David Hudson’s grandfather opened one Chevrolet store in Providence, Kentucky in 1948. Today Hudson Automotive Group runs just over 60 dealerships across the Southeast — and Hudson says the goal was never a rooftop number.
In Episode 74 of Presidio’s Full Throttle, Jason Stein sits down with the third-generation dealer and CEO for a candid read on where automotive retail actually stands in 2026: what’s working, what’s tightening, and which technology is worth the money.
Inside this episode:
- Why 2026 has outperformed Hudson’s own January budget — and what he got wrong
- The SAAR range he’d “sign up for” for the next twenty years
- The K-shaped economy: why customers are getting approved and still walking away at the payment
- “We like to be on the cutting edge of technology, but not the bleeding edge” — Hudson’s filter for vetting the vendors calling every week
- The AI use case with the clearest ROI: how his CFO turned a 3,500-line monthly DMS invoice into found money
- Whether AI truly transforms dealership economics — or just makes us faster at what we already do
- Where friction still lives in the buying process, and why the online-to-showroom handoff is the real gap
- F&I on an iPad at the sales desk: more speed, more transparency, still compliant
- Opportunistic M&A in a flight-to-quality market — and how you “buy the multiple down”
- What Hudson is watching heading into 2027