Great find Pianowire, thanks for posting this!
Post# of 40989
220 out of 325 AutoNation facilities already approved under this program.
Per Scott Arnold, Executive Vice President, Customer Care and Brand Extensions of AutoNation, AutoNation (has) provided a peerless experience to over 40 million service customers - that's access to a much larger customer base than we were originally thinking, as the focus until now has been on AN's new car sales. AN's customer base from auto repair service is already about 4x that of their base from new car sales. NOW add the number of NEW customers driven to AN by the "AAR-certified" program partnership with AAA... SB put us in a great position with AutoNation!!
AutoNation has sold over 11 million vehicles, the first automotive retailer to reach this milestone - that's a helluva a lot of vehicles, but even THAT is relatively small compared to the exposure they have with "40 million served" for auto repair services.
In 1 AutoNation / AAA press release, we have ALREADY realized overnight that we have, first, 5x the customer base exposure that we knew of (added the repair service customer base, which is 4x that of new car sales by AutoNation)
...AND...
AutoNation is getting a huge push from the AAA partnership that should boost these numbers SIGNIFICANTLY!
Totally speculative and let's just say it's NOT the case... but what interesting timing. If there's something more to this whole thing as it relates to private label activity with AN or AAA, or with possible endorsement of bSafeMobile by AAA... I don't even want to think about the temptation to let some shares go at crazy high prices much sooner than anticipated.