1. Car Financ­ing: Ford Cred­it suc­cess­ful­ly does online financ­ing with Ricart Ford, Ohio

2. Online Car Buy­ing: Auto­Grav­i­ty deliv­ers car buy­ers to deal­ers with four financ­ing options to set up a com­plete online buy­ing sce­nario; Ques­tion is; Can car shop­pers get the financ­ing approval first and then go back to the select­ed deal­er?

3. Car Sales: Penske failed to make No Hag­gle prac­tice work. Claims they were loos­ing deals.

4. Deal­er Busi­ness Mod­el: Deal­ers and Ford acknowl­edg­ing that Autonomous cars are going to change the deal­er busi­ness mod­el. Some hint that maybe to be a source of var­i­ous modes of trans­porta­tion & ser­vices.

5. Wal­mart Com­pet­ing with Deal­ers: Wal­mart sell­ing cars under an affil­i­ate pro­gram is anoth­er indi­ca­tion of peo­ple want­i­ng to avoid the pric­ing and sales prac­tices of deal­ers.

6. Man­ag­ing Munic­i­pal Traf­fic; Traf­fic Tech­nol­o­gy Ser­vices seeks to be mid­dle­man between OEMs & Cities. Offers tech­nol­o­gy that enable cars to read Red lights & cap­ture traf­fic data.

7. Diesel Emis­sions: Now it looks like FCA, Peu­geot, Renault & oth­er OEMs are being inves­ti­gat­ed for using soft­ware that messed with the mea­sure­ment of diesel emis­sions in a dynamome­ter lab test­ing set­up. Have not all OEMs mis­rep­re­sent­ed either mileage, emis­sion lev­els, or per­for­mance stan­dards at one time or oth­er?

8. Leas­ing on Speed: Well done Edmunds Research says that 4.3M cars and trucks were fund­ed with a lease in 2016. The entire sales dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nel from OEMs to Cap­tives to Deal­ers and even lessees do not seem to be ready to man­age a con­trolled vehi­cle recy­cling process.

9. Being Intel­li­gent about Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Lead­ers from IBM, Microsoft, & Vista Equi­ty Part­ners sought to say that AI is and will not be a “job killer. $47B to be spent on AI ion next 3 years some­how sug­gests oth­er­wise.

10. Call Cen­ters Match­ing Up Calls – Affini­ti Sys­tems search 100 data­bas­es when caller dials and the seeks to match caller his­to­ry with call cen­ter per­son, even if in Philip­pines.

Want-to-know more and drill down to get more detail, vis­it www.eportlandhomes.info dur­ing the week or Call or email us.

Chuck Park­er
Pub­lish­er
310 265‑2225