15 Headlines in 30 Minutes: Rapid Fire Automotive News For Shop Owners [RR 1091]

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1:28Hey, welcome back. Great partners, great sponsors for us. We have Tom Hamm with us. Tom's from theautomotivemanagementnetwork.com. Hey, Tom, how you doing? Tom, I'm great. He also owns AutoCentric, an import specialty shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I was actually watching the weather for Buffalo recently, Tom, and I saw some incredible lightning and thunder come across Grand Rapids. I think it was yesterday.

1:56But Tom isn't there. It's too cold up there this time of year. So Tom's an FLA guy. And also another really cool thing I really got to talk to you about, and we've done episodes on the labor rate tracker and a great feature in AutomotiveManagementNetwork.com is the exclusive labor rate tracker. Sort by the rates, city, state, shop type. What an incredible piece of software and information for many shop owners.

2:24In a market. Wow. Yeah, that's one of our hottest features on the website. I betcha. Okay, so we've done this with Tom in the past and we're going to do it again. Look at this. It's a special episode. We're going to do 15 headlines in 30 minutes. Rapid fire kind of stuff. Me and Tom. And he actually was the guy who found all these great headlines for us.

2:51And it's going to be fun because I have them right in front of me. And let's do number 1. Okay, here's number 1. AI will take a lot of jobs. You can prepare. I mean, Tom, before you even start discussing this, I've read articles both ways on AI. It's doom and gloom, or it's incredible and there's gonna be a lot of opportunity.

3:16How do you see it? It sounds like there's gonna be a little bit of both. We're gonna cover several stories here that kind of go from that gamut, that, that, that whole area that you talk about, some immediate things that we are noticing right now, Block, which is the Jack Dorsey from Twitter, he's cutting 40% of his workforce. He had, I think, 10,000 people.

3:35He's cutting 4,000 because what they did is now going to be done with AI. Meta is cutting 20%, Amazon 10%, UPS is closing, I think, 90-some facilities. Most of this is being attributed to AI and the things that AI can do. And this is kind of just the beginning. Of the shift that's going to go on. And, you know, the recommendation to everyone— and this is virtually everyone, I mean everybody on the planet, you might say— is to learn AI.

4:02Don't be afraid of it. Learn it. It's not as scary as you think, at least what I've seen so far. Learn what to use it for, what not to use it for. There's certain things I use it for, certain things I don't. And then folks who are in AI-threatened jobs, And there's a lot of them. I mean, tons of them really need to look at what other kind of occupation, what kind of skill can they develop?

4:28What do they enjoy doing that is not something that is on the AI radar in the near future? It can be anything, but take a look and consider what those are. You know, start taking the college classes or whatever, or start doing the on-the-job training, a part-time job in these other areas, and see if— so you're prepared. Because I think a lot of this is just gonna come on suddenly.

4:50People are just gonna be noticed. Yeah, we're, this company's gonna be cutting 1,000 jobs and you're one of 'em. And it's kind of like, we'll not see you Monday morning. Thanks for bringing this up, Tom. Doom and gloom. I mean, the people that are losing their jobs and they're blaming it on AI, I really feel for you, but yet I'm the kind of individual who would probably say this, Tom, I'm gonna pick myself up by the bootstraps and just go figure this thing out.

5:11What else to your point am I good at? What else can I do? And then they say that there's an awful lot of opportunity that AI is going to create. Listen, this is a shift, no doubt, that we're gonna have to learn to live with. And I think this is, this is not like the gas fluctuating and all this other stuff that's going on because of world crises.

5:34This is a technology burst, if you will, that we'll have to learn to live with. Yep. I think culturally is gonna be a big challenge cuz I like what you just referred to. You think that way. I think that way. A lot of people, I don't know, over the age of whatever, 50 or 60 or whatever, think that way. The last couple generations, they don't think that way so much as, oh, I'll just adjust.

5:55I'll just find a different way. I'll just pick up bootstraps. It was kind of that, that wasn't part of the educational system. So they're going like, what, what are you talking about? So that could be the challenge. But anyway, anyway, I know we exceeded our 2-minute review of this headline, Yeah, you're gonna, you're gonna have to prompt me on these. I know.

