but full disclosure, we are partners. So over here at Spiffy, we were using Smartcar as part of our connected car initiative and, and you know, by, uh, our developers are using your, your wonderful Api Apis to help us get access to vehicles for surfacing them. So, uh, we, we can vouch that it's real and it works and we've enjoyed working with you guys. Sahas: [04:28] Appreciate it. Thank you very much. It's been great working with your team as well. Scot: [04:31] Yeah. So, uh, as a, as a fellow startup guy, uh, one of my first questions is, you know, how, how big are you guys? Um, I know I saw that you guys have raised some capital, so the extent, whatever you're comfortable sharing, you know, obviously I don't want to get into, into dicey territory, but, but how, how big are you guys and how big do you think this could be? Sahas: [04:49] So taking a step back, um, the company started off, uh, with myself and a female into kind of getting the idea. I started working on convincing my brother who now happens to be the co-founder and CTO of the company to quit his job at Linkedin and join me on this journey to build this company. And that was maybe three months in of me trying to start the company. And he was a little resistant at first. He thought it was a crazy idea. And I've worked on that for probably about six months or something of that sort of trying to join. And finally, by the nine month mark or 10, 10 month mark, he finally said, okay, I'll quit. And let's do this. By that point, even though he was working his full-time job, he was on weekends and evenings, uh, um, helping prototype the first version, very, very early version of the product. Sahas: [05:43] And we use that very early prototype, uh, that, uh, he built, um, with me while he was still working another job to take that to investors and pitch idea. So the company at this time, it was just him and me and we were living in a small in South San Jose. And, uh, we went out to pitch a lot of ECS and uh, start off with a lot of angels and incubators. We unfortunately got rejected from a lot of the incubators. Almost everyone said, this is a ridiculous idea. Uh, I don't see, oh, you could actually make this work. But within about a few weeks, um, we ended up meeting, uh, Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen and entrepreneur partners at the firm, Andreessen Horowitz. And we pitched to him. We really didn't know who they were at the time. Uh, for those who aren't startup, we're holding, um, it's a really famous from a, they've been early investors in a lot of incredible companies like Airbnb, Lyft, Facebook and uh, octa and a lot of really a well regarded companies today. Sahas: [06:44] But we walked in not really knowing who they are. Uh, we should have probably done her homework, but we hadn't, uh, we didn't spend all their time reading about vcs. We were just focused on our product and we give them a genuine pitch of what we do. Uh, we brought a couple of cars so there are parking lot and demoed or tech working. So we were standing in the parking lot and writing a couple lines of code on her command, prompt our terminal on our computer and showing them how we're pulling data out of these cars and unlocking the doors to these vehicles. And they got pretty excited and they ended up up, uh, writing a check to us. It just the two of us, uh, for $2 million. And that's how the company got started and fast track to kind of where we are now. Since then, we've now raised a little over $12 million in venture capital from both Andreessen Horowitz and another firm called NEA I, which is not as new enterprise associates. And, uh, the team is approximately 20 people and this year we're actually on traction doubling the head count. So, uh, we've had a pretty exciting journey and, uh, we're really looking forward to what's coming next. Scot: [07:49] Pretty cool. Um, yeah, the, I'm a huge fan of, uh, Ben's book, "The Hard Thing About Hard Things." It's uh, it's one of my go tos so I have not met him. I've met mark a couple times, but I'm, I'm super jealous that you got to meet and pitch him. I bet that was fun. Sahas: [08:06] Yeah, no, I love that book. There is just a, I think the first time I read it was before I uh, or right after I started the company. And uh, um, I didn't really understand most of it because I have not really gone through any aspects of building a company. Uh, but I actually re-read it, um, uh, just a few months ago, a second time and it added so much more value. What the context, having tried to build something, uh, with learning how to hire people, manage people, uh, unfortunate circumstances of learning how, what and to let go of people and a tough decisions when it comes to your finances, numbers and scaling the company. So I think it's a really great book for entrepreneurs who are maybe pass their seed stage and maybe at least around the series a stage of their company and uh, figuring out how to get it to scale. Scot: [08:56] Yeah. Last time I was in your office, it seemed like half the folks there were coming back or going to a hackathon. And that seems to be a big way you guys get your APIs and the in the hands of folks don't tell us about the hackathons that you guys sponsor. Sahas: [09:10] Yeah. Um, so when we think about are the connected car market, when we, when we look at the industry, what we see is the innovation that's happening mo

