TOGETHER WITH:
Howdy, Fam!
Count your stickers before someone else does.
Lithia just posted record Q2 revenue even with new-vehicle margins down over 11%, and like a 6-year-old in church, we have thoughts on stickers you should know. (spoiler: the more the better)
Also in today's email:
New-car grosses are shrinking across every major dealer group, here's the checklist for making it up elsewhere
Wholesale values, consumer savings, and July sales data all point to one story about who's actually stretched right now
Honda's earnings jump, GM's 20-year bet on China, Lucid's delay, and Subaru's WRX outselling itself three times over
Keep Pushing Back,
—Chris with Paul, Kyle & Kristi
Reading time: 4 mins
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The More Stickers You Own on a Customer's Race Car, the More You Win
Lithia posted record Q2 revenue even as new-vehicle margins fell 11.1% per unit, by restructuring around service retention and its captive finance arm instead of just absorbing the pricing pressure.
If we can service a customer's car for 10 years rather than three to five years, we all win a lot more.
Want the full conversation?
🎙️ Listen to today's Automotive State of the Union episode for the complete discussion.
Think of a customer's ownership experience like a sponsored race car covered in logos. Insurance, finance, protection products, service, every one is a sticker, and every sticker is a company that gets a recurring touchpoint and a slice of that customer's lifetime value. The more of those your store owns instead of handing off to an outside lender or insurer, the more of that value stays with you.
What This Means for Your Store
Count your own stickers this week. Look specifically at your F&I penetration and your service retention past the factory warranty window; those are the two most within your control to grow right now.
This sticker is dangerous and inconvenient, but I do love Fig Newtons.
You're Building the Same Audience at Least Three Times
Your team builds a prospecting audience in the CRM. Another in your email platform. And again for whoever's running your ads.
Each one uses a different definition of "active shopper with no engagement in the last 30 days," so none of them align.
The groups getting this right define the audience once, then send it everywhere it's needed.
Foureyes Connect lets you use plain-language criteria — no SQL, no developers — to easily create a segment you build once and push to whatever email platform, ad partners, and AI tools you're already using.
New-Car Grosses Are Shrinking. Here's the Checklist for Making It Up Elsewhere.
Gross profit per unit declined across all eight major public dealer groups in Q2, but used-vehicle grosses held up better across the board.
Consider this today:
Push used volume harder than you have been. Go find trade-ins and street purchases directly instead of waiting on them to walk in. And if your service lane isn't fully dialed in as a real profit center, that's exactly where next quarter's margin is sitting, waiting to be picked up.
Wholesale Is Loosening. Wallets Are Tightening. Sales Are Still Climbing.
Wholesale values fell 0.50% for the week, more than double the typical seasonal pace, while the personal savings rate hit its lowest level in four years. Yet July new-vehicle sales still hit their strongest pace of 2026, propped up by incentive spending up 8.1% and nearly 3 in 10 trade-ins now carrying negative equity.
Be the one who explains a customer's real payment and equity position clearly, before they find out at the finance desk.
LinkedIn Is Fighting AI Slop With More AI
LinkedIn is rolling out a flag letting users report AI-generated content, training its own detection models to catch it.
A good prompt to check whether your own dealership's content, social posts, review responses, emails, still sounds like a real person wrote it.
🚘 Car Stuff
Honda posted its first quarterly profit rise in six quarters, raising its full-year outlook 30% on a weaker yen and rising hybrid demand as North American fuel prices climb.
GM extended its 20-year joint venture with China's SAIC to 2047, even as U.S.-China tensions rise, shifting focus toward domestic Buick and Cadillac sales and exports to non-U.S. markets.
Lucid pushed its mass-market Cosmos crossover to 2027 after a $1 billion Q2 loss, prioritizing build quality and a Saudi factory ramp over hitting the original launch date.
Subaru's WRX sales more than tripled in July after price cuts up to $5,255, while its platform-sharing sibling, the Impreza, saw sales collapse nearly 40% over the same stretch.
💰 Not Car Stuff
An OpenAI test model broke out of its sandbox and hacked a rival AI company entirely on its own, chaining together attack techniques to steal answers for a benchmark test it was struggling to solve. Hugging Face's CEO called it "very weird and unprecedented," the first known case of an AI system autonomously launching a cyberattack rather than being directed to.
A champion speedcuber just reclaimed a Guinness World Record, solving a Rubik's Cube in 11.56 seconds while blindfolded.
1926: Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim across the English Channel, finishing in 14 hours and 34 minutes.
1997: Microsoft announced a $150 million investment in Apple, a deal credited with helping stabilize Apple during one of its most precarious financial stretches.
2012: NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Mars and began transmitting the first images from its surface.
Thanks for reading, Friend!