6:11We're gonna go to the next one, but this AI is hot. It's juicy, and I'm glad we— Oh, we got more AI stories coming, so let's go. Oh, I, I know that. So, uh, here's our number 2. Amazon accelerates last-mile delivery war with a new 1-hour option. And oh, by the way, I think you have to pay for that, right? Yeah. Anywhere from $5 to $20, depending on what your membership status is and, and, and how fast you want it.

6:37I think there's a 1-hour option, a 3-hour option. There's prime and not prime. But the point is, is they're, you know, they're really putting AI and other things to the test and figuring out what they can do. And, and, you know, that's gonna— it's on, uh, it's 2,000 towns and cities, 90,000 items. So a toothpaste, probably yeah. Water pump for an Audi, probably not.

7:00But, but still, that's going to come eventually. You know, we're gonna— I think the auto repair shops can look forward to faster delivery times because The auto parts vendors are going to be threatened by this because Amazon, you know, it's not in those 90,000, but they carry the same stuff that the parts stores do and they can get it to you awfully quick.

7:21So I think deliveries are going to get immediate for everybody. Looking forward to that. You know, I find that this whole next day and one mile thing, and I get this, if you have an immediate need and there's a crisis, but this whole, how fast can life really go? I will never plan ahead. I will always rely on Amazon to pick up my faults of not trying to plan ahead.

7:48I, we're being trained. Yes. Very good. Headline number 3, are new cars becoming a luxury item in America? And boy, do I have an opinion on that. Yeah, this is, this was from Fox Business. You know, the average MSRP now is, uh, over $50,000. The average sale price is slightly under that for discounts and so on. But yeah, cars are very expensive.

8:10We're gonna have a couple stories on this in here, and that's something we'll talk about more in a later story. But just some other points to make. But here's an interesting one. Luxury brands, you know, Lexus for instance, luxury brands are now 19% of the market. Pre-COVID, they were 11% of the market. So I find that amazing. Up a couple of percentage points doesn't surprise me.

8:30Almost doubling really does surprise me and shock me that the luxury brands are up that much. A new car costs about 30 to 35% more than a 3-year-old car. And one thing that's happening, we're kind of hitting a plateau on the technology, all the gadgetry and cool stuff that's on the cars. It's kind of plateauing out. In other words, I, you know, a lot of us have like a 10-year-old car and it's got a lot of the stuff that the brand new ones have now.

8:58They started to max out with this stuff in the, car makers are running out of new shiny gadgets to throw on the cars to amaze us. It's kind of like, yeah, well, my 5-year-old car has all that. What's the point? I mean, what, this one's got shinier wheel covers? I mean, I'm not getting why I should get the new car. So that's coming into play there too.

9:17I have a friend, Tom, who does some work with dealerships, and I was chatting with them the other day. They were talking to their sales team and found out that in this particular group, and I think it was in Florida, Tom, $1,000 was the average walkaway price per month for that vehicle at 84 months. Yes, the car payments. And I think again, we'll hit that.

9:42Another story here are up too. It is scary. It is unbelievable to think. And the only other thought, my, as you were telling me the part of this story was the word affordability. Everybody's complaining about affordability, but yet you look at where Lexus or luxury cars share is. And have we created more wealth of recent where people then just want to go out and spend it on a piece of thing that's going to depreciate faster than man?

10:07Who knows? I think you have a good point there. The affordability thing. And on one hand, I get it. I posted something the other day that I'm not a candy addict. My wife is. So I went to the store the other day to buy something useful like bourbon, and she said, get me a candy bar. So I don't know, I grabbed a candy bar.

10:24They didn't have the prices on them. It's just, it's just a little Reese's 2-cup candy bar thing. Okay. What? Nah, what? $2.50. $2.50. $2.50. Now I looked it up. I was in shock, but anyway, little while later I looked it up because you remember things when I was younger, you know, you remember that? You go out, people say, ah, your memory's junk.

