Dealership Mobility Product

Empowering automotive dealerships to capture new revenue through the Dealerware Subscription & Rental features. Transitioning from traditional vehicle ownership to a flexible, modular mobility platform designed for the modern consumer.

Overview

  • The Challenge: Dealership lot inventory often sits idle, failing to generate optimal revenue.

  • The Goal: Ship a modular enhancement to the Dealerware platform that enables dealers to launch and run a vehicle subscription program for at least 90 days with minimal risk.

  • Target Success Metric: Getting 5 dealerships to launch and maintain the program

  • Roles: Researcher, Product Owner, and Product Designer

Discovery

    • There is consumer appetite to pay for a monthly vehicle subscription.

    • Consumers very rarely want to switch from their initial subscription vehicle to another.

    • Consumers have negative associations with walking into a dealership and prefer a frictionless experience with fewer personal interactions when acquiring vehicles.

    • Dealerships need flexibility to make concessions and decisions that will help them maintain their CSI.

    • What are the fleet mixes and utilization from such fleets that various dealerships will use to run a subscription service/program? How will dealerships manage multiple fleets?

    • How will dealerships price a subscription fleet of only 10 vehicles?

    • Will dealerships prefer collecting collateral to minimize risk?

    • Will dealerships staff or even up-skill current fleet managers to manage an additional service/program?

    • Will customers lose interest in subscription without a digital onboarding channel? How will dealerships manage a digital channel and marketing?

Product Roadmap

The raw data was synthesized into a hierarchical framework to identify actionable patterns:

  • 542 observations were collected from the field.

  • Observations were grouped into 67 Themes.

  • Themes were summated into core insights.

Design Process

Our primary output was a research report detailing the following:

  • 8 Core Insights: 4 insights for dealerships and 4 insights for consumers.

  • 8 Product Features: A list of features for the design team to explore with prototypes and validate through user testing.

Consumer Insights

Recommended Features

  • Contract my vehicles out on a monthly basis

  • Create discrete vehicle tiers with specific pricing

  • Charge a Mobility Contract differently than a Loaner Contract

  • Ensure the appropriate insurance is applied to the appropriate customer and contract

  • Estimate the real-time value and future value of my fleet

  • Create contracts with customers and cars on a mobile device

  • Insight/Documentation into Mobility best practices from DealerwareSME’s

  • Only pay for features my dealership uses

Impact

The research supported the business hypothesis that consumers had an appetite for non-ownership vehicle models, which dealerships could serve by expanding their operations and leveraging existing digital tools. The business resolved to proceed with the recommendation to expand the product roadmap by adding a feature that dealerships can use to test the model.

Previous

Dealership Mobility Research