EP002 - Senior Editor of Auto Remarketing & Auto Remarketing Canada, Joe Overby http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 2 is an interview with Joe, Senior Editor of Auto Remarketing & Auto Remarketing Canada; recorded on Wednesday, March 6th, 2019. He and Scot discuss a variety of topics, including: Joe’s position at Auto Remarketing Vehicle lifecycle - how people are buying and selling cars How changing ownership models (car-sharing, subscriptions) are influencing rental car agencies and dealerships The evolution of automotive auction, both physical and digital The progression of technologies for more connected cars Affordability of electric vehicles, as well as the availability of used EVs Slow down in autonomous vehicle hype It looks like dealers, auto auction companies (KAR/Cox) and rental car companies are on a collision course around the fleet maintenance/reconditioning/remarketing space Be sure to follow Joe on LinkedIn! Check out the multiple events hosted by Auto Remarketing and Auto Remarketing Canada, such as the Auto Intel Summit and Used Car Week. If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript:   Scot: [01:01] Welcome to the vehicle 2.0 Podcast. This is our second episode and it's being recorded Wednesday, March 6th, 2019. In this episode we have our first guest and I'll give you a little background. So here at Spiffy we are doing a lot of work at automobile auctions. It's a whole industry I've always heard about but never had experienced. So I was, I was reading online at a great site called Auto Remarketing and I kept seeing some content there by a guy named Joe Overby. And I said, "Wow, I've got to meet this guy some time" and went to his bio and discovered he is here local. So Joe is going to be our first guest here on the show.   Joe: [01:37] Scot, thanks for having me.   Scot: [01:38] Yeah. When we have 500 shows out, you'll, this'll be, you'll put it on your resume.   Joe: [01:42] That's right, first ever guest on Vehicle 2.0.   Scot: [01:43] Yes. We really appreciate it. And you're the senior editor of Auto Remarketing and Auto Remarketing Canada. So that's interesting. So you speak Canadian apparently as well as English.   Joe: [01:56] I try to. My southern accent, a little bit, gets in the way.   Scot: [01:59] Is that on your title? So you can go get some of the delicious Canadian beer or?   Joe: [02:04] You have delicious, delicious Canadian beer and they have the gravy fries, which are out of this world.   Scot: [02:11] Yeah. Yummy.   Joe: [02:12] Going up there in two weeks for that.   Scot: [02:15] Cool. Let's start off and kind of orient every, all the listeners about your background. How did you get into the industry and where you are today?   Joe: [02:23] So I went to went to NC state and I majored in political science, did a minor in journalism and had worked in for technician for a few years. And the student newspaper and then had a job in sports writing at a newspaper in Georgia right after college and worked there for two years and decided I want to try something different and get into magazines and applied for the job back here in Raleigh at our S&A Cherokee, which is the parent company of Auto Remarketing. And I've been covering the auto industry for about 12 years now.   Scot: [02:54] Awesome. Cool. Yeah. And NC state. Awesome. Go pack.   Joe: [02:59] Yes sir.   Scot: [02:59] Tell us more about Auto Remarketing. So is it print and online? Just online? And what kind of audience do you guys have? We'd love to know more about the publication.   Joe: [03:14] So we're print online and we have a digital edition are online. You know, we have our website obviously, and then we have a wide range of e newsletters that we send out, kind of that's how we get our stories out. Our largest e-newsletters, a daily morning one that goes out to about 22,500 subscribers. And then we have, you know, various other daily and weekly newsletters. They're about the same size or smaller. And then we have a print publication that goes out to 36,000 subscribers and then a digital edition of our same, of the same magazine. It goes out to 50,000. And then we have the same another publication Auto Remarketing Canada for our Canadian audience. And that also has a weekly and daily newsletters, and also a digital edition as well along with print. And then a colleague of mine, a guy by the name of Nick Zulovich, he heads up a couple of automotive finance publications. So we have one kind of specializes in the fin-tech space and then one that specializes in kind of the subprime lower tier financing in automotive as well.   