Why GPS is your secret weapon for lot management
We wrote this in article format, but it’s really more of a treasure map. The great news is that the treasure we’re talking about here is already yours – metaphorical gold buried all over your lot. You just need to claim it.
And how will you and your team find these hidden caches of treasure? The way people find anything in the modern era: with GPS locators.
If you’re operating your auto dealership without the right GPS tracking solutions, you could be missing out on a fortune in efficiencies and the potential for an increase in sales productivity. So in this treasure map disguised as an article, we’ll show you just a few ways that deploying the right system for real-time vehicle tracking can give your dealership’s bottom line a big boost.
But first, here’s what the researchers at McKinsey & Company discovered in early 2025 about how much the right technology can benefit an auto retailer’s business:
“We [at McKinsey Research] estimate that if dealerships used technology effectively across both customer-facing and back- office processes, focused on cutting inventory and other costs, and adopted a clear strategic agenda, they could lift sales per employee by at least 25 percent.”
So let’s go treasure hunting!
4 treasure caches you can scoop up with vehicle GPS trackers
1. Real-time vehicle tracking
Cox Automotive’s 2024 “Car Buyer Journey” study revealed some interesting insights. Here’s how the study’s authors described the one that’s most relevant to our discussion:
“Despite the availability of digital tools, buyers still indicate they value time spent at dealerships for test drives, interacting with sales teams, and vehicle pick-ups – essential components of a seamless in-person experience.”
You’re no doubt feeling pressure from online vehicle marketplaces like Carvana. And you’re certainly hearing doom-and-gloom stories about how auto dealerships, like any brick-and-mortar retail operations, are likely to continue losing ground to online competitors.
That’s why this CBJ study offers such a useful reminder of your dealership’s value – something the all-digital vehicle-purchase platforms can’t match. Here’s how the authors explain it:
“It is a common misconception that most vehicle buyers today want a completely online car-buying process. The findings in the latest CBJ study indicate that buyer satisfaction is influenced not merely by the time involved, but rather by the efficiency of the transactional aspects of the buying journey.”
Because it’s such a large and important purchase, most vehicle buyers would clearly rather spend at least some time discussing their options with the experts – like your team, on your lot – and physically testing their next potential car.
But here’s where many auto dealerships drop the ball. As the CBJ authors stated above, your customers want those onsite experiences to be efficient. How much of an expert will your sales rep appear to be – and how efficient can they make the test-drive experience – if they have to drag your customer around the lot for 15 minutes searching for the car they want to test?
With the right vehicle-tracking solution, your reps can have a real-time view of every car’s location across your lot – so they can make that part of the process smooth and enjoyable.
So there’s your first cache of treasure:
quicker time to test drives, less time wasted on the lot, happier customers, and probably more sales. All because you equipped your fleet with simple GPS trackers.
2. Fuel and battery monitoring
Speaking of the test-drive experience, let’s say that your rep knows exactly where the customer’s preferred vehicle is on the lot and walks him right to it, but then discovers the car is out of gas, or worse, has a dead battery.
You probably try to address this problem on your lot as efficiently as possible – but manually. Maybe you ask your reps to monitor vehicles’ fuel levels throughout the day and run to the gas station when their tanks get low. Maybe you also have your techs check the battery levels of every vehicle on the lot once a month or so. Fine processes, as far as they go.
But those approaches can’t prevent the distracted (or lazy) sales rep from leaving a low fuel tank for the next rep to deal with. And those hours-long battery-checking days aren’t the best uses of your technicians’ time anyway.
And here, again, the simple answer is GPS. By installing the right solution on your lot’s inventory, you can monitor every vehicle’s fuel and battery levels in real-time. You can even set up proactive alerts – where the GPS app sends your team a notice that, say, a vehicle’s battery level is down to 20% or has fallen below a quarter tank of fuel.
Treasure cache #2 recovered:
fewer delayed test drives, happier customers, less time wasted running to the gas station, and more time for your technicians to spend on more forward-looking initiatives than testing batteries.
3. Simplified bank floorplan auditing
For pretty much all of business history, there really wasn’t any way around a bank’s physical inspection of your financed inventory. If the lender wanted to check up on the stuff you were buying with their money, they had to come out and see it for themselves – and you had to divert some of your business’s resources to helping them with that inspection.
For most auto dealers today, this is still the basic process: a bank representative spends a bunch of time and money traveling to your dealership so they can walk your lot checking inventory. And your dealership needs to divert some of its resources to helping that representative gather all the inventory details the bank needs. You might need to call in some of your reps, for example, to explain that the “missing” vehicles the bank employee can’t find are in fact out on extended test drives with potential buyers.
This manual auditing process consumes enormous amounts of both parties’ time and causes needless friction between lender and borrower. Everybody loses.
Now imagine that instead of this walk-the-whole-lot-with-the-bank-rep approach, your team can simply push a few buttons on your GPS app and generate a complete inventory of every vehicle’s VIN and exact location.
Instead of incurring the time and costs of travel, your bank can simply ask for an up-to-the-minute GPS report showing the whereabouts of every vehicle in your inventory: lot, test drives, shop, gas station, etc. You can save your staff the time and stress of dropping their work to help with the audit, and the bank can save itself time and resources scanning hundreds of cars on your lot
manually. Everybody wins.
And there’s yet another treasure cache you can uncover by deploying the right GPS solution:
increased efficiencies, streamlined audits, and a better working relationship with your financial institution.
4. Stolen vehicle recovery
First, the good news (sort of).
The National Insurance Crime Bureau reports that vehicle thefts overall in the US dropped 17% in 2024 (although that drop followed a four-year “surge”).
Now the bad news. According to data reported by WIFR News in Illinois, car thefts at dealerships across the country have “skyrocketed” over the last few years.
In other words, each year your business is becoming a more likely target for auto thieves to strike. As Willie Sutton put it, he robbed banks because that’s where the money is.
So here we offer our final bit of great news:
with the right GPS tracking solution, you can greatly increase the chances of recovering a vehicle stolen from your lot before it winds up in some auto-theft-ring’s chop shop.
The right GPS trackers will have several features that the thieves simply can’t counter. First, the devices themselves will be hidden. Second, you can arrange for emergency alerts sent to your team immediately if a vehicle that should be resting on your lot starts moving. Third, you can set up a geofence in your GPS app – a virtual fence around your lot – and automate notifications to your
team if anything in the lot moves beyond that boundary.
The fourth benefit is where things get really interesting. Because the right GPS tracker will deliver up-to-the-minute location data, you and your team can give police the play-by-play as the bad guys move through town in your dealership’s vehicle. You can even be on the line when the dispatcher tells you they’ve stopped the thief. And as we’ve heard multiple times from our GPS customers, that is an amazing feeling.
So now you’ve found your fourth treasure cache:
fewer stolen vehicles, more peace of mind, and probably more favorable terms with your auto insurer and maybe even your bank.
Of course, if you don’t implement GPS tracking as part of your lot management strategy, all this hidden treasure will remain right where it is.
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