Curbee Carves a New Path for Dealership Service

Amit Chandarana, the just-installed CEO of technology-based mobile dealership service platform Curbee, is one of a select few. He’s spent more than half his career in top-level automotive positions often working with dealerships for such heavyweights as Toyota North America and Scion.

His professional background includes high-level positions in sales, brand management and operations. This gives him credibility with dealerships and makes him uniquely qualified to helm Los Angeles-based Curbee.

Curbee is a dealership vendor that provides software that can manage scheduling, equipping and routing mobile service vans to individual customers and-or local fleet customers. Besides the software, Curbee provides consulting and highly detailed playbooks dealerships can follow to create their own mobile service programs.

Curbee was founded by former Tesla executives who helped the BEV maker come up with a mobile service platform. As an independent company starting in 2020, Curbee provided all these services for fleet customers — the software, the technicians, the upfitted mobile vans — but switched earlier this year to exclusively helping dealerships launch their own mobile services.

Dealers speaking with WardsAuto say growing one’s own mobile service program is too complex, especially the scheduling, the allocation of human resources and equipment, and the routing. “Harder than it looks” is how Texas dealer Brendan Harrington describes mobile service. He is president of Autobahn Fort Worth, which has six European import brands.
Another selling point is that Curbee integrates directly into existing dealer management systems (DMS), dealers say.

Chandarana recently spoke with WardsAuto about his career, Curbee’s value and how he plans to lead it into a global future. See below for the conversations —

Amit Chandarana, Curbee CEO

WardsAuto: You’ve worked in automotive before. What’s your dealership background?

Chandarana: I think that’s probably why I’m in this chair. In a 23-year career, I spent 21 in the automotive space and walked into dealerships through the front door or through the service drive and worked directly with dealerships.

WardsAuto: You’ve also worked on the OEM side, right?

Chandarana: I started at TMS, now TMNA (that is, Toyota Motor Sales USA, later renamed Toyota Motor North America). Every person at Toyota starts at the call center. Most of us who grow through their Toyota experience start in the Fixed Ops part of the organization. You learn parts and service, wholesale parts, all these components of service and fixed operations. Then you move to sales, marketing, the divisions, etc. But I can hold my own in terms of having a relative concept about how things work when it comes to working with a dealership.

WardsAuto: How many dealerships is Curbee working with? Would you say its dealership business is still in the pilot phase?

Chandarana: We’re not in pilot mode. There are not 100 dealers using us – yet – but it’s not 10, either.

WardsAuto: Are you signed up as an approved vendor, if that’s the proper term, with any OEMs yet?

Chandarana: We have OEMs who have endorsed us, endorsed using us. I just spoke at a 500-person webinar with GM and their dealers.

WardsAuto: How is the pivot to dealerships going?

Chandarana: We still think, act, and perform like a start-up company. We are learning a ton. The biggest areas of opportunity are learning use cases with our customers. The second thing is we are also integrating with other systems from other vendors.

WardsAuto: How do you grow, by signing up big dealership chains? Through OEMs? One rooftop at a time? All of the above?

Chandarana: Our ideal process is to work with progressive, individual dealerships whose owners have the right mindset about providing more customer convenience and who want to expand their service potential – that’s our bread and butter. That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t work with OEMs.

WardsAuto: Curbee doesn’t deliver service to the end user anymore, right?

Chandarana: No. We have to (offer) software solutions and support. What we do is make sure the dealership has the right job, matched up with the right technician, at the right time, with the right equipment, at the right place. That’s the sweet spot, so the tech arrives knowing it’s coded “lube, oil and filter” and not “tire change,” or something that would require different tools or a different truck.

WardsAuto: Will you be doing training?

Chandarana: We absolutely will be in dealerships, working with the BDC (Business Development Center) to optimize appointments. “Oh, you’d like to make a service appointment? Would you like to make it mobile? Would you mind if we came to you?” Most people are happy to learn that’s an option. We can also help with how dealers merchandise this offer, marketing, point-of-purchase material, etc.

WardsAuto: What’s the pitch to dealers?

Chandarana: A vehicle is sold only once every four or five years. But all that time in between, the dealer has an opportunity to (provide) service that can create loyalty. That’s so important, that flywheel effect that keeps the business humming along through up and downs. Getting people back in the service lane, you provide a connection. There’s a big likelihood that customers will be buying another car from you.