TOGETHER WITH:
Howdy, Fam!
Two automakers just showed the opposite reaction to the same tariff uncertainty, one is threatening to walk away from a new plant, the other just doubled down on $26 billion in U.S. investment. Also today: what a dealership's drone pilot and an AI-search deep dive both say about solving problems nobody else bothered to fix.
Also in today's email:
Honda says it may skip a new North American plant entirely without a USMCA extension
Hyundai just posted the biggest U.S. market share gains of any automaker this decade
Three moves to make today before AI search finishes forming an opinion about your store
Keep Pushing Back,
—Chris with Paul, Kyle & Kristi
Reading time: 4 min and 21 sec
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A Michigan Ford Dealer Just Delivered Auto Parts by Drone
While automakers argue over tariffs on parts crossing the Canadian border, one Michigan dealer is testing a way to stop parts from getting stuck on the road entirely. Jack Demmer Ford just became the first dealership in the country to complete a drone delivery of auto parts.
📊 The Pilot, By the Numbers
12-15 flights per day, 7.5 lb. max payload, targeting a 12-mile radius if expanded, backed by a $740,000 state mobility grant.
When a critical part is delayed, a vehicle can sit in a service bay longer. That means more inconvenience for customers and more pressure on our technicians and service teams.
Amazon and Walmart have spent years testing drone delivery without fully cracking consumer logistics at scale. Jack Demmer found the use case those companies never had: a fixed, short-range need between a dealership's own buildings.
Want the full conversation?
🎙️ Listen to today's Automotive State of the Union episode for the complete discussion.
Employee Retention Starts with Listening
Keeping great people starts with understanding what makes them want to stay.
Too often, dealerships focus on replacing employees after they leave instead of understanding what drives retention in the first place.
The dealers taking a different approach are listening to their employees, identifying what matters most, and using those insights to make smarter workforce decisions.
The 2026 NADA Dealership Workforce Study powered by ESiQ is now available.
Learn how ESiQ helps dealerships understand retention and turn insights into action.
Your Dealership's Reputation Now Has an Opinion, and It's Not Yours
AI search doesn't just rank your dealership anymore, it forms a judgment about it. Chad Graves of Reunion Marketing joined Auto Collabs to unpack what that shift means, and three things to do about it today.
Get your About Us and testimonials pages doing real work. Every plaque on your showroom wall means nothing to an AI tool reading review sites and forums instead.
Stop treating cost-per-lead as your only health metric. Zero-click search climbed from 45% to 68% in under a decade. A shopper who never submits a lead may have already made up their mind.
Get your community involvement in front of the systems forming opinions about you. Reputation doesn't fragment the way search platforms do, it's the one thing that holds up no matter which AI tool a shopper happens to be using.
Consider this today
Pick one piece of community work your store has done that's never been publicized, and get it in front of your marketing team this week.
Two Automakers, Same Tariff Uncertainty, Opposite Bets
Honda Executive VP Noriya Kaihara told reporters the company may skip building its eighth North American assembly plant entirely without a USMCA extension, despite running near full production capacity. "If there is no USMCA agreement in the future, we may have to change our direction," he said, adding Honda needs a decision within a year or two to have the plant running by 2030.
Hyundai is making the opposite bet in the same environment. The automaker has grown U.S. market share from 8.4% to 11.8% since 2020, the largest gain of any major automaker, and is accelerating a $26 billion U.S. investment plan, including a possible expansion of its Georgia Metaplant to become the largest vehicle assembly plant in the country.
❝
Tariffs are helping accelerate our localization plan. That's very, very simple.
— José Muñoz, CEO, Hyundai Motor
Same trade uncertainty. One automaker is pulling back until it sees clarity. The other is treating the uncertainty itself as the reason to move faster.
🚘 Car Stuff
Wholesale depreciation accelerated last week, per Black Book: the overall market down 0.52%, more than double the seasonal average, with the Compact Crossover/SUV segment now down 12 consecutive weeks.
Tesla is denying rumors it's pulling its Full Self-Driving team out of China, calling its Shanghai data center "operating normally" after rumors spread that the company had quietly abandoned its FSD push there. China still doesn't appear on Tesla's official FSD subscription market list.
Subaru and Ford dominate the cheapest cars to insure in 2026. The Outback tops the list at $1,969 a year, with the Forester, Crosstrek, and Ascent rounding out four of the top ten Subaru spots. Insurance costs are climbing across the board though, newer vehicles now run 34% more expensive to insure than older ones, largely due to standard advanced driver-safety tech, pushing the average full-coverage cost on a 2025-2026 model to $2,879 a year.
💰 Not Car Stuff
Rolls-Royce just completed a $1 billion defense manufacturing investment in Indiana, expanding engine production for the Army, Air Force, and Navy. Fun fact for the group chat: this is Rolls-Royce plc, the aerospace and defense company, a completely separate business from Rolls-Royce Motor Cars since a 1970s split, so no, they're not building luxury sedans in Indianapolis.
Bill Gates is sounding the alarm on AI's risks, publishing a 6,000-word essay warning of mass unemployment, models capable of building biological weapons, and a lack of adequate safeguards. "I believe we need time to prepare for the period of social, political, and economic upheaval we are about to enter," Gates wrote.
Instagram launched "First Draft," a feature that auto-assembles a rough cut of a Reel from selected clips in under 10 seconds, trimming pauses and pulling together the best moments automatically. It's rolling out on iPhone first, part of a broader push of AI editing tools across Instagram's creator suite.
1859: The world's first successful commercial oil well is tapped in Titusville, Pennsylvania, launching the modern oil industry.
1939: The first jet aircraft flight takes place.
1962: NASA launches Mariner 2, which went on to become the first human-made object to successfully fly by another planet, passing Venus that December.
Thanks for reading, Friend!
