Cox Automotive to buy Dealertrack in $4 bln all-cash deal

[emilymoore]

I get nervous when one entity owns so many integrated aspects of our business. Not that I think they will exclude dealers, but rather because of the leverage it gives them to extort the business.

 

[joe.pistell]

I get nervous when one entity owns so many integrated aspects of our business. Not that I think they will exclude dealers, but rather because of the leverage it gives them to extort the business.

Hi Emily,

I view it differently. Larger companies struggle to be nimble (I can't think of one, can you?). Large co's often doesn't listen well. Large co's often devote all it's time and attention fighting other large co's, and famously overlook the small threats.

There are examples where Large is great (Apple, Amazon, UPS/Fedex, Panara, HomeDepot/Lowes), but, Large co's often can't help but become their own enemy (Kodak, BlockBuster, Sears, Motorola, Dell, Microsoft & Intel are fighting it's largeness, Toys r Us, and on and on).

I believe there are 3 mega vendors now (ReyRey, CDK, Cox) and watchout for Solara. Think what would happen if one of them goes open source, or gave all vendors API access? They'd spawn a creative explosion like what's happening over at SalesForce.com

Now that would be truly disruptive.

 

[Bill Simmons]

So if you are a customer of some of these companies under this Cox umbrella, let's think of some great services that they could offer us, IF they could get all of these platforms interacting with each other.

Let's say I go to Manheim Auto Auction and buy 25 cars. Those vehicles are automatically pushed to my Dealertrack DMS and Vinsolutions inventory manager, vAuto or Homenet, and onto the website with no downtime waiting for transportation or recon. Want to sell used cars quicker? Get them online quicker! The photos from the Manheim condition reports could be used temporarily and condition report info could be cycled into a comment generator. How much time and productivity is lost in dealerships waiting on paperwork and manual data entry? A ton. Something like this could eliminate a lot of that.

Why have two website platforms? They should consider blending the best of the Dealer.com and Vinsolutions platforms into one kick-ass CMS. Or Vin could just give up on the website side of the biz and offer their dealers the opportunity to switch to the DDC platform. One dynamite website platform that could host all of their Cox product offerings without diminishing the performance of the website, for example AIS rebates, KBB Lead Driver, ATC TIM, Dealertrack Retail Suite, Make My Deal or whatever other conversion tools the dealer uses.

Lets say you already use Haystak as your SEM/PPC provider. Is one of your rooftops overloaded with one make and model? Design a quick offer and ad for PPC from within the inventory manager and push it to your Adwords account for a weekend sale.

Keep in mind I'm coming up with these ideas from the dealership sales side of the business, I would love to hear feedback from you guys on the technical side within these companies if you feel these ideas are far fetched or invalid. Even if they are, if you could figure a way to make some of them happen, your customers would be a lot happier! Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

 

[craigh]

There's always a way to connect applications, but seldom do I see larger companies go that route.
I've been tasked with the process of migrating and/or connecting apps many times in the past and it's always an exciting project, but it's also a pain sometimes, especially if they're all completely different programming languages.

I'd love to see them do it, but I wouldn't hold my breath on a quick turnaround.

 

[joe.pistell]

Back of napkin math, 44092 pounds?

Good shot Bill! I asked The Google and found:

Each $20 bill weighs about one gram.
$4 Billion = 200 million 20 dollar bills (gulp!)

We have 220 million grams of $20's
There are 454 grams per pound
Result: 484,581 pounds of $20 dollar bills (220 million divided by 454)


That's 242 tons of $20's

The payload of an avg. semi truck can haul 17 tons of stuff...

You'd need 14 semi's to haul all that cash.