🚗 Community > Competition

Welcome to Saturday, Friend!

On this day in 1902, Cadillac was founded from the remains of Henry Ford’s former auto company.

After Ford left, investors brought in Henry Leland to assess the assets before a sale. Leland saw enough potential to convince them to keep building.

Thus, what appeared to be a dead end became a 120-year luxury brand.

It’s a good lesson to keep an eye on the things other people are quick to dismiss. Good things can often start where someone else stopped looking.

Keep Pushing Back,
—Paul, Kyle, Chris & Kristi

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🤨 Riddle Me This: I have cities, but no houses. I have mountains, but no trees. I have water, but no fish. What am I?

(Find the answer at the bottom of the email.)

Missed a day (or five)? Here's the gist of everything that mattered this week.

Tesla grabbed 61.5% of June's EV registrations while every other brand combined fell 31%. Not really an EV story, it's a focus story: while competitors spread themselves across every price point, Tesla let one vehicle become the unmistakable answer to "what EV should I buy."

Also that day: a sub-$30K Kia EV signaling where EV residuals are headed, and Chinese exports surging 71% while the domestic market cratered.

A New Jersey dealer group sued Polestar for $25 million, alleging the automaker used a federal ownership ban as cover for an exit it had been quietly planning for two years.

The detail that stings: sister brand Volvo, also Geely-owned, sought and received an exemption from the same ban. Polestar never tried. If your franchise brand has any foreign ownership under regulatory scrutiny, this is the case testing whether "the government made us do it" actually holds up in court.

Group 1 is consolidating dozens of legacy dealership names under a single brand, with more than 60 stores already converted, representing over half its U.S. sales volume.

Folding everything under one marketing budget is the easy part. Giving customers a real reason to choose that name specifically, rather than just recognize it, is the part that takes a full year of actual storytelling to land.

Carvana is pricing new vehicles above local competitors, including the Ram 2500 at $4,533 higher, and still posting a 69% average turn rate versus 39% at competing stores. Its Boston location hit 107%.

The lesson: no-haggle certainty is worth real money to a meaningful slice of buyers, and Carvana's win here isn't about being cheap, it's about being predictable.

NADA President Mike Stanton joined the show to lay out the association's priorities through year-end, FTC pricing clarity, the fight against direct sales, and Chinese OEM pressure, all tracing back to one number: dealers moved 96% of new-car sales last year, and NADA wants the rest.

Also that day: why easier auto credit access might be masking a more fragile buyer, and why dealer service bays are quietly becoming the real profit center.

For one night, nearly 5,000 people got a pretty good look at what happens when car dealers pull in the same direction.

Central Ohio’s dealer community packed KEMBA Live! for the 2026 Concert For A Cause, raising more than $100K for Canine Companions and Charity Newsies.

The money will help provide trained service dogs and new clothing for local kids. The event itself has become something worth borrowing.

Catch our recap from Columbus and see what community can build together.

A toxic top performer can cost more than they produce.

Michael Cirillo goes solo to unpack how that dynamic takes hold inside a dealership, why leaders rationalize it, and how the rest of the team reads the decision long before anyone says it out loud.

If there’s someone on your team everyone tiptoes around, this episode is worth your attention.

The internet loves a simple villain.

Dealerships make an easy one.

In this episode of The Pushback, Paul and Kyle take a viral “dealerships are a scam” argument and work through the actual mechanics behind pricing, franchise law, and local competition.

Watch the full episode for a sharper read on one of retail auto’s most persistent debates.

Robert Bassam built Easterns Automotive Group from two Salvation Army beaters and $100 in tip money into an eight-store operation with a 160,000-square-foot reconditioning campus.

And if that isn’t impressive enough, he has also accumulated as massive collection of classic, custom, and exotic rides, something he considers "a sickness and a passion." He even let us borrow a piece of it for this year’s ASOTU CON with his orange 1969 Dodge Charger.

But, that Charger barely scratches the surface of what's parked in there.

The collection runs deep into triple digits when you count every model year and variant, sprawling from Italian hypercars to a fleet of Porsches spanning six decades of 911 alone, to classic American muscle.

Every car lives in a 20,000-square-foot climate-controlled warehouse he calls, fittingly, RB's Garage.

Robert built his businesses giving people a shot nobody else would. Off the clock, he's spent thirty years proving good taste doesn't discriminate either.

🤨 Riddle Answer: A map.