February 2020

FEBRUARY 2020 AFTERMARKET 15 www.aftermarketonline.net quotation. Well hard luck, you can’t. The vehicle manufacturer blocks all direct access to the vehicle and the driver for independent service providers. Currently, the best offer from vehicle manufacturers is to use a ‘back-end’ interface from the vehicle manufacturer’s server where data (well actually information – there is a big difference) is made available at a price. You might simply get the vehicle mileage, or a DTC, or the next service date – happy days! However, the best bit, is that to get even this information, you have to register with the vehicle manufacturer, declare your service that you would like to provide to your specific customer, and then use the remote services contract that must first exist between your customer and the vehicle manufacturer to transfer the data/information via the VM server to you, before you can provide any form of service offer to your customer. Does not sound too appealing, does it? So welcome to the world of the connected car - and the best bit is that you will not know the customers you have lost, as you will not know what service, maintenance or repair work they needed, because the vehicle manufacturer will have known what was needed even before the vehicle owner did and then proposed their service offer directly to them without you even knowing. Streamline Perhaps there is some good news on the horizon as vehicle ownership changes towards ‘mobility as a service’ and people do not buy cars, but simply buy transport. The vehicle owner becomes a corporation who runs a large fleet of vehicles and needs them serviced locally to where they are being used, but to ensure that they can offer competitive mobility services, they will need the lowest cost for labour and parts – and with their bargaining power for individual independent workshops, it could be a race to the bottom to offer the lowest price. The answer lies in working as part of a team with your suppliers (e.g. diagnostic tool or parts suppliers) who can negotiate better corporate deals and help streamline your business to meet these new challenges. The days of simply talking to your customer and giving them a price before telling them that their vehicle will be ready at five o’clock are rapidly disappearing, to be replaced by working in a wider eco-system of remote access to the customer and their vehicle and competing not with the workshop around the corner, but with corporations, both as partnership suppliers or as competitors. Tomorrow’s business model will not be just more of the same as what you were able to do yesterday. Welcome to the world of the connected car and the new playground bully, where you will need to gang-up to defend yourself. xenconsultancy.com It is not the car that is the problem, but the vehicle manufacturer that designed and built it ”