More Dealers Move Toward Mobile Service

Curbee, a technology platform that serves dealerships looking to provide mobile service delivery, is joining a growing trend of dealers setting up their own programs to make service calls at homes and workplaces.

Advocates say mobile service increases parts and service revenue, wins back share from the aftermarket, increases a dealership’s territory and encourages customer loyalty.

“I think it’s a differentiator with customers,” Texas luxury car dealer Brendan Harrington tells WardsAuto.

Mobile service attracted a lot of interest during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic when customers couldn’t or wouldn’t come into dealerships for service and came to rely on home delivery of other goods and services.

Harrington is president of Autobahn Fort Worth, a dealership group with six stores, all with European import brands — a mix that includes BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mini, Porsche, Volkswagen and Volvo Cars.

He says every one of those brands encourages him to offer service delivery, and he’s been experimenting with mobile service delivery for “probably 15 years.” However, he has never been able to stick with it.

While he’s convinced of the appeal, growing and executing a homegrown service delivery system is too difficult, he says.

“People get excited about it,” Harrington says. “But it fails, mostly because of the dispatching. It’s too difficult. It’s too manual.”

Enter San Francisco-based Curbee, founded in 2020 and designed and launched by former Tesla executives who worked on the automaker’s mobile service program.

. “I finally found someone (who) I think has the software to allow us to do it properly,” says Harrington, who signed with Curbee six months ago.

Curbee CEO Denise Leleux tells WardsAuto its prior experience has mostly been using its own fleet of service vans to deliver service to customers at their locations. But after a successful pilot program with dealerships in several states, she says Curbee is pivoting toward becoming a vendor to OEMs and auto dealerships, potentially nationwide.

 Curbee has made it onto about half a dozen OEM “approved vendor” lists, although Leleux says she can’t disclose specifics. “Dealer principals, fixed ops directors, they all say mobile service is coming,” she says of the positive reception.

Dealerships can choose the level of involvement they want from Curbee in developing mobile service delivery. Factors include whether the dealership has prior experience with such a service and how much the dealership wants to outsource.

Leleux says that for newcomers to mobile service, Curbee has “playbooks” for equipping service vans and other operational details based on Curbee’s experience delivering service for fleet customers.

Dealers just getting started can start small or maybe get acquainted with mobile service by delivering service to fleet customers, she says.

Fleet business is easier and more efficient than learning to schedule service visits for hundreds of individual customers, Leleux says, since a fleet customer typically has numerous vehicles needing service, all in the same parking lot.

“The name of the game is density. You need density to keep busy, to reduce downtime, to reduce travel time” between jobs, Leleux says.

Another Curbee customer, Andy Guelcher, president of Mohawk Chevrolet, Ballston Spa, NY, recently went live with Curbee and intends to start offering mobile service to fleet customers only, initially using a single van.

“We don’t want it to be part of the retail user experience right out of the gate,” Guelcher tells WardsAuto. “We are targeting larger companies, which should allow us to do seven or eight services at one location.”