How Do You Measure Recon Dwell Time by Stage?
Measure recon dwell time by stage by stamping a start time and a stop time on each of the eight recon steps — Pending, Inspection, Estimate Approval, Mechanical, Cosmetic, Detail, Photos, Ready — and reporting the gap between steps separately from the work inside them. Dwell time is how long a vehicle sits at one stage before moving on. Most stores lose their days in the gaps....
How Much Do Lost Keys Actually Cost a Car Dealership?
No authoritative third party publishes what key loss costs a dealership per year — every figure in circulation comes from vendor marketing with no disclosed methodology. What is verifiable is the hard cost per key: replacing a car key at a dealership runs under $50 to over $600, according to Edmunds (2025). A smart key for a 2018 Honda Accord costs about $300 including programming....
Does GPS Tracking Work for Dealership Lot Management?
GPS works for dealership lot management outdoors — vehicles in transit, loaners out with customers, open overflow lots — but GPS fails indoors and tracks nothing on a key. GPS positioning needs a clear view of the sky, so accuracy degrades or drops entirely inside service bays, detail shops, under canopies, and in multi-level parking structures. For inventory and keys on a dealership property, Bluetooth-based real-time location is the better fit....
How to Increase Service Throughput Without Hiring Techs
A dealership increases service throughput by raising bay utilization and cutting the dead time between repair orders, not by hiring more technicians. Throughput is bay turns per day, and bay turns are limited far more by staging, dispatch, and vehicle hunting than by wrench time. 86% of high-performing dealers run service bays at 90%+ utilization, versus 72% of other dealers, according to Cox Automotive (2026)....
How Do You Find a Specific Car Fast on a Dealership Lot?
To find a specific car on a dealership lot fast, work a fixed search order — DMS status first, then service, detail, and photos — instead of walking rows. A parked car is almost never lost at random; someone in your store moved that car for a reason. Parking-spot fields decay within days because nobody updates the record after the move....
Everybody Added Capacity. Nobody Added Output.
What Q2's fixed ops stall means for dealership operations. In four business days at the end of July, six of the largest public dealership groups in North America told the same story with slightly different numbers. Service is now roughly half of their gross profit. And in the second quarter, it barely grew....
Why Does Reconditioning Take So Long at a Dealership?
Reconditioning at a dealership takes so long because used vehicles spend most of their recon time waiting between stages, not being worked on inside them. The delay is queue time — waiting for inspection after stock-in, waiting for estimate approval, waiting for parts, waiting for detail, waiting for photos. Fix the handoffs between the eight recon steps and days to line falls without adding a single technician....
How Do You Keep Track of Keys at a Busy Dealership?
The most reliable way to keep track of keys at a busy dealership is to attach a Bluetooth tracking tag to every key so location is recorded automatically. A key board and a sign-out sheet both depend on someone remembering to log a key — and both fail at 5pm on a Saturday with a customer standing there. Replacing a lost key runs under $50 to over $600, according to Edmunds (2025)....
What Is RTLS for Car Dealerships? A Complete Guide
RTLS — a real-time location system — tracks where every key and every vehicle is on a dealership property, continuously and automatically, with no one scanning a barcode or updating a spreadsheet. Dealership RTLS runs on battery-powered Bluetooth tags and fixed readers rather than GPS, because GPS goes blind indoors: service bays, detail shops, and parking garages. Mobile Dealer Data (MDD) built the approach inside Longo Toyota in 2015....
The 80-Day Lot Is Back: What Swelling Inventory Means for Dealership Operations
For the first time in years, dealers are staring at a familiar problem with an unfamiliar price tag. U.S. new-vehicle inventory rose sharply in early July — dealers entered the month with roughly 2.83 to 2.95 million units in stock, and days' supply jumped to about 82 days, roughly 12 days higher than a month earlier (Automotive News). At the same time, sales stalled. More metal is landing on lots faster than shoppers are clearing it, and the gap is widening....