AutoNation

In fact, places like Applebee's, Buffalo Wild Wings, Chili's, TGI Fridays, Ruby Tuesday, In-N-Out, and many more are giving military and veterans a free meal today.

Vets can also get special discounts at places like Kohl's, Target, and AutoNation, free haircuts at Great Clips, and free entry into any national park.

Note that we here at the Newsworthy will also be off tomorrow for the federal holiday.

So we want to take the opportunity today to say thank you to any service members, veterans, or military family members that are listening.

All right, let's pause for a break right there.

Come back and do the corrections offensively and defensively and the big picture takeaways and get the heck out of here on the Draft Time Podcast brought to you by AutoNation.

Those were the standouts in segment two.

We'll talk about the corrections here, and it's mostly going to be on the offense side of the football.

My biggest problem is the biggest dogs, and I'll call names because I'm not afraid.

I had a conversation with an AutoNation dealer today that was on a live stream.

That dealer had thousands of dollars of add-ons that weren't disclosed on the website.

The FTC specifically said, AutoNation is the top three biggest auto group in the country.

they are not leading by example.

And if they think they can get away with it, everybody else around says, okay, well, I can get away with it.

And that's the problem we have right now is that the biggest dogs are not leading by example.

If Group One, Sonic, AutoNation all said, okay, this is the way we're doing this.

So Penske, which is moving private through its merger with Mitsui and Company, props to Penske on that transition, led the six public groups in Q3 gross profit per unit, posting more than $4,100 on new and more than $1,000 ahead of second place group one and nearly $2,000 on used per Stevens.

Both figures slipped by $216 on new and and 149 on used lithia led revenue at 9.9 billion across 471 stores up three percent sonic posted a record 3.9 billion dollar quarter and four of the six groups grew revenue year over year F&I per unit fell from Q2 at every group from $40 at Asbury to $101 at AutoNation, though AutoNation still posted the best figure at nearly $2,700.

Sonic was the lone group to grow F&I per unit year over year, finishing at $2,600, which gives dealers benchmarking against the public's a clear back-end comparison.

All right, now we're going to go into the CDG buy-sell track.

But hopefully there will also be something here on the private class action side as well.

Does this not just signal to you a little bit of what we were talking about yesterday? If you didn't see yesterday's show, it was about AutoNation and tearing down their third quarter results.

And in their third quarter results, It's just so clear that AutoNation is as much a bank as they are an insurance company as they are a car dealer.

They sell cars in service of selling loans, in service of selling financial products like insurance products associated with extended warranties, gap insurance, etc.

This is an automaker.

Dad, we're going to be talking about on today's program, the 2026 car market reset.

And I was digging deep in the numbers of AutoNation, one of the largest dealership groups, their quarterly earnings.

They just came out with their third quarter quarterly earnings.

I'll pull it up on the screen so everyone can see it.

And AutoNation is one of the largest dealer groups in the United States.

I guess it's second or third, something like that.

Second, I believe, second.

Buyer's market, But educated buyers will probably end up doing even better because these dealers are having to adapt to a more challenging sales environment.

And so there are lots of many good examples of companies that become no growth, but management's very good at sort of using the free cash flow to buy back stock.

Like AutoNation has done that and O'Reilly's and lots of these, they sort of just leverage buyout themselves on the market over time.

This is assuming no private equity firm shows up to take them out and you still end up with pretty good returns.

In that instance, it sort of caps your downside a little bit.

But let me tell you, I'd put these three stores up against any dealerships in the country, and they're owned by, you know, big corporations.

I've never had an AutoNation store on this show.

I've had a couple of the other groups.

My initial impression of Group 1 after the two that took over for my dealers wasn't good.