The Magic of Understanding the EV Shopper with TrueCar

This episode is sponsored by DriveItAway. Whether you’re looking to rent, buy, or simply test out an EV, DriveItAway puts you in the driver’s seat. Visit driveitaway.com for more details. OTC: “DWAY”

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Transcript

Elena: So we’re here at Used Car Week and thank you for taking the time. I know at conferences, it gets a little crazy. So I appreciate you taking the time.

Matt: Thank you for asking. I think I appreciate that more than you appreciate me taking the time. It’s always cool to ask somebody say, hey, I want to hear what you have to say. So that’s cool. Thank you.

Elena: Yeah, no, no worries. So we’re, we are at Used Car Week, which is day two of a very long week. But Matt would love for you to talk through your background. Tell the audience for the listeners a little bit more about you and how you got into this crazy world of automotive.

Matt: Okay, well, thank you. Actually, I got sent to Automotive in 2001 in December of 2001, and I started my career in automotive as a retail salesperson in Southern California. I worked at a import store. Part of a large group. And an import store was actually knows that it was like a very important brand in the area that I lived in. And so it just seemed like a natural fit. If you’re going to sell a car when I sell a car that has a built in consumer base. So I did that. And it turned out I was OK at it. And within three or four years, I was you know, a manager of some sort and stayed with the industry. I was like, Okay, I found my calling. So I stayed on the retail side of automotive for 12 years, from sales to internet departments and finance management and sales management. Did that for 12 years and then I transitioned over to a company called Edmonds. Edmonds was looking for and this was in 2013 and Edmonds was looking for somebody who can help translate what was going on in retail automotive, for their consumers. And who better to do that than somebody who had actually worked in retail automotive, so it was a perfect fit for me. And so that’s what I did for six years with that company. A couple of years in transition. From just giving education to car developers to informing the media about what’s going on the automotive landscape. So I took on this position of automotive subject matter expert, and eventually started writing and creating content for places our times and USA Today and Good Morning America and all those things and the whole idea behind it was not just to talk about automotive. The foundation in the baseline was to help consumers better understand retail automotive, so that when they go into a retail automotive environment, they’re better prepared to deal with a purchase. And the reason that’s important is because if you haven’t bought a car in 55 years, you’re sitting here with an old or antiquated view of what goes on at a dealership, you might actually be hurting yourself. I moved to transition over to TrueCar to do the exact same thing, but in reverse. My role now is primarily to educate dealers and the broader automotive industry on what consumers are doing. And the way that I do that is by scrubbing through tons and tons of data. We have tremendous amounts of consumer behavioral data at TrueCar. One of the things that’s really cool is we get to watch a person start their shopping process, and we get to see where that process includes. So that’s slightly different than when you interview somebody because somebody will say something, but we get to actually see what they do. And that changes by area changes by income and changes by a type of vehicle. So primarily what I do and of course EVs are part of that conversation. Gosh, that was a long intro.

Elena: I love that, Matt. Those are the long intros are the best intros and you have such a great retail background and retail experiences, which is why I’m excited to talk about EVs with you because we’re at this really at this crossroads right now. Like the train has already left the station, right on EVs like it’s happening or feel like it or not. So but again, to your point about educating dealerships, but then also getting the consumers on board as well. So where do you see your skills and talents fitting into the EV ecosystem along with what you’re working on a TrueCar?

