A Hurricane Is Coming, Let’s Go Car Shopping

Auto dealers are beginning to see stepped-up car-buying in regions affected by recent hurricanes. That’s expected. Armed with insurance-claim checks, storm victims who lost vehicles quickly replace them, historical data shows.

But here’s a head-scratcher: Detected pre-storm automotive consumer behavior oddly shows an apparent surge in dealership traffic in affected regions just before Hurricane Harvey rained down hard in Texas and Hurricane Irma swept across southern Florida. (Click here to see a chart  showing the surge of lot visits just before Harvey hit Houston and, to a lesser degree, Dallas and Austin.)   

“We were surprised to see so much dealership activity on days before the storm, when you would think people would be at home battening down the hatches,” says Kevin Root. Or perhaps heading to Home Depot for plywood to board up windows.

Not that a lot of people weren’t making such preparations just before the storms. But plenty of others were at dealerships at what seems like an unlikely time for car shopping, according to data patterns Root and business partner Graham Line detected with their new dealership foot-traffic tracking product called AutoPulse Insights.

It uses data from assorted sources that reveals detailed customer information ranging from names to email addresses to car ownership and the equity therein.

Moreover, by using “pulse” signals from smartphones with their locator functions on, the AutoPulse technology shows nearly real-time visits to dealerships.

Root and Line developed the technology primarily for marketing-attribution  research and sales, but they have found a new use for it: tracing dealership visits before, during and after a disaster hits a region.

Obviously in the height of a storm, car buying in an affected area is virtually non-existent, such as Aug. 24 and 25 in Houston when Hurricane Harvey parked itself in the city and elsewhere, unleashing an estimated 33 trillion gallons of water in total.

Irma in Florida wasn’t as bad, but AutoPulse data shows, as it does in Texas, a flurry of visits to dealerships just before disaster struck.

Root and Line know the car industry well and they are astute observers of it. They are careful not to overreach in speculating what’s behind the oddity of that dealership activity just before the storm.

Root, left, and Line.

Line says it may demonstrate human resiliency. Still, he says, “when you know a bad thing is coming, you’d think sales would be down beforehand.”

He’s reached out to some Houston dealers who say, yes, empirically there were more-than-expected visits just before and after Harvey swept in. They’ve promised to send him sales data for those time periods.

Root floats a couple of theories that seem diametrically opposed to each other, one indicating logical preparatory actions, the other illogical what-the-heck behavior. Humans are nothing if not varied.

The first theory goes like this: People knew a bad storm was coming and thought, for whatever reason, they would lose their vehicles when it hit. So just before that, they proactively shopped for a vehicle to replace the one they expected to lose. (Harvey claimed an estimated 500,000 vehicles.)

The other theory Root puts forth as a possibility takes into account a psychological quirk of human behavior that surfaces when people know a disaster is imminent.

Root told his brother, who holds advanced degrees in psychology, about the unusually high level of dealership traffic just before the storms hit.

His brother told him of a phenomenon that when people face potential danger, they’ll do incongruous things. Essentially, they are distracting themselves and trying to avoid thinking about what may be in store.

Their behavior can include going to bars, overspending, gambling or generally wearing a devil-may-care attitude. Root and Line still are trying to figure it all out, but we might add visiting car dealerships to that list of what people do when the soft-boiled eggs are about to hit the fan.

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