Tag: TrueCar

Car Search Aggregation

I was rereading Professor Rogers’ book and I had this brainstorm that somebody should develop an aggregator site to sit on top of digitally-enabled car dealers, the way Kayak does for airlines.  It could scrape all the listings into one vehicle-search page, aided perhaps by a standardized listing API. 

It turns out I am not the first one to have this idea, but the research was interesting.

First, we have to make a distinction between providing a lead and selling the car.  This is not always easy, because few customers require full digital retail, and most lead providers have some limited DR capability.  Still, this distinction is important to an aggregator:

To make said distinction, imagine the dealer in this diagram has a DR system and also uses a third-party classified site.  If you are a DR skeptic, imagine this is Carvana (or CarMax) with their own integrated car-selling site. 

I am using a thin line for leads and a thick line for deals.  This notation helps to show that the Kayak site should only connect to DR-capable dealers.  Otherwise, it’s lead provider on top of lead provider, with no added value.

Once a platform is widely established in its category, it is extremely hard to launch a direct challenger with a similar service – David Rogers

Here, I am just doing what any good futurist does – working backward from the goal state.  What the market wants is a single place to shop, like Amazon.  Rogers would call this a “platform,” and network effects says it’s a winner-take-all business.  There can be only one. 

Once you recognize this three-layer model, you can infer all sorts of fun things.  Like, suppose Carvana (or CarMax) decided to open up their DR capability to other dealers.  These would be certified and operationally compatible dealers, whose inventory Carvana could sell for a commission.  I’ll leave it to you to negotiate who earns the F&I gross:

I have been writing about digital retail for a few years now, speculating on how the goal state would be achieved.  Note that “DR aggregation” on the left side of the diagram, and “platform aggregation” on the right, correspond to the two vectors I described here.  

I have long advocated platform sites adding DR capability, as some are doing now.  This brings us to an interesting piece of history.  Airline booking sites Orbitz and Kayak were founded by the same guy, Steve Hafner, in that order:

Initially, Hafner undertook what we would call the DR piece, while Kayak opted to be simply an aggregated lead provider.  I still think it’s a good idea for listing sites to develop DR features, but history suggests the TrueCar approach – linking up with Roadster – is the correct one.

Raising the Bar

Armchair strategists are feeling vindicated now that AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson has abandoned his “asinine” plan to ground all vehicles under recall.  I see the same argument whenever anyone tries to change dealer operations.  They estimate the reduction in profits and write about that, as if that were the end of the argument.  It’s not.  That’s not how competition works.

If you talk about disclosing product prices online, you will hear that F&I gross is now $1,500 and who wants to screw that up?  Same story with TrueCar and their diabolical plan to disclose transaction prices.  You even hear this complaint about vAuto and the velocity method, which sounds to me like the most logical thing ever.

My back-of-envelope calculation says that AutoNation carrying an additional 10,000 units of inventory, at maybe 2%, would cost them roughly $5 million per year.  That’s 0.02% of sales.  For comparison, the related “Drive Safe” ad campaign was $10 million.

AutoNation, with investment-grade credit, enjoys a lower carrying cost than its private dealer competitors.  Selling diverse brands, they are less exposed to a recall by any one manufacturer.  They can also exploit their scale to mitigate the cost of such a policy, not to mention the PR benefits.

If federal regulators had followed Jackson’s lead, this would have raised the bar for all dealers.  Two senators, now disappointed, were lined up to make that happen.  Jackson’s policy, a minor challenge for AutoNation, might have proved fatal for smaller dealers.  That’s how competition works.

It is a mistake to look at process change only in terms of the costs.  Athletes training hard for a competition don’t think about how much it hurts.  They think about how much it’s going to hurt the other guy.

Update:  Motley Fool estimates the cost to AutoNation at $0.06 of EPS, a little higher than my estimate (and Jackson’s) due to the Takata debacle.

How to Save TrueCar

My title is somewhat facetious, but “how to position TrueCar so that it makes dealers less hostile and invites fewer lawsuits” was too long. The Auto News forum is not exactly laden with objectivity. People see the headlines and the share price, and then they crow about TrueCar going out of business.

Complaints or negative publicity about our business practices, our compliance with applicable laws and regulations … could diminish users’ and dealers’ confidence in our products and adversely affect our brand

Investors are more objective, as in Why I’m Buying TrueCar despite the Sell-Off. You can look at the Morningstar rating (undervalued) and the quarterly report. TrueCar is making twice the revenue of Autobytel, and growing faster. Still, there is the hostility. Here are my thoughts:

  • Enhance the site to support online buying, as I have described previously.
  • Add features like the ability to sell protection products. This feature alone would compensate for foregone gross on the front end.
  • The platform should help individual dealers to compete with consolidators. Make it a “community” that includes dealers, affinity groups, and finance sources.
  • Prepare for a world of one-price dealers. Look at Scion, for example. The histogram for a Pure Price dealer has only one bar.
  • Use out-of-market data, consumer data, and statistical inference to provide a more detailed pricing picture. This feels less like “ratting out” the dealers.
  • Make the database a research tool, as Zillow is for homes. TrueCar owns ALG, so they already have the machinery.
  • Update the revenue model, to avoid legal classification as a broker. The current model, ironically, becomes less effective as more dealers adopt it.
  • Think about pay per lead, or monthly. I can’t share the details, but I understand the AutoNation deal could have been saved.

These measures should allay the hostility that some dealers have toward price transparency, and the TrueCar business model. If all else fails, and litigation persists, there is the “nuclear option.”

I can think of a few ways to end price obfuscation, for good. The practice is obsolete anyway (not to mention unfair and deceptive) and would not survive six months of concerted attack. Of course, that would also damage the TrueCar model, as presently constituted. I recommend doing the strategy alignment first.

TRUE