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Uncle Joe's Makeover Diary 2.0

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#201
Funny thing - I built a site for this that's a work in progress. But I made it for myself to get a better idea of my out the door price when buying a car or snowmobile. It's called Car Payment Pal (Car Payment Pal - Realistic Auto Payment Calculator, Auto Loan and Lease Deals).

I'll have a responsive version up in the next couple days but I wanted to get something up so it starts getting indexed and I can begin optimizing. I'd be more than happy to build a widget out for a VDP though. Looks up the users postal code and finds the combined sales tax rates and common title, license, and dealer fees for that given state.
 
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#203
AI: The 4th Industrial Revolution
Bigger than the impact of the internet, AI will present many 100x opportunities and will vaporize millions of workers world wide.
• The chip fab boom is laying the groundwork for powerful AI hardware. Shortages of transformers is one example of the AI rollout.
• IMO, AI is a weapon of massive, scalable leverage, which means the AI rollout is tilted heavily in favor of mega cap companies.

If you want to look into the future, Dave Shapiro is a data scientist and an AI genius. In this video, he explores the possibility and likelihood and impact of an overnight launch of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).


FYI: We are not building AI, it is being grown (i.e. it's alive, it's end state is unknown, it can grow in any direction)
 
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#204

How many of your BUYERS drove 45 minutes or longer to buy your car?​

Selling cars is a team sport. Getting a long distance shopper to commit to the drive to your store needs great team work.

Store: Reymore Chevrolet (90 days sales)
Map: BatchGeo.com creates 'miles between buyer and seller. Rings on the map created by ChatGPT4. Rings represent drive time to the store.
  1. Casual Passerby Car Shoppers: 30.8%.
  2. Easy Planned Stop Car Shoppers: 17.9%
  3. Across Town Car Shoppers: 29.1%,
  4. I Drove a Long Way to Get Here: 22%,

1711285037925.png

51% of all sales drove 45 mins or longer​

​

Competition is thick. There are 13 Chevy stores within a 45 min drive​

1711286183597.png​

Your miles will vary ;-) Every store is different. Product mix, competition, topography.

Next question, "The long distance buyers don't know the dealer, how did they find the VIN?" Probably the classified sites. I'll map all sales from 3rd party leads.

p.s. Its free and easy.
• BatchGeo.com is free. DL your sales in a .csv, all you'll need is the address (I used the zip code).
• GPT3 is free, GPT4 is paid. I used GPT4. If anyone wants the prompt, ask here.
 
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#207
My startup has me way down the AI rabbit hole. OpenAI's mega success has created an arms race funded by trillion dollar companies.
  • $GOOG: Gemini,
  • $MSFT: ChatGPT,
  • $AMZN:Claude,
  • $META:Lamma,
  • $TSLA:Grok, FSD
  • and more.
What is coming is a revolution. Everyone of these CEO's see the wealth creation that's coming, this creates a competitive environment will drive them to out innovate each other.

The franchised automobile retail industry is a perfect fit for AI's strengths.
Dealership world is filled with AI friendly structured and semi-structured data and compliance rules. Add to this, franchised dealer staff has a common business hierarchy, each player doing the same job, over and over, coast to coast.

What is genuinely different about AI humans create the framework, and AI is learning and growing on it's own. The more we build into AI's framework, the more robustly it grows, and, the faster it grows... by itself.

What else is unique is AI communicates to us with a voice of authority, even when it's wrong, and it's wrong a lot. Amazon's Claude, this months highest performing AI platform, has a 40% error rate on "Zero Shot" test prompts. Today, bleeding edge AI is building multi-agent, task specific swarms to dramatically reduce its error rate and improve it's relevance (google it).

How fast is the AI innovation coming?
I believe by 4thQ 2024, AI's task solving abilities and reduced error rates will create a totally new paradigm in damn near every industry on the planet. In 2025, AI's strengths will become so self-evident that the President of the US will 'finally' create a committee to try to put a fence around AI.

Ppl ask me if I am afraid of AI, I believe FaceBook is a bigger scourge on humanity's happiness than AI will ever be. :)

p.s. AI in Auto Retail, Personal Digital Assistants
--Linkedin, Jan 2024
 
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#208
I found this in my archives. It's a mock of a new search UI (created while I was Head of Marketplace at CARS.com). It never saw the light of day but I still like the concept ;-)

User story: I know the YMM of what I'd like to buy, I have some fav features, but IDK much about the trims.
1714920824079.png
The mock attempts to display the trim hierarchy and help the shopper visualize, as you move up or down the trim list, display what changes. The shopper picks their favorite trims and clicks submit....

Result:
1714921371979.png
A new search UX :)

My mission was to get creative and think of new and unique search experiences. My design goal was to assist the power user. This mock would be easy to Improve by adding price filters (i.e. under $xx,xxx) , add deal bucket filters. Then to stimulate repeat use, add new arrival filters (i.s. VINs you haven't seen yet), price changes since your last visit and 'likely to sell soon'.


p.s. inspired by the Kayak 'multi-date' power shopper Grid UI...
1714921835373.png

It was a 1st draft, be nice to me hahaha
 
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#209
This is a cool concept.

I think manufacturers don't do this on purpose. They don't want the buyers to know that the next trim up is just some pinstripes and a fancy name and badge.

So this would be really cool to have for buyers to sort through the trims.

I can also see blogs about which trim is really the better buy.

It's time for car manufacturers get put through the same comparisons as computer manufacturers face.
 
#210
joe.pistell said:
I found this in my archives. It's a mock of a new search UI (created while I was Head of Marketplace at CARS.com). It never saw the light of day but I still like the concept ;-)

User story: I know the YMM of what I'd like to buy, I have some fav features, but IDK much about the trims.
View attachment 8829
The mock attempts to display the trim hierarchy and help the shopper visualize, as you move up or down the trim list, display what changes. The shopper picks their favorite trims and clicks submit....

Result:
View attachment 8831
A new search UX :)

My mission was to get creative and think of new and unique search experiences. My design goal was to assist the power user. This mock would be easy to Improve by adding price filters (i.e. under $xx,xxx) , add deal bucket filters. Then to stimulate repeat use, add new arrival filters (i.s. VINs you haven't seen yet), price changes since your last visit and 'likely to sell soon'.


p.s. inspired by the Kayak 'multi-date' power shopper Grid UI...
View attachment 8832

It was a 1st draft, be nice to me hahaha
Click to expand...
Kayak allows users to automatically include fees for bags, seat selection, etc to make sure you're comparing apples to apples.

Take that same premise and add a checkbox to automatically include all dealer fees to the final price. A dealer with $0 doc fees suddenly might look like a better deal than one with a $995 DOC fee and a $495 DIC fee.

Or I guess we can just wait for the CARS rule ;)
 
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