The Automotive Troublemaker w/ Paul J Daly and Kyle Mountsier

Hyundai-Amazon Sales Coming In January, Betting on Auto Bonds, Distracted Holiday Driving

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We’re rooting for a great end to the month as we enter Thanksgiving week. Today, we’re talking about how Hyundai and Amazon’s online retail platform could enter its next phase in January, how Wall Street investors are still bullish on auto loans and how this week signals a new level of danger for drivers.

Show Notes with links:


  • Hyundai’s online retail platform with Amazon faced setbacks from the CDK cyberattack but is now on track for a January pilot phase launch. Despite technological and operational hurdles, dealers are increasingly optimistic about the program's potential.
    • Over 80% of Hyundai’s 841 dealers expressed interest in the platform, signaling strong support.
    • Hyundai addressed dealer concerns, ensuring sales remain tied to the dealership, not Amazon.
    • The CDK outage disrupted over half of Hyundai’s dealer network, delaying progress.
    • Other challenges include trade-in valuation and flexible financing options.
    • Hyundai CEO Jose Munoz said that “Customers want to go to the dealer to get the car themselves. That’s one of the reasons why a lot of dealers have seen this not as a competition, but as something that reinforces their sales.”


  • Investors are doubling down on auto loans, even as rising delinquencies signal financial stress for consumers. Wall Street remains bullish, betting on a strong economy to balance the risks.
    • Subprime auto bonds sales surged to $40B in 2023, up 17% from last year.
    • Investor demand is immense; some bond deals are oversubscribed by 20x.
    • Auto bond yields have tripled since 2021, with low-grade bonds offering 6%.
    • Delinquencies, now at 3.8%, are the highest since 2010, affecting low-income borrowers most.
    • Analysts argue that car payments are prioritized; “You can live in your car, but you can’t drive your house,” says Daniel Liesener.


  • Thanksgiving week sees a sharp rise in distracted driving, making it one of the riskiest travel periods of the year. Peak travel times amplify those dangers with increased phone use and speeding.
    • Thanksgiving Day distraction rates soar 18% higher than a typical Thursday.
    • Speeding doubles during Thanksgiving week, contributing to additional crashes.
    • The Wednesday before Thanksgiving sees distraction up 7%, peaking on the holiday itself.
    • Distraction is highest from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, dropping during typical dinner hours.
    • “Early morning travel offers safer conditions,” highlights the report, urging caution.

Hosts: Paul J Daly and Kyle Mountsier

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Paul J Daly:

Monday, it's that week where traffic seems to be a little less than it usually is, November 25 Thanksgiving week. Today we're talking about Hyundai's program with Amazon. What else we talking about? Auto bonds and, oh, distracted holiday driving, data to back

Kyle Mountsier:

it up with data to back it up. You get weird. I don't think anyone's

Paul J Daly:

gonna really be surprised.

Kyle Mountsier:

No one's gonna be surprised.

Unknown:

Oh man. Well,

Kyle Mountsier:

how you doing? It's Thanksgiving week. Paul

Paul J Daly:

feels the weird. Over the weekend, I was like, I feel like Thanksgiving should have just happened.

Kyle Mountsier:

Well, you know what? This is, what this? I got two problems. First problem is, by the time I get to the week of Thanksgiving, it might as well be January 1. Like, I don't know what happens in my brain, but I'm like, basically the next month and two weeks is a throw. It just like happens, and then we're in January and it's nada show, right? I don't know why, but it feels like that every year. But I've done it to myself this year, because we're traveling next weekend, and typically on the weekend, we throw up all the Christmas stuff, but, oh, I did it this weekend, which is not normal. Never done it in my life. I have, like, created my own cardinal sin, which means I've accelerated the acceptance of January 1.