Matt: Okay, so I think I think that’s a very loaded question, and I could potentially get myself in a lot of trouble with that answer. So I’m gonna I’m going to start delicately but honestly, there’s a pervasive thought around the world that you know that consumers need more education about EVs. And I particularly as a human being, don’t necessarily subscribe to that. I think that people who are in the EV market right now are fully invested in the EV market and they’re doing incredible amounts of research research, like I’ve never seen people do in my 22 years in automotive. So I’m skeptical that consumers need more information. I think what consumers need is a little bit more of an action plan, and a bit more of a reality check of what the market is. If somebody were to if I were given to people who are supposed to be able to clearly identify the difference between miles per gallon and kilowatt hours, I’m going to actually put my money on the person who’s shopping for the EV they know what they know these things, right. But what they don’t necessarily know is how to navigate what it means to buy a car in this space. So I think that’s where the education comes. In the educational piece, and helping this very analytical group of shoppers understand that doesn’t have to be this, you know, horrendous, terrible, terrible drama inducing environment. I think that’s part of the key to making this like an a big witnessed hug from everybody who’s buying cars. There’s people who are probably buying cars online, from from particular manufacturers, and they’re in their mind, maybe on that particular manufacturer, but there may also be about the process or avoiding a process they think is antiquated. So I think consumer education comes from like, well, you can actually have that process in today’s market as well. You know, even from non online buyers and talking about how you can utilize the networks of stories that are already here to actually make your life easier and the process better. So there’s a lot of education but on the dealer side, I think it’s helping understand the dealers understand the mentality of evey shoppers, because it’s something different than what we’ve seen in the past and as a person who sold cars, I can say, truly that in my time selling cars, a person who wanted or traditional ice car had slightly different needs of their vehicle than somebody who was looking for a hybrid, and I sold to both and they were different shoppers. So helping people understand broadly motivations, I think is gonna be really important in this.

Elena: Yeah, and you you also bring up a really key point though, too is is shopper behavior and so like if you’re working at TrueCar are you looking at potentially folks that are not repeat EV buyers, people that are like first time looking at so talk a little bit more about that.

Matt: So there’s a lot of different types of car shoppers and then we all like to talk about and think about like the enthusiast or they’re off road rock crawler and the person who was just like, absolutely, you know, the Porsche Carrera person or whatever, right? But there’s also this incredible segment of car shoppers. They don’t care about any of those things. And what they care about is their cost for transportation. Right? That’s, that is their primary driver, right? And so when we talk about these people, like I’ll give you an example and I think this is terrible, I think it’s terrible. If I were to remodel my kitchen, I would not give one single darn what brand my refrigerator was. I don’t care. All I care is that it would fit. It’s aesthetically pleasing. It’s pretty good on fuel or on like, you know, my energy costs, and that has a little water dispenser out front. If it does those things. I’m good right? Because I’m not invested in, in refrigerators, or washing machines. And we have to understand that some car shoppers are not invested in brands, or propulsion systems. They’re invested in low cost of ownership. And I think that’s what’s really going to be exciting about the Evie landscape is that it’s going to bring the cost of ownership back into foreclosure. Affordable. It’s going to bring costs of maintenance into focus and it’s going to so I think there’s a lot of implications for EVs and that’s where the dealer education I think is coming from we talked about motivations. It’s not their motivation for some people, it’s going to be tech good. Give them a good process, because they’re going to know all the other people it’s gonna be motivation for cost, make sure that you can help them understand the potential cost savings now and in the future.

Elena: Yeah, that’s such a great analogy because ironically, I am remodeling a kitchen right now. And that is hilarious that you actually brought that up so I yeah, I feel the pain on the refrigerator part. So yeah, man, I love your perspective on this. And I would love to also pick your brain a little bit on the retail experience at the dealership level for EVs, and it’s been said I have my own perspective on this. I’d love to hear yours on a dedicated EV portion of the dealership. Good idea, terrible idea. Somewhere in between what are your thoughts there?

Matt: I’m gonna go with somewhere in between because there’s a precedent in automotive of having specialization within a dealership. I’ll give an example. One of the groups that I worked for had a truck center. So you had to be fully fledged and you had to take all the tests and you have to understand the differences and chassis isn’t towing capacity to whatever in order to work for the trucks and because I was a very specialized customer, right. So there’s also people within dealerships who specialize in special finance. There’s people who specialize in ultra luxury. So I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea, but not for I don’t want it to be grouped into like, oh, there will be one person who can help. Help. There’s going to be more than one person who can handle this. We need police professionalism, type customer, right, and specialization just as prominent throughout our lives. We go through it all the time. And I think another reason why that we’re working on you’d have the same engine essentially in the Honda Accord. And in the Honda CRV, you’d have the same engine in the Honda Pilot on the Odyssey. And you might have the same engine, the Honda Civic and maybe on a bit production. It has a different variant. But the thing was, is you only had to learn the specs three times to learn the braking system three times to play across different brands. This is a completely different monster. So I think specialization would would would benefit but if we go down the route of creating specialization based on technical acumen, we’re gonna fail. If we can go down that route for specialization based on this is what this shoppers behavior is. And this is how they over index or the way that they want to transact that’s where we’re gonna win that one.