10:43So I actually looked it up and a Hershey bar in 1968 was how much? How much you guess? It was 30 cents. $0.05. Whoa. In '68. It went to $0.10 in 1969. It was $0.05. So that's a $0.05 to $2.50. That's an increase of times 50. If I did that for an oil change, oil change was $10 in 1968. That made an oil change today would be $500.

11:12Anyway, that was just an example of the whole price thing. The affordability thing, I think half of it is legitimate. And I think the other half of it is their people's money skills, even with Dave Ramsey, are worse today than they ever have been. That people are just clueless on handling money and depreciation and interest. They don't know how to do a budget.

11:34So I think a lot of the affordability is I just PUA all my money and there's no more left. It's amazing to hear you say that. It hurts me to hear your comment on that. All right, let's go to topic number 4. Government turns off car heaters. Are you serious? This looks like— well, this is a Babylon Bee, obviously, but, but it's not.

11:57This is actually— this is Germany. You know, the Germans over here, ja wohl, ja, you too warm, we want you cold and unhappy in Germany. But because of the pollution and the green emphasis and so on and so forth, that Lexus has an option. Toyota has an option on their cars and others do too. But where, you know, you're going to leave for work in 10 minutes and your car's in the street because nobody has garages over there.

12:22So you hit the button on your app on your smartphone and the car warms up for 10 minutes. Well, Germany talked to Lexus and said, yeah, y'all got to turn that off. Turn that off. And Lexus had the ability to do that remotely on all the cars. You know, there's over 100,000 cars in this case where people went, hey, don't work anymore.

12:43It's kind of like, yeah, we turned it off. The government said we had to. So obviously they had their reasons and I think it had to do with the CO2. Yeah. Wow. The option, they have the option on ICE cars and on EVs. It still works on the EVs. Oh, and there's no wasted energy there, right? Works on the EVs, but they turned it off in the ICE cars.

13:06Oh my God. Okay. There's a cycle of genius right there. Okay. Number 5, highest skilled trade technical demand jobs in 2026. Automotive. Wow. Yeah. I love this. Cause they listed their top 20 hot jobs. Monster did that. They're predicting based on what they're seeing on their website, et cetera, et cetera, under the category, they divided it up into like 4 or 5 different categories.

13:32And under the category skilled trades, there were 3 or 4 in there. The top one they listed first was auto mechanic as far as one of the highest demand jobs. So this kind of ties back into a story you mentioned earlier. You know, what kind of skills can you develop? I think there's going to be people coming in from other industries that AI take care of and be looking for jobs in automotive shops.

13:52So I think that's good news as far as employment goes. Thanks for bringing that up. I do believe in the word career, not trades. So it's a skilled career. And, you know, of course, In my language shift, I don't believe in mechanic and/or technician anymore. I believe in— we have specialists that work on all of our great vehicles. Are you a NAPA Autocare Center ready to elevate your shop?

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16:44NapaTrax is always customized and tailored for you, whether you're a one-man shop or a large multi-bay or multi-location company. After all, it's your shop, so it's your choice. Visit us on the web at napatracs.com. Number 6, if you're freaking out about a future jobless AI dystopia, oh my God, interesting video from Marc Andreessen, who's in the tech world, is fairly well known.

17:17He's got a— there's a video you can find on YouTube or wherever else. It's probably an hour, hour and a half long, something like that, where he just talks about it. And he kind of sees it just the opposite of all the doom and gloom. He says it's going to be one of the greatest things that ever happened to the population, to the human race in general, is AI.

17:33And he goes into details why, you know, production is going to go way up, technology is going to go up. Because of that, prices are going to go down, which means the economy is going to go up, wealth is going to go up, safety nets will be easier to finance. And almost everything is going to be better for everyone. And also he says it's hitting at the perfect time because a problem that you don't hear much discussed nowadays is population growth in the developed countries, United States, Japan, et cetera, et cetera.

18:02Population is, I mean, is headed for extinction. If you look at the, if you look at it statistically, there's maybe, I think in Japan it's something like every couple is producing, I think, 1.2 children. So they can show you on a graph where the population in Japan is going to go to zero here as time goes on. There's just nobody having babies anymore.