Paul J Daly:

Wow, yeah, our Christmas tree is out. We did it early. Everyone's coming to our house for Thanksgiving, and because we're going to shoot more than another episode of more than cars the weekend after Thanksgiving. We're not traveling on that weekend, but fun to have everything. You know, if everyone's coming over for Thanksgiving, it might as well feel like Christmas. You got a festive especially if you're like two days before Thanksgiving. Hey, we released a new ASOTU Edge webinar. We had a great one last week with our friends at car cutter. You should check that out. But we just released a new one. Go to the ASOTU home pages, connecting cars and consumers through advanced media streaming. So or advanced, yeah, advanced streaming media solutions. Listen with our friends at force marketing. If you're trying to plan out your 2025 which you should be, you should check this out, because streaming media should be a part of a well balanced diet of media. You're going to be with Cody Tom checks, Senior Vice President of force, and Dane taco, Senior Director of Marketing at Lithia. So we've had a couple big deal auto guys on the last two webinars. I

Kyle Mountsier:

would say that the last six webinars and the next two that we have, if you just, like, got your marketing team together and watched them, you would have a really good perspective on, like, what should I be thinking about heading into 2025, and gonna start? It's like, yeah,

Paul J Daly:

I would just go watch them all with the market. I mean, and watching them all will only take you, like, a couple hours. You could do it like, over a morning, yeah, right now,

Kyle Mountsier:

speed, and you'll be fine. Half

Paul J Daly:

more. Yeah, exactly. Oh, it's, it feels brutal to watch stuff, man. When you can watch stuff at one and a half speed, I just get happier. Um, hey, we want to thank our friend Dan shine and our friends at automotive news for featuring us on the daily drive podcast. On Friday, you can still go to the I think you can still go to the home page of auto news. And we talked about season two of more than cars and filming it. We were actually on location. We found a place to set up. We set up. Nathan south, with our producer, posted a great picture of how our computer camera was actually balanced. So that's worth the price of admission, right there. But thanks to them and all the good work that they do and getting behind the more than cars project, putting the best dealers out front. Yeah, hey, we've got, we got our fourth annual Year in extravaganza coming up. We'll talk more about that. I know it December 19 circuit.

Kyle Mountsier:

We're going to shoot another more than cars, third one and season two. It's coming in hot season two rip

Paul J Daly:

like, a week from today, we'll be on site in St Augustine. How weird is that? Wow. Like Thanksgiving happens in between now and then, yeah,

Kyle Mountsier:

like, it's supposed to get ridiculously frigid up here. And good. So you miss it St Augustine and be like,

Paul J Daly:

beautiful. What time in what timing? Let's talk about some news. We haven't talked about this one in a while. Hyundai's online retail platform with Amazon face some technological and operational hurdles early this year. KC. K Heck, yeah. Half of but now is on track. They're saying for January pilot launch for like across the board, over 80% of Hyundai's 841 dealers expressed interest in the platform, saying that this shows some strong support. The largest challenges, though, as they look at what has been going on with the few select dealers have been trying out no surprises here trade and valuations and flexible financing options. Well, yeah, who's surprised, not us. You know, the CDK outage did slow things down, since half of Hyundai's dealers are on that platform. However, CEO Jose Munoz said, quote, customers, I love this. Customers want to go to the dealer to get the car themselves. That's one of the reasons why a lot of dealers have seen this not as a competition, but something that reinforces sales. We'll see. Yep,

Kyle Mountsier:

here's the thing, it's a listing site, honestly, because, again, financing is hard, and trade in is hard, and they're already noticing that. This was the shocking statement, though Jose Munoz also said, we're not. Tracking the number which, oh, yeah, right.

Paul J Daly:

We're not tracking the number of cars that have been sold on. Yeah? Like the guy who's responsible for this program goes in Munoz office, really? So how many have we done is, I don't know, Dad, that's fine. That's fine.

Kyle Mountsier:

I mean, we're not, we're not tracking all that digital interaction stuff. That's nobody

Paul J Daly:

really that's a really interesting statement. I don't know is this that's really interesting. I didn't realize it was still political season. I

Kyle Mountsier:

still think this is a great opportunity, right? I hope that dealers and Amazon and the OEMs can figure out how to make this a listing site that, like, drives traffic, because I think there's so. I mean, you know, talking to the team at cognition digital, right? And the the reason why Amazon is such a strong platform from a logged in user is the is the rate at which people update their addresses is insane, like it's, it's almost like you update your Amazon address then your postal address, yeah, oh, right, out of doubt, like, I move houses and I need to buy stuff to get things today house, I

