Steve Greenfield, CEO of Automotive Ventures, walked through a reality check on the future of automotive remarketing in a presentation at the ARA’s Summer Roundtable conference near Dallas on Aug. 21, 2024.
Photo: Martin Romjue / Bobit
Steve Greenfield launched into the anticipated future of automotive remarketing by emphasizing how the “wayback machine” and industry history should never be abandoned.
Looking back across the decades, with the help of that Internet tool, underscores how any advances in auctions and wholesale vehicle selling must retain those processes and standards that remain steadfast.
Greenfield, the CEO of Automotive Ventures and an informal “futurist” for the vehicle remarketing industry, dipped into the past and present before outlining how auctions and vehicle consignment will shift in coming decades. He spoke on Aug. 21 at the Automotive Remarketing Alliance’s annual Summer Roundtable conference near Dallas.
“We cannot without the frame of reference of looking backwards be able to look into the future, because you need to have that foundation,” said Greenfield, who has worked in the vehicle remarketing industry since 1999.
Defining the Core of Remarketing
While showing a “wayback” 1945 image of a Manheim auction in Pennsylvania, Greenfield pointed out how auctions retail their core roles even with the Internet and the digital versions. It’s still about connecting vehicle buyers and sellers with the most accurate information available.
“The auctions have grown in scale over time, obviously, but in terms of the actual auction process, they haven’t changed a lot,” he said. “What motivates a seller and a buyer is still the same.”
Vehicle consignors are still interesting four goals:
- Maximizing the price retention when you sell the vehicle
- Minimizing your cost of remarketing, which includes trimming down the number of days until the sale.
- Perpetuating a brand you are proud of that brings in specific buyers
- And doing all of the above as quickly as possible
Buyers are still focused on vehicle quality and trying to minimize fees and price as efficiently as possible, while gaining the title quickly.
Quoting Canadian science fiction author William Gibson, Greenfield said, “If you examine the present, there’s evidence of seeds being planted today which give you an indication of where we go in the future.”
Greenfield then outlined key areas spanning automotive remarketing of growth and potential:
Electric Vehicles a Bigger but Slower Wave
Electric vehicles, now the most hotly debated issue for the automotive remarketing industry, are going through a deceleration, Greenfield said.
“There are different markets around the world where penetration is accelerating forward, but in the U.S. for many reasons and despite a lot of top-down stimulus, we are finding that the early adopters have bought their EVs, and because of negative press, EV adoption among consumers has slowed down.”
In the U.S. market, demand for plug-in hybrids has strongly outpaced that of EVs. When looking at global EV sales, growth has been inconsistent, or “choppy,” Greenfield said. He predicted that electrified vehicles, including hybrids and plug-in hybrids, will reach 50% of the market in 2030. One quarter of Ford F-150 pick-up trucks, the most popular vehicle in the U.S., are hybrids.
“We’re living through a downturn in terms of global electric vehicle demand,” Greenfield said. “I believe 50 years from now we’ll look back at an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle like a rotary phone. Kids of the future will look back and say, ‘They were inefficient, they were polluting,’ etc.”
To close the gap, EVs will need more charging infrastructure. “With cars of the future, there’ll be inductive charging whether you’re driving or whether you’re parking over a spot. We won’t be plugging cars in. They’ll automatically get charged, like putting your iPhone on an inductive cradle today.”
Greenfield foresees “two generations from now” a ground transportation world where EVs are automatically charged in short periods with ranges of 1,000 miles.
“Some of the headwinds we’re facing today with resistance around range anxiety and charging infrastructure will change very quickly and be seamless to the consumer. EVs will supplant ICE vehicles.”
China May Lead the EV Future
Remarketers need to watch EV events in China, Greenfield advised. While the U.S. has dominated repeated waves of economic innovation since the Industrial Revolution, China has positioned itself to dominate the next major wave in clean energy, electric vehicles, and artificial intelligence.
“China can do this because they’re top down. They call themselves a democracy, but they’re not a democracy. They can play an entirely different game than we can in the U.S., where we vacillate between two parties every four to eight years. They can have a 100-year view on how they want to dominate certain industries.”
Fifteen years ago, China made a strategic bet about garnering EV inputs and battery producing capabilities such as mining, extraction, and production of minerals needed for EV lithium batteries, Greenfield said. China has nine of the top 10 battery producers worldwide.
“You can see what they’ve done over a 15- or 20-year period, driving predominant market share in many of these categories. This is not a good thing. And I struggle with what the right answer is.”
Greenfield referenced the question of whether the U.S. should levy tariffs on EV imports as China aggressively dominates the global market for EVs by moving its production into other tariff-free countries such as Brazil.
“I think that we can protect ourselves and isolate ourselves, but we’re conceding the rest of the world to China and their cheap, high quality EVs at a time, ironically, that if we let them into our country, consumers in the U.S. would benefit from cheap, high quality EVs.”
That raises the question of whether U.S. automakers would consolidate to share research and development and factories to become more competitive, Greenfield said.
“We will see how this all plays out. But it would be easy for all of us to say China is a problem far away. We should all be staying abreast of China, especially as it takes more market share around EVs. I’m conflicted, because I don’t know if erecting these big barriers to protect legacy automakers and union workers is the right thing to do. I think it’s a temporary fix.”
