🚗 For Dealers Doing The Work

🚙 This Week's Top Headlines, Practical Tactical Pods, and Auto Innovation at CES

January 10, 2026

Welcome to Saturday, Friend!

We know a lot of you are working today. Helping customers. Solving problems. Keeping the store moving. It’s not always glamorous work, but the boat doesn’t row itself.

Because good dealers shape entire communities. Because the right leadership lifts more than just profits. Because when one store gets better, the whole industry feels it.

We’re not here to ride waves, we’re here to rise tides. Ya dig?

Keep Pushing Back,
-Paul, Kyle, Chris, and Kristi

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ICYMI

The News Works Weekends

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The Daily Pushback Email

Monday: “Certainty” is really a proxy for permission

Consumer confidence slid again, but demand did not disappear. Shoppers are still arriving, just slower to commit, more payment-obsessed, and more skeptical of surprises. This is the kind of market where “certainty” becomes the product: trade clarity, early numbers, clean paperwork, and fewer last-minute swerves.

More on this in Monday’s email.

Tuesday: The market is stable, but uneven in a way that punishes sloppy execution

Sales rose in 2025, and 2026 looks “fine” on paper. The catch: fragmentation. Higher-income buyers float, lower-income buyers grind, and brand performance diverges. When everything is steady-not-surging, tiny process gaps cost real money, and strong operators gain market share without needing hero-level incentives.

More on this in Tuesday’s email.

Wednesday: Hybrids won the year while EV demand took the volatility

Ford and BMW both show the same pattern: hybrids and PHEVs are where confidence lives right now. EVs softened hard after incentives changed and late-year demand dropped. The story is “risk-managed electrification,” with buyers choosing the drivetrain that best protects payment and lifestyle certainty.

More on this in Wednesday’s email.

Thursday: Used is the affordability release valve, and one sedan’s jump tells you why

Late-model used is still truck-led, but the Chevy Malibu’s sudden rise is a tell. Scarcity plus fleet flow plus price pressure can reshuffle the leaderboard fast. Used EVs are also reshuffling beneath Tesla’s dominance, which signals opportunity for stores that can price, recon, and explain value better than the market.

More on this in Thursday’s email.

Friday: The future is software-defined, but the bottleneck is still human hands

OEMs and suppliers are racing toward open-source collaboration to cut costs and ship software faster. Meanwhile, the technician pipeline is thin even with top earners hitting $160K. Service remains the most controllable profit engine, but the industry is building tomorrow’s complexity faster than it is training tomorrow’s talent.

More on this in Friday’s email.

PODCASTS

ASOTU Edge Webinars

If your reps ever lose time figuring out who to call and what to say, this checklist lays out a simple daily workflow that turns the signals you already have into a prioritized list of the right customers, for the right reason, at the right time.

Then it helps your team draft the first email, text, or call note using real customer context, so reps are not staring at a blank screen or relying on generic templates. The impact shows up fast: fewer wasted dials, faster follow-up, more relevant outreach, higher reply rates, and more appointments stacked with the same headcount.

If you want a practical way to save time, gain clarity on where opportunity is shifting, and convert more of the chances already sitting in your CRM, these are 30 minutes you can’t afford to miss.

Catch the full webinar here.

The Dealer Playbook

In this episode of The Dealer Playbook, Josh Keough of Gensler explains why dealership design functions like an operating system. Layout, lighting, sound, and workflow all shape how people move, work, and decide long before a deal starts.

Drawing from 1,600+ dealership projects worldwide, Josh shares how smarter design supports fixed ops efficiency, technician retention, EV readiness, and guest trust.

If your store feels harder to operate than it should, this conversation offers a new lens on why.

AROUND THE ASOTU-VERSE

NADA Parties

NADA is a month away, and it’s time to prepare. Flight, hotel, horse-shoe-shaped neck pillow thing, AND, a full schedule o parties after the day’s work.

Check out NADAParties.com to make plans now.

SOMETHING FUN

Top Tech from CES 2026

Autoweek / CES 2026

Lots of floorspace at this year’s CES was dedicated to advanced in-vehicle tech like thermal and night vision, giant screens, and advanced driver-assistance features.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Longbow Speedster made a strong case for lightweight EVs that prioritize driving feel over digital overload. It focuses on balance, responsiveness, and simplicity, which stood out in a room full of oversized screens and concept-heavy builds.

The Navee WaveFly 5X went in a completely different direction. Designed to skim above water at speed, it blended marine tech with aviation-inspired engineering. Not exactly a daily driver, but it showed how far mobility thinking has stretched beyond roads and rails.

CES 2026 made one thing obvious. Smarter tech is already shaping how vehicles get sold, serviced, and talked about. And dealers are right in the middle of it.

Quick Hits

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