Fixed Ops Journal - April 2020 - F24

FIXED OPS JOURNAL

Lyft, Uber drivers are
ripe for fixed ops picking

RIDE-HAIL WINDFALL

ALEX KWANTEN
foj@autonews.com

ide-hail drivers log hundreds of miles
on the road per week. That means
quicker-than-usual oil changes, tire
rotations, scheduled maintenance
and parts in need of repair or replacement.
"A full-time ride-share driver will easily put
1,000 miles a week on their car, which means
a lot of maintenance is accelerated" says Harry Campbell, founder of industry website
TheRideShareGuy.com.
Despite this, most dealership service departments have shied away from Uber and
Lyft drivers. The hesitation to court ride-hail
drivers may be due to unfamiliarity with ridehail drivers' needs and
older paradigms of how
and when service departments operate, Campbell
says. But their business is
out there to capture, and
- perhaps more importantly - the ride-hail
companies want it.
Lyft already operates
Allan: Start small
maintenance hubs in partto test waters.
nership with Pep Boys locations and CarMax service facilities while also partnering with OpenBay to help drivers
find service options. In 2018, Lyft committed
$100 million to building 35 of its own Driver
Service Centers, which offer maintenance services at discounted rates. The first opened in
March 2019.
"That's a costly project that's going to take
years," Campbell says. "But if a dealer wanted
to create that service facility, they could do it
tonight by leveraging what they already have."
That is: repair services, parking areas, wash

PAGE 24

APRIL 2020

Paragon Honda in New York City, top, has a
night shift to take care of ride-hail cars. Above,
service adviser Jose Rojas helps a customer.

and detail services, customer lounges, restrooms
and WiFi. All are things that will draw drivers on a
12-hour shift into a dealership's orbit.
Uber had 160,000 U.S. drivers in 2014, more
than 750,000 in 2018 and is now estimated to
have more than 1.5 million, according to the
company and Campbell's statistics. That soaring demand has created more familiarity with
the retail side opportunities of ride-hail, and
significant service revenue opportunities
have followed.
Brian Allan, vice president of strategic partnerships at HyreCar, says that while cars are
ripe for innovation because they're only used

5 percent of the time, dealerships are too.
"Fixed operations infrastructure is sitting
there 24 hours a day but typically only being
used for 10," Allan says.
Platforms such as HyreCar and DriveItAway, which enable dealers to rent out idle,
aged or dedicated inventory to ride-hail drivers, have had a front seat for watching dealers
service an increasing volume of ride-hail
drivers.
It was the norm, Allan says, that dealerships
wouldn't be open late and certainly not 24
hours. But there's now a dedicated group of
customers willing to pay extra for additional
service options that don't cost dealers much
to provide.
It's easy, he says, for dealers to test the waters by starting small.
"If you're going to try being open late, start
with Thursday nights," Allan says.
Thursdays, he says, are when many ride-hail
drivers are resolving any cleaning or maintenance issues before the heaviest travel days
- Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Being open late extends the working hours of
the shop, adding more paid work
rather than displacing existing
customers, Allan says. The
only extra costs are staff time
and electricity. Allan, formerly general manager at
Galpin Ford in Los Angeles,
also says that some staffers
actually like working late
shifts.
see RIDE-HAIL, next page

Campbell: Dealerships already
have all the pieces in place.

http://www.eRideShareGuy.com

Fixed Ops Journal - April 2020

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