18:22This ties back in with that, where you get the robots coming in doing certain other things, and also ties in with income going up, or humans being in more demand. There won't be as many jobs that demand humans, but there won't be as many humans. So the value of a human doing something that AI can't do is going to go up and gonna be of more value.

18:44So anyway, that's kind of a rough sketch, but that's what he's talking about. And it's just an ops, complete opposite of the doom and gloom. I agree. You know, you're bringing up, when you say the opposite of doom and gloom, there's always two sides to every story, Tom. There really always is. I appreciate how you're approaching this because I can be very neutral on how it hurts and how it helps.

19:09And you have to decide what side of the fence you want to be on. Yeah, I know. Of course, a lot of that with people in general is just the attitude, the old glass half full, half empty type thing. I mean, there is always— and what we were referring to, the bootstrap thing a few minutes ago, I mean, well, what's next? You know, I like the analogy of, uh, if you watch car racing at all, NASCAR race, whatever, you know, you crash, you spin out, after things get going, you restart last.

19:33Well, what are we going to do? Well, we're going to go after the car ahead of us and we're going to be second from last. That's what we're going to do. And we just keep doing that. Keep doing that. Keep doing that, which can be fun. It really can be fun and challenging and just good for us in a lot of ways.

19:48Well said. Thank you. I'm here with Tom Hamm, 15 Headlines in 30 Minutes. These are rapid-fire topics that we're working with Tom on. Number 7, Stellantis scraps the Jeep Chrysler plug-in hybrid vehicles. Interesting. Yeah, it's the whole Chrysler gang, Ford, Honda, uh, everybody else. Everybody, they put together these fantastic EV plans over the past few years and now they find out, yeah, it ain't working.

20:14The governments are deemphasizing them, the people aren't buying them, you know, they're not selling, the inventories are stacking up, and the ice vehicles are becoming more efficient, and the climate scare, it turns out to be not as bad as we thought it might be. And just, uh, $7,500 subsidies are gone. You know, those are gone, I think last September or whatever. So just the whole EV thing has really, uh, the EV future is not as bright as it once was.

20:40So a lot of the EV stuff that was gonna happen ain't gonna happen now. Got it. So, so interesting. I, I, you know, I read the articles, very interesting how they're all looking at it. Uh, number 8, we are all paying for Big Tech's AI fire sale and nobody's talking about it. Yeah, this is probably the most serious story among our lineup of the 15 stories here.

21:02It's a difficult one to explain in just a minute or two, but to overemphasize it, AI is being sold to us at a massively discounted rate. I think currently OpenAI is spending about $2.25 for every dollar they're taking in. AI is a massive loss leader at this point.. And at some point they're gonna have to recover that money because they're taking in billions, if not trillions in investments.

21:28And at some point they gotta pay 'em back. So what's gonna happen is the cheap AI is the prices in the future at some point are gonna skyrocket. And when it does, that's gonna change that whole thing. You're gonna say, I, I think maybe getting rid of all those people wasn't the smartest thing I did. Thank you for that scary piece. Uh, number 9, it's just crazy.

21:49High car payments make ownership feel impossible. This kind of tacks onto that other thing. Yeah. Yeah, here we circle back to that average car payment now, $744. In 2021, it was $588. That's a huge increase in just 5 years. 20% of car payments now are over $1,000. Total cost of car ownership from car payments to repairs, everything else is up 40% in 6 years.

22:1340%. That's amazing. Average car age, 13 years and still climbing. Here's an interesting one. Tariffs. The evil tariffs. What tariffs have done, they have slowed new car purchases, but they have increased car repairs at the car repair shop. Tariffs have ultimately been good for car repair shops, not as good for car sales. And then it just— what we referred to a minute ago, the whole car payment thing.

22:38Nobody can afford it. There's a simple fix for that. Don't get car payments. It's something that I swear people are indoctrinated that they need to do. But they're unnecessary. They're not something one needs to do. And matter of fact, they're probably the biggest financial drain negative that your typical family has is car payments. Depreciation, interest, and all that is just a massive, massive drain on finances.

