We live in a world obsessed with efficiency. For many, time is more valuable than money.

My team and I, who own dealerships across the Southeast, first saw this shift a year ago at our Quick Lane service center in Montgomery, Alabama. The lobby was jam-packed with customers waiting to get routine maintenance done on their business vehicles.

We asked some customers if they’d prefer us to come to their homes or stores the following day and service their vehicles in their driveway or parking lot.

Many took us up on the offer. We serviced a vet clinic's vehicles and the next day they called to sign up their entire staff for mobile service appointments. They have been repeat customers ever since.

This response gave us the confidence to ask the same question to others. We called a few big corporations, from well-known delivery services to airlines, who already brought vehicles to our service centers for routine maintenance.

After just a few remote service appointments, these companies saw the potential for time and money savings. No more payroll for a person to drive vehicles to a dealership. No more paying a service tech to sit in a customer lounge for two hours.

Some of these big companies owned a mix of Ford and competitor vehicles. After seeing the time and money savings of mobile service (and our telematics-based fleet management), they swapped out some of their competitor vehicles for Ford models.

I vividly remember a fleet manager telling me at that time: There's no reason for us to drive these other products anymore if you're going to come to us to service our vehicles.

Think about that. The auto industry regularly thinks that the best way to incentivize a customer is with a discount. Although I and other dealers were skeptical at first, it’s clear that the incentive of giving time back can be just as effective.

Now, we pair our remote service techs with sales staff for a one-two punch. Vehicles get serviced more efficiently and we can talk with the right decision-makers to plot out future vehicle and software needs.

This model, which we’ve refined since Ford introduced the pilot in 2019, is working. There is a market research metric that measures how likely customers are to recommend a company, product, or service to others. Across my three dealerships that offer remote services, that number is up 15 points on average for those customers who get their vehicles serviced remotely, which includes servicing vehicles on-site or bringing them back to the service center and returning them once complete.

Not 15 percent, 15 percentage points.

Now expand those results across the country, where Ford completed nearly 4 million remote experiences in 2024. As more learn about the benefits of remote services, I think we can double that number in 2025.

Mobile service in particular is growing so quickly, it’s making us reconsider new brick-and-mortar projects for service centers. It takes years to add new service bays, whereas we can scale mobile service “bays” simply by adding new vans.

We're doing something incredible – providing maintenance for customers that save them time and money at scale – to match the needs of the modern customer.

Eddie Stivers III is owner and dealer principal at Stivers Ford Birmingham in Birmingham, Alabama, Stivers Ford Montgomery in Montgomery, Alabama, and Stivers Ford South in Atlanta.

Ford Mobile Service and Pickup & Delivery are offered by participating dealers and may be limited based on availability, distance, or other dealer-specific criteria, and does not include parts or repair charges.