Welcome to another edition of the Car Dealership Guy Podcast Recap—a rundown of key lessons from top operators, founders, and execs shaping the future of auto retail.
Today’s guests are Ben Atkinson, VP of Auto Lending at Upstart, and Evan Driscoll, General Sales Manager at Audi Jacksonville.
Evan breaks down how a slow approval costs his store at least $1,000 per car per day in aging inventory, and how a 10-second automated decision changed the math.
Ben explains why Upstart evaluates 280 data points beyond the credit score, including income stability, deal structure, and loan-to-value, and more.
Speed to decision is now the primary variable in whether a deal closes
The moment a customer leaves without an answer, the odds of getting them back drop sharply. Someone else in the market will find a way to approve them.
"If you let them leave, I mean, the odds of them coming back, you know, probably not that great."
— Evan
The signal: Every hour a deal sits in the queue without a decision is time the customer is cooling off, getting shopped by competitors, or simply deciding the process isn't worth it.
Dealers underestimate how much slow approvals cost on the used car side
The cost of a financing delay is a car aging on the lot for another day, compounding across the whole inventory.
"It probably cost, [at] minimum, if I let a used car sit another extra day, at least $1,000. Times that by, you know, 100 cars. I mean, it's a lot of money." — Evan
His point: Time to sale is the metric that captures it, from shop to detail to photo to finance approval to delivery, and every friction point in the financing lane extends that clock.
The single-offer, single-vehicle model is a structural inefficiency in how dealers submit deals
Traditional deal submission works sequentially: pick a car, submit to a lender, wait, and if it doesn't work, back up and start again. The back-and-forth is where time and customer goodwill disappear.
"I think the industry started with this kind of single offer, single vehicle. And there was a lot of back and forth between Evan and the lender. Our approach has been a little bit different, right? It's like how do I give Evan as much information as possible right from the start." — Ben
Giving a dealer multiple offers against multiple inventory units in one submission changes the conversation from "approved or not" to "which car is the best fit,” which is a fundamentally different and faster workflow.
A soft pull changes the customer conversation entirely
The difference between a hard pull and a soft pull is largely invisible to the bureau, but the way it lands in the showroom is completely different. Hesitant customers become easier to move forward.
"‘Hey, don't worry about it sir. What we could do is we could just do a small little soft pull real quick. That'll give us an actual like rate and term that we could work with so we could show you some more real numbers instead of just giving you an estimation.’ And then from there, the deal's pretty much done."
— Evan
Removing the psychological barrier of a hard credit inquiry at the early stage of the conversation keeps customers engaged at exactly the moment they're most likely to walk.
Presented by:
Upstart - Unlike traditional auto financing, Upstart uses thousands of data points – not just credit scores – to approve more buyers, structure more profitable deals, and speed up funding. Learn more here.
Credit score alone is a poor predictor of risk, and lenders who treat it as the whole picture are leaving good deals on the table
Risk assessment that starts and ends with a credit score misses the deal structure, the loan-to-value, the payment-to-income ratio, and a dozen other variables that determine whether a loan actually performs.
"Negative equity with great credit is elevated risk for us. So, we're going to price for that risk, but we look at risk way more broadly than a credit score. Payment-to-income is another really good example, right? Where you may have um you know signal around marginal credit score, but then strong income that offsets risk from us." — Ben
The inverse is also true: A thin file or first-time buyer with strong income, job stability, and the right vehicle can be a better risk than a seasoned borrower in a structurally bad deal.
First-time buyers are not a monolithic risk category
The instinct to treat all first-time buyers the same way (as elevated risk requiring extra friction) misses the real question, which is what other factors offset the lack of credit history.
"Not all first-time buyers are created equal. They could have been in the bureau for a period of time and had really successful payment experience on other trade lines. There are other offsetting factors such as stability, right? Maybe have been on the same job income, right? Good job. New college graduate, good income, going into a profession that we feel really good about from a stability perspective." — Ben
His point: A blanket stipulation applied to every first-time buyer, regardless of their full picture, is a policy that turns away good deals. Not to mention that cost is invisible because the customer simply doesn't come back.
Lenders going dark during the highest-volume selling periods is an industry-wide problem
The week between Christmas and New Year's is one of the busiest stretches in automotive.
"I emailed one of our vendors. I won't say who, on like December 20th. I needed something done, but it was important. And then the email that came back was like, 'Hey, I'm out of office till January 12th.' I'm like, 'What?'" — Evan
The dealership floor doesn't pause for holidays, and financing infrastructure that goes dark when volume is highest creates a structural mismatch that costs real revenue.
Technology only gets adopted if it reduces work for the desk, not adds to it
Tools that require manual data entry, separate logins, or additional steps get abandoned. The desk has too many deals moving at once to absorb more friction in the name of accessing a new capability.
"Having to manually type a credit app in. Awful. I'm out. I'm out on that. I don't want to type anybody's credit app anymore." — Evan
The practical test for any new financing tool is whether it removes steps from the desk's workflow or adds them, and most tools fail that test before anyone checks the approval rates.
The lender-dealer relationship is shifting from transactional to collaborative, and that shift is visible in how technology is being built
For most of automotive's history, the balance of power between lenders and dealers has swung back and forth depending on credit conditions. The current moment feels different.
"I think there's kind of a real acknowledgement at this stage of we need each other. And in the past, I think you've had these ebbs and flows where the dealers have had kind of more influence over the lenders and then when credit gets tight, the lenders have had more influence over the dealers. But right now, it feels like we're in this like really good state of world's changing. We need each other." — Ben
The shift is now toward giving dealers more information upfront, across more inventory, with less back-and-forth, which only makes sense if the goal is a shared outcome rather than a transactional one.
People and process still come before technology, and dealers who invert that order get the worst of all three
The order of investment matters. A financing tool layered on top of a broken process or an undertrained team produces worse outcomes than no tool at all.
"I definitely would say people first because I feel like the car industry is always going to be people driven. Process as well. You want to get your piece of the pie? You got to have a good process in place. And then, technology could definitely help you. I mean, the right technology can absolutely help your dealership." — Evan
Bottom line: Technology accelerates what's already working, but it doesn't fix what isn't, and the dealers getting the most out of financing tools are the ones who already had strong fundamentals underneath them.