23:04And you can hear people call into, I hear Ramsey tell 'em that they'll call in, they'll tell their financial situation, I can't afford a house. He'll go, how much is your truck payment? And they'll say $800. And that's why you can't afford a house. Right, exactly. You know, Tom, I look around when I'm out on the road. We did a lot of traveling this particular past weekend.

23:23We went to New York. Tracy did a keynote down there at the TST Big Event. And thank you so much to G Trulia for his great hospitality. But I'm looking as we drove down the hardware that's on the road, I'm thinking, wow, I've never seen a vehicle like that. That is so new. It's so slick. Look at the lighting, you know, look at the design.

23:40And I'm thinking, How can people afford this? And it's either we've got to keep up with the Joneses. I want something brand new. I am blown away. Tom, I own both my cars. I have no payments. I feel like there's this level of, ooh, I can't tell you, it's gooey. It feels so good that I don't have to do that. And you know what?

24:03I guess I would love a brand new, high-tech, slicker than anything vehicle. But I think I have a level of practicality in me that says, don't be stupid, don't be crazy. It's really cool for the first month. And after that, you realize that was an expensive month. Your brand new car doesn't look that different from my 2015 Toyota Highlander, except, you know, I only paid whatever, $15,000 for it.

24:27Especially today, as long as cars last, I can go on for hours in this one, but I've never spent more than $19,000 on a car in my life. I've spent more than that on RVs, but not on a car. It's a ridiculous waste of money. What would people do? I have not had a, in that whole time of that 30-some years since I last had a car payment, I, none of my cars ever been towed either.

24:46So, but anyway, it's us. Okay. But you bring up such a great point. We've done some great episodes on the 250,000-mile maintenance mindset that we as shop owners can bring out to our clients and say, do you really want that? And show 'em some math as to, What's the investment in keeping this vehicle going and these miles right and what the manufacturer recommends we need to do at all of these intervals of mileage and to show people how much money they can have in their pockets by just investing in their current vehicle.

25:17So thank you. I'm glad we brought that up. Now, number 10, auto repair and maintenance to reach an unbelievable $2.07 trillion by 2035. That's 9 years away. And today it's just a fuzz over $1 trillion. So it's going to double. It's gonna go up about 7% a year. People say, yeah, is there gonna be enough business for car repair shops? Oh yeah, there's gonna be a lot of business.

25:43Plus at the same time, what you're gonna have, you're gonna have car repair shop population decreasing. So you're gonna have more per shop. So the future for a repair shop, it looks really good. So anyway. Thank you for that. So I guess my comment about that to my audience, our audience is, are you prepared to be growing at 7.5%. And if you're not, then you're missing an opportunity.

26:07And there's so much you can do inside your business, your culture, your leadership, your systems, your processes, your protocols to make a company that can get that business and maintain it. Thank you for that. Number 11, American values are under attack. A county places 4-way stop with a roundabout. Now, Tom, I love roundabouts, by the way. Now, this is one of our stories from the contributor to Babylon Bee, and it just refers to Batesville, Indiana, where they replaced a four-way stop with a roundabout, and the population is not happy with all this woke, DEI, communist, socialist road stuff.

26:47They want to have the roads back the way God intended them, like back in Rome. The first roads that intersected in Rome were four-way stops. You know, we know that from history and here we've gone, that's worked for 2,000 years. And now we're going with this communist crap of roundabouts. The first week in that town, they had 32 accidents at the roundabout.

27:06Okay. Well, you and I are aligned on a lot of things, but in this one particular thing, I love roundabouts. I don't know why we have one of the towns close by, 8 miles away. They put in 5 roundabouts about 5 or 6 years ago. And I remember waiting at red lights forever. Trying to get through this town just to go from one end to the other, and now it's a flash.

27:28I guess that's why I like them. Obviously, this is where, where we're just doing the, the B story here, which is kind of humorous, but I know that it's so cool. Okay, so that's cool. Thank you for bringing that up. Number 12: tax season will bring record refunds. Use them wisely. Yeah, we're looking— the average taxpayer is going to get about $1,000 more this year.

