www. PowersportsBusiness. com

Powersports Business • July 2026 • 13

The powersports industry has a transparency and perception problem, and it is called freight and setup.

Consumers see one price online, then show up at the dealership and are MARK SHEFFIELD presented with another. The dealer then gets put in the worst possible position: explaining charges the customer did not expect, defending fees the dealer did not create, and trying to save trust in the middle of a transaction that should have been exciting.

That is not a good customer experience. It is not good for dealers. And frankly, it is not good for the OEMs either.

This is not a new problem. Dealers have been talking about freight and setup for years. The difference now is that the conversation has changed. This is no longer just about whether a customer gets irritated at the sales desk. This is now about transparency, compliance, advertising risk, and the long-term credibility of our retail model.

The automotive industry figured this out a long time ago. Destination is part of the pricing structure. The manufacturer and the dealer are generally speaking the same language to the customer. That does not mean every automotive transaction is perfect, but the basic advertised pricing framework is far more aligned than what we have in powersports.

In powersports, we have allowed a fractured system to continue for too long. The OEM publishes an MSRP that does not include freight. The dealer is charged freight. The vehicle requires setup, assembly, inspection, and preparation before it is ready for the customer. Then the dealer is left to recover those costs at retail, often as separate line items that the consumer sees as dealer-created add-ons. That is the heart of the problem. The customer does not care who created the charge. They do not care whether it came from the OEM, the carrier, the crate, the setup process, or the technician who had to assemble and inspect the unit before delivery. All they know is that they saw one price and then got shown another.

And when that happens, the dealer takes the hit.

The NPDA has released a white paper calling for a better, cleaner, more transparent model. The proposal is simple: OEMs should include freight or destination in the published MSRP, and they should create a formal reimbursement structure for required dealer setup. That could be handled through wholesale pricing, reimbursement, or another clear structure. The exact mechanism can be worked out. The principle should not be controversial.

And to be very clear, this cannot come at the expense of dealer margin. Dealer margins are already under increasing pressure, and any proposal that simply keeps MSRPs close to current levels while forcing dealers to absorb freight and setup costs is not a solution. It is just moving the problem from the customer’ s invoice to the dealer’ s financial

statement, and that is not acceptable. Mandatory costs should not be hidden downstream.

If a cost is required to get the vehicle from the factory to the dealership and make it ready for the customer, then it needs to be reflected in the pricing architecture upstream. Dealers should not be forced to either advertise a higher all-in price that looks uncompetitive against the OEM’ s own website or advertise the MSRP and then risk looking like the bad guy when the real transaction price is explained.

That is an impossible position, and it is one dealers did not create. However, this is one of those rare issues where with the

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they hand off tasks between tools, and they report back. Instead of you bringing the AI to the problem, the agent is already working on it before you knew there was a problem to solve.

An agent could watch your RO board and flag anything over 72 hours with no status update. Another could monitor your first-service follow-up window and send a reminder to the advisor if no contact has been logged. Another could pull your weekly numbers, format them, and have a summary waiting in your inbox Monday morning before you get in.

This is not science fiction. We’ re building and testing exactly this inside The Dealer Lab right now. Getting there requires a foundation. The manual habits I described above, clear prompts, useful outputs, documented processes, that’ s the groundwork. Teams that skip it and go straight to agents end up automating chaos.

But if you’ ve started experimenting and you’ re ready to think about what an AIassisted operating system could look like for your store, that’ s the conversation we want to have.

Reach out at max @ ownex. io. We’ re deep in it and we’ re happy to share what we’ re learning. Start with the service message prompt. Try it today. It takes four minutes. The rest will follow.

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