Scot: [04:28] Yeah. And then the broader Cherokee, are all their publications automobile-oriented or do they go into a lot of different kinds of B2B verticals?   Joe: [04:35] Most of it actually is automotive B2B. I think we have four prints, automotive publications, but then we've also got two local lifestyle magazines. Folks here in the Triangle area, probably know Cary Magazine and we just launched a magazine for Holly Springs and Fuquay called Main & Broad. And then our company also has done several custom publications where, you know, maybe it's a, an association or a, you know, company that will publish a custom custom job for them. But mostly, yes, our bread and butter is the automotive space.   Scot: [05:11] Very cool. Yeah, it's interesting. The, you know, you read the headlines, print is dying out, but I think that's the daily newspaper. But it seems like where there's a lot of vibrancy is in kind of hyper local. So people want to know a lot more about what's going on with their community. And then also in, in kind of a lot of the B2B verticals, seems like you have those bases covered.   Joe: [05:30] We've got a, we've got a captive audience, so to speak for the, for the B2B as well. Yeah.   Scot: [05:35] Well, cool. We've got a ton of stuff we want to talk about. Let's start with what I call the vehicle life cycle. It seems like you guys got financing and then then kind of like, you know, the, the used car side, the remarketing refurbishing side. What are you seeing there, you know, around behavior around how people buy and sell cars. Is that changing or it's kind of the same it's been over the time you've tracked it?   Joe: [05:59] Certainly. Probably since about 2013, well, 2014. It's become a lot more digital in terms of the actual transaction. I mean, you had, you know, back then you had a lot of companies like Carvana, you know the BPs of the world, the rooms that have launched in the last five years. And more consumers, even if they're not maybe signing on the dotted line and buying completely online, they're doing, if there's five steps to car buying, they might be completing four of 'em online and then going and picking it up at the dealership or, or, you know, setting up the deal online. So I think you're seeing a lot more movement to completing some or all pieces of the process online. And, and, and it's not just these, the startups that are doing it, dealers are getting into the game as well. And you know, using software providers to get in the game themselves in terms of online buying and selling.   Scot: [06:56] Yeah, I think one of the Superbowl commercials that was my favorite was, I can't remember if it was Kia or Hyundai. Bt they had the commercial where the guy was in the elevator and it was Jason Bateman, and there was like root canal. And you know, like all these things and then like the bottom kind of the bottom level was buying a car and they were that company that, oh, that OEM was rolling out a model that was very Carvana [inaudible] will come to you, you have a return period. That kind of a thing. So I think it's been interesting to watch that.   Joe: [07:25] Yeah, for sure. I mean the automakers are doing it and they're, they're doing it through their dealers. I mean partly obviously cause a franchise dealer laws that they have to go through their dealers. But you know, they, they've got the infrastructure of, of these large dealer networks that they can set that up. Yeah.   Scot: [07:40] How about, I'm kind of staying on the topic of the vehicle life cycle. You mentioned your sister publication around finance. What's, what's new there? I know I've seen some data that leases are, are quite kind of, you know, continue to be the most, one of the increasingly popular ways to, to, to finance a car. What else are you seeing in that?   Joe: [07:59] Well, I'm one of the, one of the alternatives now is some of the cult subscriptions and they, you know, instead of in one of the, one of the models that has launched recently is one called Fair, which was launched by a guy named Scott Painter who was the CEO and founder of True Car. And he brought in a guy named George Bauer who's a former executive with the German automotive. And I believe, you know, it's had a lot of, a lot of experience in, in that, in that space as well. But you know, they models like that kind of had, I've taken on the approach of, you know, why jump into a 60, 66, 72 month loan when you can subscribe to a vehicle for, you know, a year if you want it at three months, if you want it. And then kind of get out and move on to the next one. And it's, you know, not to get in the weeds too much, but it is a different little bit different model than say, you know, a rental or a lease. But it just gives another flexibility for, for someone who doesn't want to set up financing for the next six years of their life.