The dealership model that carried the automotive industry from 1985 to 2020 is not going to survive the next ten years. That is not a provocation. It is a description of what has already happened — a diagnosis rendered plain by the affordability data, the trust surveys, the enforcement docket, and the quarterly filings of every publicly traded retail group in America.
This chapter is the honest conversation. The one every dealer principal has had privately with their CFO at ten o'clock on a Tuesday, after the doors closed and the last customer drove off the lot. The conversation about margin compression that is not cyclical, about a customer base that no longer trusts the process, about a workforce that will not tolerate the old ways of doing business, and about a marketplace layer that has quietly rewritten who gets to see which car at which price.
The rest of the chapter continues in the full edition — hardcover, paperback, or eBook.