Carwow

Hello and welcome to another episode of Talking Shark.

Today we're joined by Sam, racing driver Sam, from CarWow and Driven Plus, and also Max Sastavani from Driven Plus.

Please make sure to like, comment, subscribe, and let us know who you want on Talking Shark next time.

Yeah, I have no interest in cars.

I

don't mind that.

How did you two meet then, through CarWow? It was a CarWow shoot, wasn't it?

Yeah, so Troy, he had a McLaren 750S, one of the first in the country.

Today on Overcommitted, we are joined by Jade Dickinson.

She's a senior software engineer at Henry Schein One with a career spanning Rails and Elm from Carwow, Simply Business, and Theta Lake.

She's an excellent conference speaker who has given talks on Rails performance and load testing methodology, and she was recently very active in our Overcommitted book club discussion of Tanya Riley's "The Staff Engineer's Path," which is what we'll be talking about today.

Also, as a shout-out, we will be giving... she will be giving a talk called "Building a Multi-User Booking System across Hotwire and Rails" at Helvetic Ruby in November.

Okay, not yet.

So Rory's been on Carwow or Motorway or whatever, and he was like, "Oh, look, here's a green L322 that's going really, really cheap.

It's worth X amount, but, but it's up for sale for X, for Y."

So I don't know why, but green Range Rovers...

... a super...

It's a super rare spec, and you don't usually see these listed.

Like, basically Carwow's, like, trade-in.

Mm.

Because the technology moves so fast, today's cutting-edge EV is tomorrow's obsolete gadget.

We saw this play out brutally in the UK used car market, where CarWow showed last year that a one-year-old Audi e-tron was trading for 27% less than a comparable one-year-old model did just a year earlier.

while its diesel equivalent held its value.

Before we talk about Ford's $19.5 billion EV write-down, let me tell you about this week's video sponsor, DeleteMe, a subscription service that removes your personal information from hundreds of data broker websites where it's being sold online.

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How did your Carwow, um, collab come about?

Oh, gosh.

How did it? So I've been on Carwow a few times.

Mm.

Um, I think one of their producers reached out to me and like, "Do you wanna get involved? Have you got any cool cars to come?" And I gave them a list of the cars that I had.

Yeah

... kind of, yeah.

Now, Gordon, not everyone successfully transitions from football into business, yet you've built a career spanning more than 20 years in the automotive sector.

You've worked with organisations including the BCA, Carwow, Aston Barclay, and currently with Gardex.

Now, talk to me about your business and where it all started in your business career, what you managed to achieve, the companies you've sold off to, and now where you're at today.

Yeah, so before I graduated in the States, I had to do an internship and I did that with Enterprise Rent-A-Car at their head office in St. Louis and kind of fell into a job as soon as I came back.

Yeah, huge business and learned so much.

I had a great mentor and leader there, Emma Westhead, who was brilliant, who ran the sales side, which she didn't run it, but... she was my direct boss and she was great to work for and learned a lot from her she'd been in the business since she was 16 so she knew it inside out and then some other great leaders in Stuart Beith in Scotland who ran all the Scottish locations so it was a brilliant experience for me

So your time there and experience, you then get involved, was it a relatively new company at the time, what was your time with likes of Carwow?

Yeah so it was my first kind of director's role when I went to Carwow so director and title not necessarily on paper but It felt like a big step up to me psychologically and I took the chance and I'd always loved the business and admired it online.

Too many women haven't been taught those skills, according to Dr Louise Wilcott, an NHS doctor and lifelong car enthusiast who recently launched a business called the Women's Auto Academy, running women-only workshops teaching basic car maintenance.

I spoke to Louise and also Maria McCarthy, a motoring journalist and contributing editor for online car marketplace CarWow.

And I started by asking Maria whether these skills just don't get passed on to girls in families.

That's right.

Then that is a bit of a sort of a garage equivalent of a red flag.

Because I think in the motoring industry, you know, as women, it is important that whether it's like, you know, car dealerships or, you know, garages, that they are willing to be open to women and to make them feel comfortable.

I mean, research by CarWow showed that, you know, six in 10 women feel feel that they are discriminated against in a car room situation it's more angled towards men so I think that you know by being willing to take up space and to ask questions and to walk away from places that don't treat you with respect that's one of the way we can improve the garage situation.

Final word to you, Louise, the courses that you've run so far, I know it's a new thing, but are you finding women are rolling up their sleeves, loving it, throwing themselves into it?

And we've also got Maria McCarthy here.

She's a motoring journalist and contributing editor for online car marketplace Carcow.

Hello, Maria.

Hello.

So prior to that, I was a consultant for just over four years.

I worked with close to 30 organisations on DEI work from across the globe, brands including organisations like H&M, Carwow, certainly in the UK, many councils in the UK as well.

And my focus there was looking at strategy, training, frameworks, really looking at how those organizations could narrow their focus and create impact in a particular swim lane.

Yeah.