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Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

apnews.com

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Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#201

Post by cduzz »

AlexandrB wrote: post #36
SSJPython wrote: post #15

Related note: car stealerships are a relic of the past. There is no reason why a middleman should exist when buying a car. Consumers should have the option to purchase directly from the manufacturer. I am personally not a fan of Tesla as a vehicle, but I admire the business model of buying directly from Tesla. Stealerships are a drain on the consumer. All that land they own can be used for productive economic activit…

> All that land they own can be used for productive economic activity or housing. No it can't. You still need places where cars can be repaired as well as storage for parts/cars inventory. The only way you reclaim some land is if service gets worse. Edit: For example, Tesla sells direct to consumers but there's still a Tesla "showroom" in my town. In terms of footprint/appearance it's basically a dealership. So where…

The original purpose of dealerships was to isolate "vehicle manufacturer going bankrupt" from "organization you bought your car from going bankrupt" events.

The idea was "if you buy a VinFast" from vinfast and they exit the market, you're 100% hosed, but if you buy a VinFast from "Karl Marx VinFast and Fiskar Dealerships of North Idaho" you can go back and talk to KMoNI Inc about your new car.

The dealership model was established a very long time ago back in the cambrian explosion era of car manufacterers and people were buying cars from companies like Auburn, Cole, Crow, Davis, Dixie, Durant, Elcar, Grant, King, Kline, Lafayette, Kurtz, Marmon, Mercer, Overland, Peerless, Pilot, Roamer, Saxon, Stearns, Velie, Wescott and Winton [1] and then the company would vanish and there would be no support.

[1] https://www.supercars.net/blog/cars-of-the-1920s

Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#202

Post by akskakskaksk »

Crazy how we are talking about this like a weather event, like it's just an unfortunate outage. Cyberattacked by whom? How? What vulnerabilities allowed the intrusion and what organizational processes created those vulnerabilities?

Naturally the people who know these answers are very busy today but hopefully we will hear more soon.

Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#203

Post by shrubble »

brian-bk wrote: post #196
blorenz wrote: post #151

Oh boy, has this made issues and opportunities for my automotive B2B SaaS. My product's customer are car dealerships and most of my customers are on CDK. This is definitely creating a void of data for them though fortunately my product won't fail without the expected DMS data. In terms of opportunity, dealers had paperwork that would be generated for the F/I department from CDK which I was able to port into my SaaS a…

What are cdk and dms in this context? I'm only familiar with them on AWS

CDK is the company that got cyberattacked; DMS = dealer management system.

Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#204

Post by kbolino »

abtinf wrote: post #146
tejohnso wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't just about everyone hate dealing with a dealership? Shouldn't it be very easy to vote to fix that in a democracy?

See “Public Choice Theory”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice Or watch the BBC comedy “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister” to grasp how government (as well as most large companies) actually works.

Yep. Basically, in no election we can practically foresee, is this going to be a politically salient issue. The voters aren't motivated enough about it, and the interest groups involved are mostly aligned on keeping the status quo. Elections put people and parties into power, not individual ideas.

Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#205

Post by bee_rider »

michaelt wrote: post #174
bee_rider wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paperwork to do one transaction might not be too bad, but keeping all the inventory on pencil and paper seems like a pain.

It'd be a pain at the multi-dealership-network level, sure. But an individual dealership has what, 50 cars in stock? That seems easily manageable to me. I'm old enough that I've seen far larger operations running on paper. Of course, the days of paper-based paperwork did require businesses to employ diligent and numerate clerks, and to have filing cabinets, manual calculators, photocopiers, whiteout, and suchlike. I…

Yeah, I assume they had an assortment of clerks who’d be hard to replace right this moment, especially given that the duration of their employment would be like, what, a week or two? However long it’ll take to get this attack taken care of.

Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#206

Post by juliangoldsmith »

blorenz wrote: post #169
juliangoldsmith wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That 90% is for both of the two biggest DMSes, CDK and Reynolds & Reynolds. Both DMSes have been around since the '70s or so, so they're probably considered a safe option by a lot of dealers.

Is R&R still that large? A few NADAs ago I approached them to see about getting a direct integration. Only one of my customers was R&R at that time. ReyRey acted very elitist and told me that they had no interest. Fast forward to this last NADA where I approached ReyRey again with only three customers. I asked them if we could integrated with three and they stated that they would even do a single customer. Quite the…

R&R is still one of the largest. The elitism was definitely something I saw when I wrote the RCI integration at Dealer Wizard around 2014. I've heard they've been trying to change the culture internally. I'm not sure how that's going, but it'd certainly be welcome.

Does Fortellis even accept other DMSes? I've dealt with it a bit to integrate with eLeads (now CDK CRM), but there didn't seem to be much on there apart from CDK's APIs.

Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#207

Post by shrubble »

spamizbad wrote: post #4

I know some (former) CDK alumni and I'm not surprised. Notorious for paying below market in engineering and IT. A place to cut your teeth but not to stay.

Didn't they also outsource a large part to an India-focused outsourcer as well?

Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#209

Post by bee_rider »

SoftTalker wrote: post #158
recursive wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say it takes 5 minutes to manually enumerate all the features of a car. This seems more than generous. An intern can go through 12 cars per hour at this rate. This is a major inconvenience, but it doesn't sound like a thing that would completely disrupt business.

A smart intern would take photos of the window stickers, OCR them, put them in a Google drive folder, and salespeople could then search them. Could be done as fast as walking from car to car.

It started last Wednesday, and the estimate for the fix is “several days” according to the AP. I think it will be difficult even to get somebody hired in time.
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