Carfax pulled the VINs on nearly 438,000 registered taxis and rideshare vehicles across 16 major cities in September. More than one in four had at least one unfixed recall. In New York it was close to four in ten medallion cabs. Nationally, roughly one in five vehicles on the road is carrying an open recall.
On a recall, the parts are free. The labor is reimbursed by the manufacturer. The customer drives away safer and owes nothing. And a quarter of the hardest-working cars in America are still rolling around unrepaired.
That's not a technology gap. The data already exists, in your store and everybody else's. The gap is between having a list and somebody owning the job of working it.
The most common version of this problem
Recalls are just the cleanest example. Nearly every business has a version of it.
The list exists. Somebody built the report. It gets emailed around, it gets mentioned in a meeting, and then it sits. When the number doesn't move, the conversation turns to the tool. Do we need a better CRM? A different vendor? A texting platform?
The tool is rarely the issue. Three questions usually find it:
- Whose name is on it? Not a department. A person.
- How many a day, and by when? A target with no date is a wish.
- Where does the number get reported, and to whom? If it never gets read out loud to anybody, it isn't real work yet.
If you can't answer all three in one breath, you don't have a process. You have a report.
What it looks like when someone owns it
A dealer group we work with had an open-recall list sitting in their service software for the better part of a year. Nobody was against working it. It belonged to everyone, which meant it belonged to no one. Service called it marketing's list. Marketing called it service's customers.
Three unglamorous changes.
One named person owned it: an existing BDC rep, not a new hire. A daily call target, oldest safety recall worked first. And the count went up on the same board as appointments and got read out in the Monday meeting, like anything else that matters.
No new software. What showed up in the drive were cars that hadn't been in for service in years, and some of those visits turned into work beyond the recall, because a customer who is already in the lane will approve a set of tires.
Why it stays broken
Because it's nobody's emergency.
A missed sales opportunity has a face and a phone number attached to it. An unworked recall list has neither. Nobody calls to complain about a repair they didn't know they needed. There's no daily pain, so there's never a good week to start.
That's exactly why it needs an owner and a number.
The thirty-day version
If you want to test this before you commit to it, it's a short experiment:
- Pull the open-recall list for your own customer base this week.
- Hand it to one named person for thirty days.
- Set a daily call count you actually believe is doable.
- Track three numbers: calls made, appointments set, repair orders opened.
- Read those three numbers out loud once a week.
At the end of thirty days you'll know whether you had a data problem or an ownership problem. It's almost always an ownership problem. And once you've seen it clearly on this list, you'll start noticing the other lists in your building sitting in the same place.
Bottom line: The parts were free the whole time. If a quarter of the industry's hardest-working vehicles are still driving on open recalls, the missing piece was never the data. It was a name next to the list.