Curbee, a technology platform for car dealerships looking to offer mobile service, joins a growing trend among dealerships setting up their own programs for service calls at home or at work.

Proponents say mobile service increases parts and service sales, regains market share from the aftermarket, expands a dealership’s catchment area and promotes customer loyalty.

“I think it’s a differentiator with customers,” Texas luxury car dealer Brendan Harrington tells WardsAuto.

The mobile service attracted a lot of interest during the worst phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, when customers could not or would not come to car dealerships for service and had to rely on other goods and services to be delivered to their homes.

Harrington is president of Autobahn Fort Worth, a dealership group with six stores, all of which carry European import brands, including BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mini, Porsche, Volkswagen and Volvo Cars.

He says each of these brands encouraged him to offer services, and he has been experimenting with providing mobile services for “probably 15 years,” but he has never been able to stick with it.

Although he is convinced of the attractiveness of having his own service system, he says it is too difficult to expand and implement it.

“People love it,” says Harrington. “But it’s failing, mainly because of scheduling. It’s too difficult. It’s too manual.”

Enter San Francisco-based Curbee, founded in 2020 and designed and launched by former Tesla executives who worked on the automaker’s mobile service program.

“I finally found someone who I think has the software that allows us to do it right,” says Harrington, who signed with Curbee six months ago.

Curbee CEO Denise Leleux tells WardsAuto that so far the company has primarily worked with its own fleet of service vehicles to serve customers locally, but after a successful pilot program with dealers in several states, Curbee now wants to become a supplier to OEMs and car dealerships, possibly nationwide, she says.

Curbee has made it onto the lists of about a half-dozen OEM “approved providers,” but Leleux says she can’t divulge specifics. “Dealer heads, heads of fixed operations, they all say mobile is coming,” she says of the positive response.

Merchants can decide for themselves how much Curbee wants to involve them in the development of mobile services. Factors include whether the merchant has previous experience with such a service and how much they want to outsource.

Leleux says that for those new to mobile service, Curbee provides “playbooks” for outfitting service vehicles and other operational details based on Curbee’s experience providing services to fleet customers.

Dealers just starting out can start small or perhaps get familiar with mobile service by offering services to fleet customers, she says.

The fleet business is easier and more efficient than learning to schedule service appointments for hundreds of individual customers, Leleux says, because a fleet customer typically has multiple vehicles that need to be serviced, all in the same parking lot.

“Density is key. You need density to stay busy, reduce downtime and reduce travel time between jobs,” says Leleux.

Another Curbee customer, Andy Guelcher, president of Mohawk Chevrolet in Ballston Spa, NY, recently went live with Curbee and plans to initially offer the mobile service exclusively to fleet customers, using a single delivery truck.

“We don’t want it to be part of the retail user experience from the start,” Guelcher tells WardsAuto. “We’re targeting larger companies, which should allow us to offer seven or eight services in one location.”