Valuing Used EVs Poses Problems
Meanwhile, EVs have a depreciation challenge thanks to Tesla CEO Elon Musk cutting new model prices in 2022, which hurt EV owners and major fleet consignors like Hertz.
“When these rental car companies don’t want to take any EVs into inventory because they worry about the portfolio value,” it hurts the overall market and transition to EVs, he said.
While this challenge will stabilize over time, the rapid advance of EV technologies bringing longer ranges and shorter charge times will disrupt the market in the near term.
“You’re going to look at a three- or four-year old EV and the consumers might think it’s not attractive because of newer EVs with better charging properties and a longer range,” Greenfield said. “Although innovation is the best thing to drive more adoption for EVs, I think it will continue to put negative pressure on used EVs.”
EVs Not Always a Maintenance Saver
One plus point of EVs is fewer repairs because of fewer moving parts. That means longer service intervals, he said. “At the same time, cars are getting much more complex with more technology in these vehicles overall.”
Repairs become more costly because of all the electronic equipment and sensors in vehicle parts that must be recalibrated.
“Will the OEMs allow the Jiffy Lubes of the world and the independent repair shops to get access to the telematics data in these cars? Will it not matter anyway if the average technician will not have the skills or tools to work on these cars?
“You look under these cars and you don’t even know where to start to work on them,” he said. “The specialized tools and skill sets needed will block any independent repair shop from having the sophistication to be able to work on these vehicles.”
Another factor is the higher cost of EVs in addition to more expense repairs, Greenfield said. “Electric cars are much more expensive on a per repair basis because of parts availability. We haven’t yet figured out how to replace modules within batteries, so you have to replace the entire battery pack, and it can be 40% to 50% of the entire cost of a new vehicle.
OEMs are under intense pressure to save on vehicle production costs but haven’t planned out how those savings will affect the aftermarket in terms of repairability and the insurance rates EV owners will pay because the vehicles are becoming more sophisticated, he added.
While AI may be used to design new parts that will be lighter with more rigidity and flexibility, the uncertain costs likely will be higher. “The car itself will be an awesome technological feat, but trying to repair them will be almost impossible. This juxtaposition of trying to drive costs out of the production line has huge implications on repairability and insurance costs down the road.”
Greenfield cited CPI inflation statistics showing inflation rising at high levels for vehicle insurance, transportation services, and motor vehicle repair. “What’s happening is car insurance in general is inflated, and for EVs, consumers are wrestling with their EV insurance being higher than for a comparable ICE vehicle.”
Greenfield mapped out how the components of vehicle auction remarketing have expanded with digital and marketplace advances.
Photo: Martin Romjue / Bobit
Shifts Coming to the Auction Marketplaces
In looking at the future of the auction marketplace, which has become more complex with each passing decade, a key challenge is to identify the biggest pain points and ways to alleviate them, Greenfield said.
“If I can alleviate at the pain point, then hopefully I’m making both sides of this equation, the suppliers and the buyers of these vehicles, happier and more likely to be loyal to me.”
Greenfield distilled a set of likely trends converging at different paces into a future mainstream driving the vehicle remarketing industry:
- Shrewd, aggressive retailers like Amazon are adding robots very quickly. More robots than humans will populate operations and factories in coming years. The main job of humans will be to look after the robots, similar to workers who monitor an OEM production line today. That dynamic will affect auctions in ways still to be determined, since it is still an industry based on mostly human capital.
- AI is still deriving its data from a narrow field of human intelligence, although parity between AI robots and humans remains elusive and unpredictable. Venture capital firms are investing heavily in AI advances.
- High-definition video imagery will play an escalating role in assessing vehicles in all ways beyond what vehicle reconditioners and auctions see today.
- Robots will increasingly be used in maintenance and reconditioning service bays as the technology behind them improves. “There will be robots that change tires much quicker and more efficiently than humans, and there won’t be any workers comp issues about backs and hand injuries,” Greenfield said.
- Autonomous vehicles will present a new dynamic and interplay with AI and robots, enabling the two technology ends to communicate on vehicle performance, deficiencies, and repairs.
- Buyers will demand more accurate EV battery assessments as the number of EVs grows and ages. There will be multiple use cases where consumers and fleets that are de-fleeting EVs and selling them through remarketing channels will require confidence in EV battery quality. Battery health scores will become a major factor in EV resales and valuations.
- There will be increased scrutiny on compliance and making sure all parties across the entire chain of remarketing, including buyer and seller, receive data protections.
Next Steps: Questions and Answers
As remarketers prepare for the future, they need to consider some key questions to determine the course of their businesses:
- What role will auctions need to play to help make sure more complex vehicles are handled properly on behalf of the consignors who are selling them through open remarketing channels?
- What has my business become and what are my goals in the areas of metrics?
- How can my auction or remarketing business focus its energies to get better to represent the buyers and sellers in the marketplace?
- How do you become a better channel than your competition?
As with vehicle auction transactions stretching into the past, the essential core metrics, or key performance indicators (KPIs), of transacting a vehicle will never change since auctions first started, Greenfield said.
“Looking into the future with all of these factors can put you somewhere on the continuum from excitement to anxiety,” he said. “If we take control and deliberate about where we allocate our resources, time, money, and people across frameworks to make sure we’re differentiated, then it can move us more to the left on this continuum.”
In closing, he referenced a variable quote often attributed to different notables, such as Abraham Lincoln and Peter Drucker: “The most reliable way to predict the future is to create it.”
