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NPDA PARTNER PROFILE

  • Dealernews
  • Jun 01, 2022

 

As NPDA continues to bring dealers in under its PURE banner (Promote, Unite, Represent, Educate), it is important to acknowledge some of the folks who helped get the Association up and running. National Powersport Auctions CEO Jim Woodruff believes in NPDA and he has been a trusted advisor since Day 1. “We share NPDA’s PURE vision and belief that our industry is better when we all work together.” We caught up with Woodruff at AIMExpo to get his perspective on the state of the industry, the role of trade shows and the ways NPDA intersects with the industry.

Here we are at AIMExpo Day Three, finally winding things down. How was the show for NPA?

It has been great. The first thing that I would share is that after not being able to see my friends in the industry for two years, and our dealers that we work with all the time, it's awesome to be back here at an in-person show. I’m seeing folks I haven't seen in some cases for 10 or 20 years. I think the flow has been good. And we've had a lot of interest in the things that we've been doing.

NPA has rolled out a new program for dealers here at the show, how has the reception been?

We are always working on things to help dealers, asking what can we do besides offering a marketplace to buy and sell their vehicles…. and technology is one of the key ways that we do that. NPA’s Value Guide has been around for years now, and it's essentially the de facto standard for any dealer taking a trade in or valuing a piece of inventory. They use it every day hundreds if not 1000s of transactions a year. But there are some things we can do to improve it. For example, what happens when there is a vehicle and we haven't sold that particular model? What does our traditional value guide produce in that case? Well, nothing because we don't have any data! So we've been working the last couple of years on a machine learning AI neural network-based algorithm that has analyzed the last 20 years of auction data, and has even learned seasonality trends and the variations that occur with condition, mileage and things like that. We've packaged all of that into what we announced here at the show: Value Guide Pro. The Pro version  https://www.npauctions.com/cp/NMValueGuidePro can provide a value on any vehicle for any condition or mileage that vehicle might have. It can show all of the details of the transactions that we might have on that vehicle, just like our traditional value guide does today. So dealers are super excited about it, we're looking forward to getting it out and letting them start using it. We provide one more tool to help them basically buy better and run a better business.

One of the things that we've been addressing at the MIC Board level because you are a board member on top of having a real job — and here the show is the buzz about the EV market. How does the new ValueGuide system AI and machine learning address EVs?

That's a great question. I think if you ask anybody ‘what's an EV going to be worth’ a year or two or three from now? Or what is their depreciation characteristic, etc. they won’t know. From a valuation perspective, I don't know anybody that can actually give you a good answer, just because there's so little data available. However EVs were included in the training set, and the system will produce a value for those. But the variability is going to be higher than it would be for a traditional vehicle. So far, what we've seen is for the EVs that have come through, that are from a major manufacturer, they're performing similarly to traditional motorcycles. As the EV market grows, and the demand grows for those vehicles, I believe that they will ultimately perform very similar to what we've seen. So they are included in the model. But you know, time will tell, as the AI engine learns, as we get more transaction volumes, you know, we're where they go in terms of their performance.

Read the full scoop in the May issue here: 

 

 

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