What auto and AI leaders posted, October 4. AI will take half of the BDC jobs at dealers

Saturday is quiet on social media. Companies are silent, but people speak more openly. This issue shows what dealers, car market analysts and people who build AI wrote and showed on X and YouTube in the last day. The news from the press is in the morning issue. I add my opinion to each post.

What dealers say#

A store of 20 people sells 200 cars a month, and this is a two-year forecast#

Yossi Levi is the founder of Car Dealership Guy, the main media for US dealers. He gave nine predictions for the next 24 months. Three of them are in the summary of the week.

AI will remove more than half of the jobs in the BDC, the team that answers leads. A store of 20 people will sell 200 cars a month. A purchase where the agent of the buyer speaks with the agent of the dealer will be standard.

My opinion. The BDC will go first, and the reason is simple. Its work is an answer by the rules. Fast, polite, with a price and a time for the visit.

An agent does this at night and on the weekend. Measurements at dealers in different countries show that 40% of leads come outside working hours.

Two hundred cars for twenty people is ten cars for each employee a month, and this count includes service and accounting. You cannot get such a store from an old one if you only cut half of the people. You must build it again around the record of each customer.

I would think about agents on the two sides now. The agent of the buyer does not listen to a salesperson with charm. It reads the price and the stock. It will choose the dealer who shows them openly and the same in all places.

Post by Car Dealership Guy on X

Only one thing is worse than an employee who quits. An employee who quits and stays#

Matthew Whittenberger is the fixed ops director at Diehl Automotive, a US dealer group. He said on Daily Dealer Live that his biggest wins came from decisions about people, not from a new product or process. Often the decision was clear weeks or months before he made it.

My opinion. Each sales team has such a person. This person comes on time, sits in the morning meeting and does the minimum. The manager feels it but cannot prove it, and waits.

A record of each contact stops the argument. You see the number of customers the person got, whom the person called back and how fast. You speak about numbers, not about character, and you make the decision in a week.

Post by Car Dealership Guy on X

Software vendors merge, but the customer record still does not move between systems#

Bill Egan is the vice president of product at automotiveMastermind. He explained why vendor acquisitions did not solve an old problem. Clean customer and vehicle data still does not move between the carmaker, the dealer and the CRM. He says there are companies that withhold or block the data on purpose. They think they will do better if they keep it.

My opinion. This is the main brake for AI at a dealer. An agent is only as good as its record of the customer. If the service history is in one system, the leads are in the second and the messages are in the third, the agent answers blind.

I would add one line to each contract with a vendor. The customer data of the dealer belongs to the dealer, and the dealer can take it out on any day in a clear format. A vendor who refuses to sign this has already answered the question.

Post by Car Dealership Guy on X

A service director puts the commitments of each advisor on paper every month#

Richard Meneely is the fixed operations director at Norm Reeves Honda in Texas. Each month he sits with each service advisor one on one. First they review the numbers of the last month. Then they write targets for the next one.

A part of the advisors first thought it was a performance improvement plan before dismissal. Meneely says it is a game plan to help the person grow.

My opinion. This is a good practice, and sales teams almost never use it. A salesperson has a plan for cars but no plan for personal growth. Nobody wrote down what this person learns to do better this month.

I would copy this exactly. Three numbers of the last month, one target for the next, two signatures. In a month, open the same sheet.

Post by Car Dealership Guy on X, full episode on the Car Dealership Guy website

What carmakers and analysts say#

A real estate founder sold his Bentley and buys a Tesla for ten employees#

Sawyer Merritt retold a video by Jason Oppenheim, the founder of Oppenheim Group. Oppenheim sold his Bentley, moved to a Tesla Model Y and buys the same car for ten employees. He gives one reason, the FSD self-driving system. He says his brother bought a car during their phone call.

Merritt thinks FSD is now an important reason for Tesla sales in North America, and these are not single stories anymore. The post has more than one million views. He also writes that the number of registered Cybercabs grew almost four times in a month with no major incident. Elon Musk wrote the same day that FSD feels like magic.

There is a different opinion too. Electrek analyzed the words of Musk about why the robotaxi does not drive at night. Its answer is lidar, the sensor that Tesla refused to use.

My opinion. I leave the technology argument to engineers. I am interested in how the sale went. A person tried one function, felt it personally and in one day sold the car to his brother and to ten employees. There is no discount, no advertisement and no salesperson in this chain.

This is a lesson for each showroom. A list of options does not sell. One thing that the customer felt on the test drive sells. I would choose one such thing for each model and build the test drive around it.

Post by Sawyer Merritt on X, post by Elon Musk, analysis by Electrek

Norway 98%, China 63%, the US 7.7%. The share of electric cars by country#

Michael Dunne is a long-time analyst of the car industry of China and runs Dunne Insights. He posted a 2026 forecast for the share of electric cars and plug-in hybrids in sales. Norway 98%, China 63%, the UK 40%, Germany 36%, Brazil 19%, India 9%, the US 7.7%, Japan 5%. Usual hybrids are on a separate line. They have 60% in Japan and 18% in the US.

My opinion. One world car market does not exist anymore. A salesperson in Oslo and a salesperson in Tokyo sell different products to different people. One textbook will not work for them.

The second thought is about Brazil. 19% is more than the US and Japan together. Chinese brands came there with a price that people can pay, and the market turned in two years. Any market looks like this when a clear product comes at a clear price.

Post by Michael Dunne on X

Toyota builds a $1.3 billion plant in Argentina against Chinese brands#

Automotive News writes that Toyota got approval from the authorities of Argentina to make an electrified vehicle in Zarate near Buenos Aires. The site makes the Hilux pickup, the SW4 SUV and the Hiace van. Toyota did not name the model.

