Future Of Oil Change Business With Electric Vehicles

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Alpha8472
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Future Of Oil Change Business With Electric Vehicles

Post by Alpha8472 »

If most people switch to electric cars, the oil change businesses will all be closing.

Grease Monkey claims that Electric Vehicles still need brake fluid, coolant, and tires. I don't think that you can run a business on coolant and brake fluid. These Express lube places are doomed. Maybe car washes might survive.

https://chainstoreage.com/single-grease ... -3-million
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Re: Future Of Oil Change Business With Electric Vehicles

Post by BillyGr »

Alpha8472 wrote: March 8th, 2023, 4:53 pm If most people switch to electric cars, the oil change businesses will all be closing.

Grease Monkey claims that Electric Vehicles still need brake fluid, coolant, and tires. I don't think that you can run a business on coolant and brake fluid. These Express lube places are doomed. Maybe car washes might survive.

https://chainstoreage.com/single-grease ... -3-million
Makes sense, but given that the switchover will be gradual (after all, even if an area stops selling new gas-powered cars, people will still have them for many years before they all go away).
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Re: Future Of Oil Change Business With Electric Vehicles

Post by Super S »

I don't think these types of places will disappear quickly. There will be many gas powered vehicles on the roads for years to come. I will say that we could see some impact in about 10-15 years, but more impacted would be the parts stores serving the DIY market. O'Reilly, Autozone, etc. People are working on their own vehicles less and less as time goes on.
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Re: Future Of Oil Change Business With Electric Vehicles

Post by storewanderer »

I don't know. I keep seeing these businesses expanding. Oil changes, gas stations... I am in an area with a lot of population growth though.
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Re: Future Of Oil Change Business With Electric Vehicles

Post by buckguy »

Google is your friend. It's not difficult to find reviews of this sector. Basically, sales have been more or less flat for about a decade, doing a little better in the runup to COVID. Car sales were pretty robust for most of that time and people keep cars longer which should mean these places are growing but they're not. Most of these places carry other fluids and have diversified into repairs, which should carry them into the slow decline of cars that need oil without their disappearance. Still, there may be a whole new niche of places that address EVs and overlap the non-oil stuff. They easily could go the way of tire places which have gradually disappeared even though they usually have other services.

These places regularly get in trouble because of their practices of pushing un-needed work on people. They capitalize on people who want something done quickly and don't do their homework about car repairs. Mechanics I've known wouldn't go near these places.
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Re: Future Of Oil Change Business With Electric Vehicles

Post by ClownLoach »

buckguy wrote: March 9th, 2023, 3:19 pm Google is your friend. It's not difficult to find reviews of this sector. Basically, sales have been more or less flat for about a decade, doing a little better in the runup to COVID. Car sales were pretty robust for most of that time and people keep cars longer which should mean these places are growing but they're not. Most of these places carry other fluids and have diversified into repairs, which should carry them into the slow decline of cars that need oil without their disappearance. Still, there may be a whole new niche of places that address EVs and overlap the non-oil stuff. They easily could go the way of tire places which have gradually disappeared even though they usually have other services.

These places regularly get in trouble because of their practices of pushing un-needed work on people. They capitalize on people who want something done quickly and don't do their homework about car repairs. Mechanics I've known wouldn't go near these places.
I was looking for one of these type of places for my junker car and reading the reviews there were over 20, but only one that seemed trustworthy in my area. I was actually pretty impressed at the honesty and transparency, no upsell other than asking if I wanted conventional, blend, or pure synthetic. 100% customer visibility into the process and they followed the old fashioned way of pumping the new oil Into a large oil pitcher and then pouring it into the engine. Interestingly enough it used to be a franchise of one of the chains and dropped out because the owner didn't like the pressure to push unnecessary add ons.

The reason for this is I was pretty much convinced that my last oil change didn't actually happen, so I didn't want to drive far to the dealer or my usual mechanic. The car was running unusually rough and I checked the oil and it was very dark and dirty which just shouldn't have been that way for the mileage. The place that probably screwed up the previous job was an outstanding independent shop I had been dealing with for over 25 years. But I am 100% convinced that somehow on the last service trip where I ordered several other items that I do know were done like a coolant change they somehow forgot to change the oil. As soon as I started it up with the fresh oil it ran smoothly from that point out. They agreed that the oil looked like it has been in the engine for about 10K miles on a turbocharged vehicle where 5K is the recommended interval. I didn't put words in their mouth, I asked for their thoughts and said I wasn't sure when the previous owner last changed it. Their opinion added validity to my theory. Hopefully there wasn't any damage to the engine from the screw up. Moral of the story is that even the "good" places make mistakes, and not all the "quick" places are bad.
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Re: Future Of Oil Change Business With Electric Vehicles

Post by ClownLoach »

Also as battery operated and hybrid vehicles are growing and aging I am beginning to see hybrid battery specialists. These folks are potential lifesavers for those with these cars as they are breaking down the price barriers. Most hybrid cars use banks of battery cells, similar to if you had a flashlight with multiple batteries in it. The gross majority of failures in these rechargeable units are only one cell, one pack in as many as a thousand other packs. These failures typically occur in batteries 12 years or older, usually after 200K miles. Since the hybrid basically means you drive half the time on a gas engine and the other half on batteries the wear and tear is surprisingly minimal. They just need gas, oil every 10K miles, coolant and tires. The last hybrid I traded in had 143K miles and original brakes that measured only 1MM of wear over all those miles.

These specialists rebuild these battery arrays for a fraction of the cost of full replacement and thereby prevent the disposal of the entire battery which is toxic material that is difficult to handle. They pop out the bad cell and install a new one and the hybrid drives like new. Then they charge fully, run down, repeat a few full charging cycles to recondition the battery and restore the same level of capacity as when it was new. There are many hybrids with over 300K miles on them or more and the only actual failure of a battery is a single cell not the entire array. The one cell gets replaced and the rest reconditioned by these specialists for about $500 and it'll potentially go another 300K miles. The dealer may charge between $3000 and $10K on luxury brands because they only sell a complete new battery array which is really unnecessary. I expect to eventually see some of these oil change places become battery specialists as the market expands for such services. Hopefully the dealers will get wise to this and start offering similar reconditioning services.
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