27:48Average tax filer will get about 1,000 more. Military is going to get about 1,700 more this year due to some changes they made in the tax law and so on and so forth. And, uh, so bottom line is there's going to be a ton of money coming out there, and repair shops should certainly be prepared to get a chunk of it. You know, look for it, it's going to be there.

28:11You know, be ready to compete for it, be ready to take care of folks quickly. And just tie that in. Your tax refund's larger. Save some of it for your car. Your car would like a little bit of it, would like a piece of it. So anyway, that's just plain great news for auto repair. A lot of these stories are really great news for auto repair shops.

28:30Yeah, they really are, Tom. And take this information, get it to your service advisor. And if you're a service advisor listening, it may not be bad to explain to your customer, listen, I know you've declined some work and I know tax season's coming out and I know you're going to realize some extra money. Please remember, this is really critical and important to this vehicle.

28:48This job needs to be done, and maybe you can use your tax refunds for that. So it's a great point. I'm here with Tom Hamm, special episode, 15 headlines in 30 minutes. Boy, am I having a ton of fun. Number 13, this guy's solution for cleaning backup cameras with a push of a button is why America is the greatest. I love it.

29:09Okay, this is from the other Babylon Bee website called Not the Bee. Babylon Bee is, anyway. You gotta enjoy a couple of websites. You wanna smile? Those are two websites. Start with Babylon Bee and you also check Not to Bee Serious. This is from Not to Bee Serious. This is not a joke, this is serious. And what's it called? It's called the Lens Lizard.

29:25I mean, what a great name in the first place. You know, depending on where you are and where you drive and all these kind of things, sometimes what happens is your rear backup camera gets covered with stuff, mud and crud and all kinds of stuff. And this thing, it's a license plate frame with a sprayer on it. So you can change it in about 3 minutes.

29:44All you got to do once you get it in there is just get it aimed, assuming you have the backup camera, which is over the license plate, which is most cars. And then you just, uh, just a button that you hit and it'll spray it off and it just cleans it like new. Great idea. One of those, you know, Henry Ford type things that developed car 100 years ago.

30:01It's just one of those inventor stories of something that's really cool. Anyway, that's a great thing, Tom. Thank you for that. And I started to realize that I actually do have one of them. And if you're watching on video, you can see it. It's called my finger. In the video where the guy sells them, he says, instead of stopping your car and getting your finger and doing this, just hit the button inside your car.

30:24And anyway, everybody didn't catch that lens lizard. Lens lizard. Interesting. I don't know the guy. I've never heard of, but if you want to clean your lens lizard, go get it. Anyway, I'm having a blast here with you on this. This is great. Thank you. Number 14, students learn skills of restoring vintage cars in a one-of-a-kind program in a Kansas City college.

30:44Yeah, this is very cool. There's, I think, 175 students enrolled in this program. And when they say vintage cars, they mean vintage. I mean, there's stuff in there from like 1905 all the way up to obviously classics in the '50s and '60s. And the program is really dedicated towards this. I don't know if you've noticed that classic cars have become a staggering industry after going to auctions and so on and so forth and finding out that There are thousands, and I don't know how many thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people, apparently, you know, guys like you that are loaded, that have a massive pole barn or series of pole barns on their property packed

31:22with classic cars. They're like their own private museums. These things are tens of millions of dollars. And it's just— and then, of course, what they need, one thing they need, they need staff to take care of all the cars. So this is kind of an interesting industry. This is more in your league though, Tom. Yeah. Yeah. The house in Florida, the, anyway.

31:44Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I try, I get by. I think this is an amazing story. And to your point about the vintage vehicles, I think Tom, when this whole disappearing ice thing started to happen maybe 4 or 5 years ago. I think people looked and I started to talk about my first vehicle that I ever, ever had. And every time I go to a car show, I look for this vehicle.

32:08It is a split bumper Camaro from '72, and you don't see many split bumpers with it, with the nose peek on this Camaro. You know, I looked it up as to what it would cost today. I think it was like 50 grand or something like that. The point is we won't make them like that anymore. They won't run like them anymore ever.

