Facebook: Fun -- but sells few cars

Despite the hype, social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube do little to help dealers sell vehicles.

Just 3 percent of 4,005 new and used car buyers polled last summer said social media influenced their purchase decision, according to a survey by market researcher R.L. Polk & Co. and AutoTrader.com, a car shopping Web site.

"It's amazing that we put so much priority on social media when it's not making us a lot of money," said Kevin Frye, eCommerce director for the nine-store Jeff Wyler Automotive Family in Cincinnati.

Frye said he has experimented for four years with social media -- with little success turning that engagement into sales. He's sticking with it, but he's doubtful that direct vehicle sales will result.

Dealers across the country are racking their brains to understand what social media can do and how much money they should spend on it.

Many dealers say that social media are good for building relationships and awareness. Many add that that social media's role in auto sales is bound to grow, so dealers need to jump in. On the social sites, dealers can post videos, pictures, blogs, answer questions and converse with customers on various topics.

And there are modest success stories: For A.J. Maida, director of digital marketing for Papa's Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram in New Britain, Conn., the returns on his time and money on social media have been good.

Maida said the dealership has been selling up to five vehicles per month from social media contacts since a year ago, when the store started posting more content on Facebook and other sites and monitoring those sites closely.

But five per month is still only 3 percent of his annual sales. Papa's, in the Hartford area since 1947, sold about 2,000 new and used vehicles in 2010, Maida said.

Depressingly small'

Evidence that few buyers are influenced by social media is buttressed by another study. Dataium, which monitors auto-shopping habits online, tracked 1.5 million auto shoppers by watching the Web sites that they visited. Of those shoppers, just 9,400 linked to a dealer Web site directly from a social media site.

Just six of those 9,400 shoppers sent a message to the dealer asking for a follow-up, said Jason Ezell, president and co-founder of Dataium.
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In future, cars might decide if driver is drunk

An alcohol-detection prototype that uses automatic sensors to instantly gauge a driver's fitness to be on the road has the potential to save thousands of lives, but could be as long as a decade away from everyday use in cars, federal officials and researchers said Friday.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood visited QinetiQ North America, a Waltham, Mass.-based research and development facility, for the first public demonstration of systems that could measure whether a motorist has a blood alcohol content at or above the legal limit of .08 and — if so — prevent the vehicle from starting.

The technology is being designed as unobtrusive, unlike current alcohol ignition interlock systems often mandated by judges for convicted drunken drivers. Those require operators to blow into a breath-testing device before the car can operate.

The Driver Alcohol Detection Systems for Safety, as the new approach is called, would use sensors that would measure blood alcohol content in one of two possible ways: either by analyzing a driver's breath or through the skin, using sophisticated touch-based sensors placed strategically on steering wheels and door locks, for example.

Both methods eliminate the need for drivers to take any extra steps, and those who are sober would not be delayed in getting on the road, researchers said.

The technology is "another arrow in our automotive safety quiver," said LaHood, who emphasized the system was envisioned as optional equipment in future cars and voluntary for auto manufacturers.

David Strickland, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, also attended the demonstration and estimated the technology could prevent as many as 9,000 fatal alcohol-related crashes a year in the U.S., though he also acknowledged that it was still in its early testing stages and might not be commercially available for 8-10 years.

The systems would not be employed unless they are "seamless, unobtrusive and unfailingly accurate," Strickland said.

The initial $10 million research program is funded jointly by NHTSA and the Automotive Coalition for Traffic Safety, an industry group representing many of the world's car makers.

Critics, such as Sarah Longwell of the American Beverage Institute, a restaurant trade association, doubt if the technology could ever be perfected to the point that it would be fully reliable and not stop some completely sober people from driving....
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