The dealer may keep the workshop while more of the recurring digital relationship moves back toward the OEM. That is not automatically a problem, but the economics were built for a different split of lifetime value.

Presidio Group's U.S. public-dealer data shows how much of dealership gross profit sits outside the new-vehicle margin: fixed operations and F&I together represented roughly 70% of gross profit on about 18% of revenue, while new-vehicle gross margin fell from 11.8% in 2022 to 6.4% in 2025.

Germany shows the same dependence in a different market structure. More than 60% of dealer contribution margin can come from aftersales while overall operating returns remain around 1.1%.

The workshop is therefore not a side business. It is part of the financial architecture that makes the franchise investable.

Battery-electric vehicles remove or reduce many routine maintenance events. Evidence used in the original article put routine maintenance requirements at roughly 10% to 20% of comparable combustion-vehicle levels and modelled workshop revenue and profit reductions of around 30% to 45%. Norwegian cohort evidence showed aftersales profit per EV cohort 10% to 30% below comparable combustion cohorts.

At the same time, manufacturers are building recurring software and connected-service economics. GM reported $5.4 billion of deferred connected-services revenue in 2025 and projected $7.5 billion for 2026. Stellantis has previously set a 2030 software-revenue ambition of €20 billion. Ford reported more than 550,000 paid software subscriptions.

Dealer economics can weaken even while total lifetime value around the vehicle grows, if the new value is captured by a different party.

Current fixed operations are still strong in many markets. U.S. public dealers generated roughly $9.23 million of service and parts revenue per store in 2025, around a third above the level eight years earlier. EV customers also remain relatively dependent on franchised service in many markets because high-voltage, software and warranty work still require specialist capability.

That is why the transition can be easy to dismiss. The installed parc is mostly combustion and hybrid, older vehicles keep workshops busy, and early EV cohorts can carry warranty work that is not representative of mature maintenance economics.

The result is a parc-lag anaesthetic: today's workshop performance can postpone the point at which the future service model has to be redesigned.

Norway provides the mature-BEV view. Dealer groups have reported lower aftersales profit on EV cohorts even while the network remains essential for technical work, warranty and customer support.

China shows the pressure from a different direction. In 2025, 55.7% of surveyed dealerships were loss-making and 82% reported selling new vehicles below wholesale cost. The service and used-car pools therefore matter even more, but intense price competition makes it difficult for those businesses to compensate indefinitely for weak front-end economics.

These are not the same market. Together they show why a network can face pressure from both sides: the new-car margin can compress before the service annuity has been redesigned for a higher-EV parc.

Agency and direct models can remove inventory financing, residual-value and discount risk from the dealer. That is meaningful. The dealer can still retain property, people, workshop capacity and EV investment while earning a fixed sales commission that is materially different from the old gross-margin structure.

The European retreat from some agency rollouts is a reminder that the commercial model has to work with the operating system around it. IT stability, local margin, working capital, customer ownership and exception handling all move together.

Changing the sales contract does not, by itself, replace the workshop economics on which the dealer investment was built.

Dealer buy-sell activity can remain strong while the economic mix underneath the franchise changes. A buyer looking only at current fixed-operations performance risks capitalising a service pool that belongs to an older vehicle parc.

A more useful view separates the installed parc by powertrain and age, models the service, warranty, tyre, body, used-vehicle and finance pools that remain with the dealer, and then maps which software, data and recurring-service economics sit upstream.

The result may still support attractive dealer economics. It may also show that remuneration, network capacity or asset values need to move before the accounting history makes the issue obvious.