Elena: Yeah, no, that’s so true. And that’s a great distinction that you made there. So now that’s perfect. So, 2024 thinking about the year ahead, what are some of the things that you’re excited to work on? That is really just like top of mind for you?

Matt: Heck of a question. I’m going to tell you what I’m excited about for EVs. I’m excited about a lot of things. I’m excited about the automotive industry coming back to normalcy. I’m excited about vehicles becoming more abundant choice coming back to evey I want to say something and I’m going to put a stake in the ground and it’s going to sound whoever’s listening to those bytes. Listen to the whole statement, okay. In this stage of the game, EVs are important. But the propulsion system isn’t important. What EV is important for is it’s a harbinger of what’s what’s to come. I remember a million years ago, when I was selling cars, people started buying cars on the internet. And we looked at it like it was this weird, gross animal that may stick around or may not stick around and may be valuable. It may not be that but now it was prior to the internet. Before my time in the industry, I often have window stickers. Did you know that those cards, we didn’t have window stickers in our industry, right? So I’m imagining people selling cars, were being forced to all of a sudden put a Monroni label because the car costs and those people at that time were probably like, oh my gosh, this is some ugly animal. I don’t know what to do with that. And then prior to that, when we were transitioning from horse and buggy into car, I actually saw a horse and buggy dad that was released after cars were on the ground. And the horse and buggy seller was like, why would you get a car, it’s not going to work in the dirt. It’s not going to work in the rain. It’s going to be temperamental. Stick with the horses and there was a horse and carriage company because you know there was a transition when we sold both right? This is just another iteration of that. The way the car shoppers buy that our shoppers, it’s probably an indication that we are to in our industry going forward. I think that is the real value of EVs and 2021 from a retail standpoint is here’s what the future could be. It’s gonna be kind of tech heavy. It’s going to be kind of service heavy, it’s going to be it may be a little bit less about, you know, how hit fast you can hit the corner or can you drift or you know, so I think that’s what 2024 is going to is going to bring to us as an understanding of whether we like EVs or not as a car, whether we believe in EVs or not as vehicles because of, you know, government endorsements or lithium or whatever you’re doing. None of those things matter. I think 2024 and 25 are going to bear out that this is going to be the shopper behavior model, whether it’s ice whether it’s diesel, whether it’s electric weather, I think that’s where the magic of EV is right now.

Elena: That was beautiful. I brought a little baby tear to my eye because no because really it is all it is a combination of all of those things. And I think what I really love about the automotive industry, is the fact that you just we have a bunch of smart people working on a bunch right? So we’re gonna figure it out. We’re gonna figure it out. It’s gonna be a mixture of things. A little hodgepodge. We’re in the teenage years right now, let’s be real.

Matt: It’s really funny that you said that because about a year ago, somebody asked me what my position was. And I said to me, I think Automotive is in puberty, right? Because up until puberty, you think you know what you are, but when you come out of it, you really know who you are. And it’s funny that you would say that because that’s exactly why we process we are in that transitional stage.

Elena: The only difference here is I won’t slam the door on your face and say you don’t understand me!!

Matt: Maybe on another podcast we can talk about examples of automotive saying no to automotive or bankers. We are slamming doors on each other.

Elena: So yeah, there is a little bit of a little bit of that vibe happening. Well, Matt, this is awesome conversation. I love having your perspective I’d love to give you a shout out and the opportunity for people to reach out to you if they have additional questions. They want to connect to you. So where’s the best place for that?

Matt: I’m really easy to find. My name is Matt Jones. So that makes mjones@truecar.com. I’m also on LinkedIn but there’s a couple other Matt Jones is on LinkedIn. So if you go on LinkedIn, look for Matt Jones TrueCar and let’s become friends and let’s extend this conversation and let’s keep this thing moving.

Elena: You are just a ray of sunshine in my day today. I’m so happy we made this workout. So thank you for your time.