As Scout Motors revealed its new concept Terra truck and Traveler SUV on Thursday, the brand also confirmed its intentions to do away with traditional dealerships and sell vehicles directly to consumers. In a workshop briefing after the big concept presentation, I got to see some mockups and projections for what Scout’s physical stores might look like. One idea really raised my eyebrow: Making the service bays and customer waiting room the same space.
No, really: Imagine trucks up on lifts getting worked on right next to the couches and coffee makers where customers are milling around waiting for their service appointment to be over. So, as a customer, you could watch a tech wrench on your truck and be able to chat with them in real time.
I have more than a few friends and family members who work in dealer service … and I have no doubt they’re all laughing or crying after reading that last little paragraph a second time.
Don’t worry. We’re still at least two years out from Scouts being in the hands of customers, and I can say with virtual certainty that this particular aspect of the Scout ownership experience concept will get canned before these stores open to the public. But the idea of it is so funny to me that I haven’t stopped thinking about the almost-throwaway moment of the presentation since I watched it last week.
Scout’s VP of Growth, a gentleman named Cody Thatcher, and its Senior VP of Digital Products, Stuart Dixon, walked us through some charts and illustrations of what the company’s physical footprint and digital sales and ownership experience would be like.
Buying a Scout is supposed to be able to happen almost entirely online. The company still wants to have a few versions of in-person spaces though, including some retail-style shops focused on brand building and some service-focused ones to repair the rigs when they get damaged. “Buying a Scout should be as easy as buying a t-shirt on Amazon,” the executives said a couple of times.
Given the long timeline, I don’t know how much these numbers are really worth … but as of right now, Scout Motors is planning to have 100 physical locations open by 2032 across the U.S. and Canada. Broken down further, the company wants to have 1,300 service bays and 1,400 service technicians across the network at that time. In the shorter term, it plans to have 25 “rooftops” (physical buildings of various consumer-facing purposes) in 16 “major markets” (specifics TBA) by 2027.
There are legal challenges to a DTC sales model in some states, which Scout’s people acknowledged. But they maintained that the trucks would be available to customers in all 50 states when the retail machine comes online.
Thatcher and Dixon spent some time emphasizing transparency in pricing and operations. No haggling or hidden fees is supposed to be a big part of the Scout buying experience. This is how they ended up touching on the concept of customer-friendly service bays—it seems the idea would be to build trust, like, look, you’re not getting screwed, there’s the car getting worked on right there! Thatcher said something along the lines of “it’s easier to do this with EVs” implying that the lack of toxic fluids means safer garages, and I guess from there it’d be fine to have mechanics and customers rubbing shoulders during repairs.
Now, yes, I am sharing this to clown on it because it’s hilarious. But we don’t need to be complete jerks here. The Scout Motors guys definitely did not present customer-accessible service bays as a main pillar of their operations, it was pretty clearly just a conceptual idea meant to illustrate the point of transparency. But like. Can you imagine?
The safety liability alone would be nuts. Even without oil, gasoline, and hydraulic fluid, an automotive workshop has plenty of hazards. And then there’s the social factor—good luck hiring 1,400 technicians who’d be willing to work with customers quite literally watching over their shoulders. And I’m not saying techs are shady. It would just be annoying as hell having the Karens of the general public hovering around while trying to get through your work day.
Quite a few traditional dealerships have already landed on the best middle ground for repair transparency: Big glass windows between the work bays and waiting room. That’s probably what Scout Motors will end up landing on.
As for those of you who like the idea, trust me, don’t want to be hanging out with techs while they work on your car. They’re either paid flat-rate by the job, in which case they will really not want you getting in their way, or they’re paid by the hour, in which case you definitely don’t want to be slowing them down with chit-chat.
I’m cautiously optimistic about Scout making good use of parent company VW’s deep pockets to create a buying and owning experience that really is better than the current status quo of car dealerships. Another DTC disruptor on the scene could end up making car buying better across the industry by forcing bad actors to adapt or die.
Got some dealership service stories? Drop the author a line at andrew.collins@thedrive.com.
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