Paul J Daly:

need the toilet paper. Yeah, that's exactly you're gonna get the most updated info. Exactly, payment info. I

Kyle Mountsier:

still trans this, if, if we can figure it out, I'm, I'm like, all in on the platform, yeah, speaking of, all in,

Paul J Daly:

all in. And then some investors are doubling down on automotive loans, even as rising delinquencies are signaling financial stress for consumers. Wall Street remains bullish, betting on a strong economy to balance out the lit risks, specifically in auto. Actually, it looks a lot heavier than in the other industries on the graph in the article. By the way, you can click through to all the articles in the show notes, subprime autobomb sales are up to 40 billion in 2023 that's up. I'm sorry. 2024 that's up 17% over last year. Nicholas troubled us. Senior Portfolio Manager at investment firm for federated Hermes, told Wall Street Journal that we've seen deals get this almost 20x 20 times over subscribed auto bond yields have tripled since 2021 delinquencies, though, are now at 3.8% the highest they've been since get this 2010

Kyle Mountsier:

you remember what was going on then? Sure

Paul J Daly:

do coming out of the thing. Analysts are arguing that car payments are prioritized over the other payments, saying you can live in your car, but you can't drive your house. So get who would it? Man,

Kyle Mountsier:

I mean, I mean, we've been talking about this coming for two or three years, and the delinquencies are rising over the, you know, over anything that we saw, pre pandemic, back all the way to 2008 to 2010 it's going to be interesting how things respond. As like, do people start turning these car payments in for lower car payments over the next year when interest rates and pricing comes to a little bit more of a, you know, state of parity that that all? I think that's really going to determine how auto lending goes over the next year and a half. But just, you know, something to watch out for in lending. Like, right now, lending is extremely bullish, and everyone we're talking to over the last couple weeks, like, lending has been all out open. And so we'll see kind of how this balances against that trend at this point. Absolutely,

Paul J Daly:

you know, automotive do we have to say it again? Auto mode. Auto motive, gonna do? What automotive going to do? Speaking of what automotive gonna do, stop, yep.

Unknown:

Segue time.

Paul J Daly:

Don't do it. Don't do or about to tell you people are doing

Kyle Mountsier:

so interesting. Stat from Thanksgiving this week, she sees a sharp rise in distracted driving, making it one of the riskiest travel periods of the year. Peak travel times obviously amplify those dangers with increased phone use and speeding. Everybody trying to get there call the fam. Thanksgiving Day distraction rates soar 18% higher than a typical Thursday. Speeding doubles during Thanksgiving week, contributing to additional crashes. I'm like, Man, I'm take leave the van at home. We're flying fans way safer. I'm telling you what distraction is. Its highest from 9am to 1pm on Thanksgiving Day, dropping during typical dinner hours, early morning. Travel offers safe conditions highlights the report urging a bit of caution. So alright, yeah, out on Thanksgiving Day. Specifically, I like how they're lying down two hands on the wheel. You

Paul J Daly:

know, even increased phone usage. I think there are several other factors. Number one, the stress factor of visiting families that is not a that is not a normal thing. And I think that that like leads to all the things, culminating in the trip to wherever you're going, I will, however, say, for like families that like do church on the weekends and go to church on Sunday morning, you already are well conditioned on what it is like to try to throw things together and arrive somewhere relatively composed, maybe when you weren't composed all the way,

Kyle Mountsier:

I think like nine to one. Is prime time for like, someone having to go to the grocery store. We'll

Paul J Daly:

stop and get this. We'll stop and get like, yeah, you're

Kyle Mountsier:

constantly getting texts of like, oh, and we forgot. Oh, we forgot. That's all the contribution that we need for that I don't know

Paul J Daly:

you. Let us know what distracts you on driving Thanksgiving morning, and we'll add it to our list. But

Unknown:

in the meantime, you have a few days to prepare your mind. Prepare your food early. Thanks for being here with us this week. We're going to bring you everything we can on this week, because let's not forget, it's a big retail week. Still, Black Friday is coming up in just a few days. We'll see you tomorrow. Good.

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Kyle Mountsier

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Paul J Daly

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