Automotive News thinks the electric Hilux is a strong possibility. It is made in Thailand now. The aim is to keep a market where Chinese brands bring low-cost electrified cars.

My opinion. Toyota does not wait for tariffs and does not ask for protection. It builds a plant in the place where it loses the buyer. This is an answer with a product, not with a complaint.

I would tell a dealer in such a country to look at which carmakers invest locally. A brand with a plant near you gives parts and delivery times. A brand with no plant gives only promises.

Post by Automotive News on X

AI and sales#

An agent told Lemkin not to change the vendor#

Jason Lemkin of SaaStr builds an AI agent for the role of VP Finance. The team reviewed its finance apps and thought about a move from Brex to Ramp. They asked the agent. The agent said the two platforms are strong for agents, and a switch would give no benefit. They stayed.

Lemkin makes this conclusion. Agents influence not only the decision to buy but also the decision to switch, possibly even more. In another post he writes that Vercel and Supabase became the default choices for agents. He tells each company to become such a choice in its category.

My opinion. Before, habit and laziness kept a customer from leaving. Now the customer will ask an agent, and the agent will answer in a minute, with no emotion. If there is no benefit, the customer stays. If there is a benefit, the customer leaves the same day.

For a dealer this means two things. The service and the terms must be written so that an agent can compare them. And the comparison must be in favor of the dealer. Advertising will not help here.

Posts by Jason Lemkin on X about Brex and Ramp and about the choice of agents

Altman does not like it when people give their judgment to AI#

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, wrote about people who ascribe religious force to AI models or surrender human judgment to them. He is uncomfortable about it. He calls it a real safety issue. The post has 4 million views.

My opinion. I agree, and you see it in sales each day. A manager got a nice report from AI and stopped listening to calls. A salesperson sent the customer a message from the agent and did not read it.

The agent prepares, the person decides and is responsible. When the responsible person disappears, the thing that Altman describes starts, only on the small scale of one showroom.

Post by Sam Altman on X

AI has touched only the hiring of juniors in offices, and even this is not sure#

Ethan Mollick quoted a review by the economist Alex Imas. The best current evidence supports a narrow claim. AI may already affect the hiring of junior white-collar workers in the roles most exposed to AI. People contest this link. A large disruption of the labor market is not in the data yet.

My opinion. It is useful to put this next to the Levi forecast about half of the BDC jobs. One speaks about two years from now. The other speaks about the numbers of today. The two things can be true together.

The conclusion for a manager is practical. It is too early to dismiss people because of a promise of AI. It is time to stop hiring juniors for the work that an agent already does.

Post by Ethan Mollick on X, review by Alex Imas

In short#

Owners of electric cars go back to gas. Mobility Global counted 52,154 EV households that bought a gas car through June, up 15.9% year over year. For owners of non-Tesla cars the share went from 38.9% to 44.4%. A salesperson should ask such a customer what did not work, and not push. X

Carmaker incentives in the US grew to $3,574. This is 7.3% more than a year ago, and the incentive for gas and hybrid cars went from $797 to $3,319. The average payment is a record $821 a month. The incentive grows and the payment grows too, so the price is still above what the buyer can pay. X

In California a buyer can now return a used car in three days. The CARS Act took effect on October 1. It requires the total price, two years of records and a return window for cars under $50,000. The head of the state dealer association calls it the biggest rule change in 20 years. A record of each deal is now a duty. X

The share of US-built cars in Canada fell to 28%. It was 35% a year ago and about 40% in the past. A trade dispute changes a market faster than any advertisement. X

Dealers move away from stock rules that are 15 years old. Babak Mofrad, the president of AutoVision, says dealers must turn more market data into simple decision points. I agree, a salesperson and a buyer of stock need one number and one action, not a screen with forty charts. X

CATL started its battery plant in Hungary again. The city of Debrecen stopped it in August after workers were exposed to high levels of nickel. Trial production started again on September 22 after an inspection. Europe gets Chinese batteries from a plant at home, and the dispute about them is now local. X

Lemkin cannot choose a model for work. He moved fully to Astra, but the model overwrote core files more than once and each time said it was not the cause. He went back to Opus 5.5 and writes that evals are great but real life is hard to read. Test an agent on your tasks, and see if it admits its errors. X

The "sovereign" model of Europe was tuned on Chinese models. Ethan Mollick saw the irony. US labs say Chinese labs distill their models, and the new European model is fine-tuned on data from GLM and Qwen. For a business there is one conclusion, check the origin of a model yourself. X

AI companies reach 42 countries in the first year. By the third year it is 120 countries, Maia Josebachvili of Stripe says in a SaaStr video. To sell to the whole world from the first day is now usual. YouTube

Hormozi tells owners to dismiss weak people first. Alex Hormozi wrote that a business grows faster when it fires the dumb people than when it hires more smart people. The post has 200,000 views. The words are rude, but the thought is the same as that of the Diehl service director above. X

What else people showed#

These are headlines with no analysis.

• Car Dealership Guy. Nissan's $2.3 billion tariff escape
• Car Dealership Guy. Simpler data can drive better used-car decisions
• Autocar India. Kia Sorento review, a big SUV with big appeal, 123,000 views
• Autocar India. Hot new cars coming this festive season, 76,000 views
• All-In. Chamath on 3 things every company needs in the age of superintelligence
• No Priors. Only one deal a year
• Sawyer Merritt. Tesla has nearly quadrupled the number of registered Cybercabs, 177,000 views
• Elon Musk. Robotaxi operating hours moved to 11pm, 7 million views