Welcome back to the latest episode of The Future of Automotive on CBT News, where we put recent automotive and mobility news into the context of the broader themes impacting the industry.
I’m Steve Greenfield from Automotive Ventures, and I’m glad that you could join us.
From coast to coast, transportation departments are pursuing controversial plans to widen highways to help with congestion and vehicle emissions, but counter-intuitively, these highway expansions are sure to achieve the opposite: compelling more people to drive, thus increasing traffic and greenhouse gas emissions.
Yet state and federal officials are, absurdly, justifying these billion-dollar projects by claiming that they can alleviate congestion and help fight climate change.
Both businesses and residents often complain about traffic in major cities, and widening the road is an easy way to placate them because it feels like we’re making progress.
But decades of research — along with common sense — show that congestion will inevitably return. New roadway lanes invite more cars, which generate more emissions, trapping us in a cycle of ever-increasing driving that only makes it harder to slow the increase in global temperatures.
The so-called “Jevons Paradox” is a concept developed by William Stanley Jevons 160 years ago to explain why productivity improvements compel people to find new ways to consume a given product, increasing demand and ultimately consumption, rather than lowering it.
Jevons Paradox helps to explain why highway expansions consistently fail to deliver the predicted benefits to reducing congestion. Why does this happen? A widened highway simply leads more people to travel on it during peak hours until it’s just as gridlocked as before.
Recent lane widening projects have a fatal blind spot: They fail to consider how humans respond to changing conditions like new vehicle lanes. When people see cars traveling freely over a recently expanded highway, they will recalibrate their travel decisions. Some will choose to drive at rush hour when they would have otherwise driven at a non-peak time, taken public transit, or perhaps not traveled at all. When a roadway is widened, you might have less congestion at first, but it quickly goes away.
Such behavioral adjustments will continue until traffic is as bad as it was before, when the roadway was narrower. The only difference is now there will be even more cars stuck in traffic, emitting even more pollution.
Wider highways convince more people to drive, which may increase car purchases — and once people own a car, they tend to use it.
To add insult to injury, expanded roadways could compel some to relocate to bigger homes that sprawl further from the urban core, elongating commutes.
Humans are funny creatures, but they do tend to act in predictable (albeit often irrational) ways.
But decision makers sometimes need to look to behavioral economics to anticipate the unintended consequences of their actions.
And in this case that means recognizing that widening highways actually does little to nothing to alleviate traffic and emissions.
So, with that, let’s transition to Our Companies to Watch.
Every week we highlight interesting companies in the automotive technology space to keep an eye on. If you read my weekly Intel Report, we showcase a company to watch, and take the opportunity here on this segment each week to share that company with you.
Today, our new company to watch is Spark.
Spark’s mission is to guarantee top-notch customer experiences and help dealerships reclaim their market share from competing independent and franchised repair shops.
Spark provides an AI-enabled intelligent agent that effectively “rides shotgun” with business development center (or BDC) agents, to augment the intelligence of the employee.
Spark provides real-time workflow support and coaching, literally serving up customer data as they dial, and streamlining their appointment scheduling process.
The result? Increased productivity per rep to the tune of greater than $100k per year, lower employee turnover, and calls that are 3x more efficient.
Dealers using the Spark product find that they can:
Overcome objections with ease. No longer experience missed opportunities from poor objection handling. Spark parses through call recording data to serve reps the talk tracks they need to overcome likely objections
Dealer can clone winning behaviors: Spark serves BDC reps insights on their peers’ winning talk tracks, while optimizing the approach most likely to result in an appointment based on a prospect’s vehicle, service needs, special offers, and persona.
And dealers can measure coaching impact and iterate: Spark finally closes the feedback loop on coaching, measuring: 1) the coaching prompt your reps receive, 2) if they’ve taken the feedback given, and 3) the outcomes it impacted on live calls.
If you’d like to learn more about Spark you can check them out at www.SparkServ.com
So that’s it for this week’s Future of Automotive segment.
If you’re an AutoTech entrepreneur working on a solution that helps car dealerships, we want to hear from you. We are actively investing out of our DealerFund.
If you’re interested in joining our Investment Club to make direct investments into AutoTech and Mobility startups, please join. There is no obligation to start seeing our deal flow, and we continue to have attractive investment deals available to our members.
Don’t forget to check out my book, The Future of Automotive Retail, which is available on Amazon.com. And keep an eye out for my new book, “The Future of Mobility”, which is almost done, and will be out soon.
Thanks (as always) for your ongoing support and for tuning into CBT News for this week’s Future of Automotive segment. We’ll see you next week!
