City Kia is the big one. It’s the mother ship, and that’s why I chose it, but I’ve got more customers than I can handle. That’s a good problem to have, but it’s also tough. It’s like having hundred-pound rocks and trying to fit them in a five-pound bag. Our slogan at City Kia is “Home of the Best Guest Experience.” I can’t provide that experience with the volume we do currently. We want everybody to be happy, which isn’t easy when customers have to wait longer and longer. We are expanding City Kia’s service department to alleviate wait times. We bought a building about a mile away, and when it opens, we will have the largest Kia service department in Florida. The new building will probably make us the city’s fastest intake store for Kia. I’ll be able to efficiently and quickly service more people daily. Our current building will be the customer building. When my new building opens, we will triple our capacity in one night and do all the heavy repairs and used car reconditioning off-site. How do you recruit young technicians who are looking into the industry? We do several things. For example, we use Hireology and work with Universal Technical Institute (UTI). UTI is the largest technical school in Florida, with one of the largest technician training programs, and one of its buildings is directly behind City Kia. We are fence-to-fence neighbors and have a great partnership. It was very expensive initially, but I believe it’s worth it. There are many reasons why a technician would want to work at City Kia. We began working with UTI two years ago. When things slowed down because of the pandemic, we couldn’t go on-site, but now we’ve created our own City Kia classroom inside of UTI. Their students include people trying the technical side because technicians are hard to get, and they make great money. We have a consistent stream of students who can work while training to become certified techs. We reimburse their tuition 100%, and I’ll hire them as they graduate. As long as they work here, we’ll pay off their student loan until it’s paid. We also give them a starter tool kit and a tool allowance every month to get more and more tools. Kia provides on-site, on-the-job training, too. Rumor has it that EVs will need much less service, manufacturers will handle it, and the service bay income will diminish. Do you think that is true? Florida has few charging stations, so we’re years away from a real problem. The infrastructure must be there before EV sales increase to 15% or 20%. The customers who are buying EVs are very specific. They want it for a specific reason. The general public is interested but is not ready to commit. People are worried about charge times and finding a place to charge their cars. If you find a high-powered charger and someone is using it when you get there, you have to wait for them to finish. It can be at least a 40-minute stop if someone else takes 15-20 minutes to finish before you can even begin charging. As we eventually transition to EVs, how will that impact service? We’re so new to this that I haven’t seen any EVs with many miles. There’s a lot of uncertainty, and we don’t know the impact yet. But our new service building was a multimillion-dollar expense. We wouldn’t have spent the money if I believed no one would need the service in five years. I believe gas engines will be around for quite a long time, although they will become more efficient. Some people will want EVs, and some people will still want hybrids. We thought many hybrid people would jump automatically into an EV; some do, but some get another hybrid. They don’t want a full EV; they want to be able to rely on their gas tank. Moving to EVs will be a paradigm shift that will take time. In the last year, all the manufacturers have come out with new EVs. Examples include the Ford Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning, our Kia EV6, the Niro, the Hyundai Ionic, the Mercedes EQA, and a slew of beautiful electric vehicles from Audi. Everybody has a new shiny toy, and I think everybody is still learning how to play with it. EVs will be another product, like hybrids. Everybody didn’t buy a hybrid when they came out. Hyundai Kia made a $2 billion investment in Georgia to build an EV and EV battery plant because customers can get a tax credit if their car is built in the U.S. We’re excited about that. I think Korea will also make a big advance in hydrogen engines soon. I believe our technology is going faster than our ability to correct issues, and fixing something is different than building it. Some of the new navigation systems are so sophisticated that they get bugs in them and lock up. I don’t think anyone knows how to fix electric engines. We replace them. That’s why it takes Tesla forever when their engines have problems. You’ll still see EV customers a lot. Their vehicles will need brakes and tires. They will also need lead-acid batteries to start the engine and power secondary electronics. (Some models might also have timing belts, but most won’t.) A 30,000-mile service will consist of checking the battery and rotating the tires. What will happen to our service business and profitability if this EV thing takes off? There will be a Continued from page 10 12 ACCELERATE
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTg3NDExNQ==