The Mortal Sins Of The Auto Business

Die, sucker! Automortal Sins will be an infrequent series about the true sins in the auto business. It won't be the sins which some bloggers regard huge. We won't blame lapses in styling, branding, we won't lambast OEMs for abandoning sports cars in favor of appliances. Building the wrong car once in a while is a minor iniquity compared to the huge, most egregious, and definitely mortal sins committed by automakers every day, without the smallest amount of remorse. Here is the first one: Automortal Sin #1:Forget Service, and to keep it holy Flouting the importance of customer service is the auto business equivalent of adultery and the coveting of thy neighbor's wife: It's bad, it's potentially deadly, and everybody is doing it. It is not the touchy-feely reasons of good customer relations that make great service all-important for an automaker, it's hard cash.  Service, not cars, is the prime moneymaker in the auto business. Don't pay attention to service, and your will develop huge pains in your bottom line. At a big European OEM I had been intimately familiar with, in a good year, the profit contribution of new cars  was 33 percent.. Another 33 percent came from parts sales. And yet another 33 percent came from financial services.  Customer service in a wider sense brought most of the company's profit – in a good year. In a bad year, the non-new car profits kept the company alive and paid for the loss in the new car business. At the dealer level, matters are even more extreme.  New cars often are a loss leader for a dealer. How do you think a dealer can offer you a car below his cost and survive?  Sure, his true cost may be a little lower than he lets on, but the real reason is in the back: Servicing cars is a goldmine. Dealers earn double on each service job:  They can charge $100 or more for an hour. They pay maybe $20 an hour to the mechanic when there is business, and nothing when there is none.  They sell you parts with obscene mark-ups. A set of brake pads, or a rotor, for which you pay from $50 on upwards, costs $5 at the factory in China. Little plastic parts that are unique to your car are better than selling drugs or pornography. Nobody else makes them, so your friendly carmaker lists them at sometimes hundreds of dollars, and often they cost pennies to make. You are probably are thinking now: This may be true where this Kraut is from, but this is America. Nobody is left starving here, even car dealers. According to NADA, that is America's National Automobile Dealers Association, new car dealers lost money on every sale between the year 2006 and 2010. In 2011, the average dealer finally manages to eke out a tiny profit on his new car sales, but only when counting profits from F&I, which finally start flowing. Pure new car sales remain a loss leader. Ironically enough, a new car dealer makes much more money selling used cars, and he did so in all years except in 2008. Where the true money is made on a consistent basis is in the service department. NADA says that in 2011, a dealer's average profit margin on service and parts sales was 46 percent. 46 percent!!! Both to dealer and OEM, service is a lifeline during good and bad times. We know how car sales fluctuated since in the past 20 years.  Service and parts sales are relatively steady and hovered at around $80 billion for all NADA dealers since the year 2000. Of course, once the warranty is over, the fleeced customers tend to flee their dealer as if he has the plague. They end up at Meineke or Pep Boys who look cheap compared to the franchised dealers. Trust me, they still make a lot of money, even if they sell you the $5 brake pad at the cut-rate price of $45 instead of $55. If the franchised dealer could hold the customer a little longer, dealer and OEM would make an excrementload more money. I am able to tell you how much, but I won't. I had access to these numbers back when. They were confidential – and huge. Just consider this: The average cost of a service job goes up with age. Keeping a customer in the shop of a franchised dealer means increased  service profits, and usually it means a new car sale at the end. Customers who fled to Pep Boys can also be very reluctant to come back to buy a new car. What is done to keep them? Nada. OEMs spend obscene amounts of money on marketing their new cars, dealer s spend wicked amounts of money on advertising theirs,  both throw away immense sums on incentives. All to sell a product that brings very little profit, or all too often no profit at all. Their is a money printing machine called service, but this is regularly left devoid of ink and paper. GM committed a lot of nasty sins. Here are two of the most egregious: To lose control of GMAC. Financial Services were the last true profit center for GM, and they let slip it away . To kill Mr. Goodwrench, and to replace the icon with meaningless Certified Chevrolet etc. Service. GM is not alone with the stupidity. When time s get tough, most OEMs happily scuttle what little market support they gave to their parts and financial service ventures and use it to prop up their doomed car sales. This can be an especially deadly sin. Especially in tough times, the service money keeps both company and dealers alive. When people stop buying new cars, they spend more for repairs. Something that is sadly all too often ignored in the industry. Look at the blue NADA chart above. Want to feel like a real car executive? Say the chart doesn't matter. Ignoring the money made from customer service is one of the most egregious automortal sins in the universe. Why is this sin committed as a matter of daily routine? Nobody knows. As one auto executive told me after a few beers: "We all have sinned and fall short of the glory of  God. Barkeep! Two more." from The Truth About Cars http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com

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