32:26And I think holding onto this stuff is precious? Oh, it's fun. Yeah. It's a fun family-oriented hobby that anyway, if you've never been to a car auction, go to a car auction sometime, one of the big Mecum or whatever car auctions, buy a bidder's ticket, sit down on the floor and it'll be one of the coolest experiences you've ever seen. But to teach young people who have that skill or that wanna, I wanna repair, I wanna fix, I wanna be involved, do something with my hands and teach 'em how to restore vintage vehicles.

32:54They'll never hurt for a job, in my opinion, forever. Oh, I agree. Yeah, absolutely. Wow. Cool, cool, cool. Finally, number 15, urgent training plea as EV sales outstrip repair capabilities. That's cool. Yeah. One thing that's happening here now, EV sales indeed are slowing. That's true. But keep in mind, they're still out there. They're going to continue. And also keep in mind, they've been out there for a few years now.

33:19And they're going to start to hit a point in time and age where they're going to break a lot. There's a lot of things on those cars are going to wear out and need attention. And what's happened is the EV training is really thin. EV-trained technicians, specialists are few and far between. At some point here, this thing's going to kind of peak where you have this massive number of cars, EV cars coming in.

33:49To need service with nobody to service them. And it almost looks like we're already too far behind to catch up. So it's coming. You know, getting your staff trained on EVs be a very profitable way to go at this point and getting the infrastructure and getting things in place. Absolutely. A comment here. 20 years ago, when people put up the hybrid sign was a brilliant, brilliant move for them.

34:14I think they started to realize that because they were doing the hybrids, they needed to get into EVs. So anyone who decided It's kind of like this whole ADAS thing. I don't want to get into this. And listen, we've been to the NAPA EV Ready Training Center in Canton, Ohio. It's a beautiful center. They've got all the right stuff there from safety to whatever jacks they need to get batteries out and to get inside and start playing with them.

34:37And I do know that there are some great training companies around the US like NAPA that really continue to have and will continue to improve their EV training program. And for any of us in this industry talking about being specialists in ADAS, you know, special calibrations, we need to commit to this. It's not like it's a huge investment, but if you can't put the shingle up there that says we repair hybrids, EVs, and again, one of the articles that I think you brought up that I read was all these damn acronyms that describe what these vehicles are.

35:11You remember that, Tom? PEBs, VEBs, EVs. It's getting so damn crazy. Is that— and who did I just recently— oh God, Tom, remind me what I read about where someone was gonna have this EV, but the gas engine was gonna make the EV. It was, well, that sounded like a hybrid to me. It's like, can't these manufacturers get this thing straight or right, or at least simplify things?

35:35Anyway, that's just me being crazy thinking here. One of the most amazing things with EV predicting for the future, and then sales are slowing down, we mentioned that earlier, is a story that we didn't use in there is Honda has taken a write-off of, I think, $15 billion write-off. It's Honda's first financial loss since the Lions were last in the— won an NFC Championship game, which if you're a football fan, that means 1957, almost 70 years ago since the Lions won that game, and almost 70 years since Honda had a negative profit year.

36:12We didn't call that one up, and maybe we should have. And I think that's an illumination part of why we in this industry need to pay attention to the overall global industry and what's going on with it. And oh, there's so much going on. And that's obviously what I do as a hobby. I try to keep track of this and I do it on a worldwide basis.

36:31Anything related to cars and transportation, that kind of thing. And it's fascinating right now. It is absolutely fascinating. Just amazing, amazing stuff. Tom Hamm, Automotive Management Network and AutoCentric Import Specialty Shop in Grand Rapids was here. We did 15 headlines in 30 minutes. We had a lot of fun doing it. There were a lot of great talking points here. And also, while you're hanging out on automotivemanagementnetwork.com, check out the labor rate tracker.

36:59I think it's the coolest thing in the industry. Tom, thank you for this. It was fun and very enlightening. Yeah, thanks. Great time. Thanks for being on board to listen and learn from the premier automotive repair business podcast, Remarkable Results Radio. Get your episodic education on the ARPN listing app at automotiverepairpodcastnetwork.com. Also enjoy the podcast on our Carm Capriato YouTube channel. Carm is all for advancing the professional automotive service industry.

37:29Until next time.