🔥 Top Story
LaFontaine Automotive Group announced a strategic partnership with UVeye to deploy its AI-powered vehicle inspection technology across LaFontaine's Michigan footprint, with more than 40 locations statewide offering complimentary drive-through vehicle health scans. The drive-through system scans tires, the underbody, and exterior to help identify potential vehicle condition and maintenance issues.
📰 Other Notable Stories
The AI Follow-Up Gap, Live From NCM — Dave Purgason, Head of US Business at Spyne, delivered a keynote at NCM Clients & Friends 2026 titled "The AI Follow-Up Gap: Why Dealers Are Losing Customers Between the Lead and the Appointment." Source: https://digitaldealer.com/news/the-next-dealership-ai-battleground-is-between-the-lead-and-the-appointment/173227
Missed Leads Still the Industry's Loudest Complaint — A Digital Dealer piece on automotive AI agent platforms opens with the observation that leads come in faster than anyone can call them back. Source: https://digitaldealer.com/news/automotive-ai-agent-platforms-how-dealerships-and-automakers-are-putting-ai-to-work-in-2026/173091/
DAS Technology Sweeps Awards Season — DAS Technology, the company behind Digital Air Strike, announced it earned five 2026 Dealers' Choice Awards from Auto Dealer Today, including three first-place Diamond Awards, spanning New Vehicle Leads, Reputation Management, Data Mining, Digital Marketing, and Direct Marketing Sales. Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/das-technology-sweeps-five-2026-170000903.html
AI Buying, Not Just AI Shopping — CBT News argues the next competitive line isn't whether shoppers can find your inventory, but whether a buyer — or the buyer's AI assistant — can actually move the transaction forward on your website. Source: https://www.cbtnews.com/ai-helps-buyers-choose-will-it-choose-you
Operators Gather at MIT — Today — The Automotive AI Summit runs today, September 24, at the MIT Museum in Cambridge; the event is an operator-first event for dealer principals, GMs, and fixed ops leaders built around one question: will this work in a real store, who owns it, what can fail, and how will the dealership measure the result? Source: https://automotiveaisummit.com/about/
💡 Tool Spotlight
LotGPT (Lotlinx) — It's the only chatbot built exclusively for car dealers, and it knows your market, dealership and inventory — fueled by Lotlinx's decades of VIN and shopper data, plus your live inventory, Google Analytics and CRM, to deliver answers on selling cars faster and more profitably. Price: LotGPT is free for dealers, but invite-only — verify current access and terms at Lotlinx.com before you buy. Who it's for: used-car managers and GMs who want a plain-English answer on aging VINs and competitive pricing without opening five reports. Who it's NOT for: a store that doesn't already trust its own inventory and CRM data — feed this thing garbage and it hands you back a confident, well-worded guess.
📊 Stat of the Day
According to Car Wars data cited by Spyne, 41% of inbound dealership calls go unanswered after hours, and the first dealer to respond wins 78% of deals. This is a secondary citation — trace it to Car Wars' own data if you want the primary source — but the plain-dealer translation holds either way: four out of ten calls to your store after 6 p.m. just ring out, and the guy who picks up first — anywhere — takes the deal almost eight times out of ten. That's not a lead problem. That's a phone problem you're paying full BDC payroll to not solve at night.
🔮 Trend Watch
The center of gravity in dealership AI is shifting off the showroom floor and into the seams — the after-hours call, the gap between a submitted lead and a booked appointment, the trade-in nobody photographed properly. LaFontaine's free UVeye scans, Spyne's "AI Follow-Up Gap" keynote at NCM, and Digital Dealer's own framing of leads outrunning callbacks are all pointing at the same bruise: dealers bought the front-end AI (chat widgets, lead responders) two years ago, and the money is now in the unglamorous middle — the handoff, the inspection, the follow-up sequence nobody staffs at 9 p.m. If your AI budget still starts and ends with a chatbot on the homepage, you're solving 2024's problem while your competitors fix tonight's missed call.
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