Roy Littlefield of the Tire Industry Association on Tire Registration and Right to Repair Legislation

Episode 92

Roy Littlefield

Tire Industry Association

Roy Littlefield retired as CEO of the Tire Industry Association in late 2021. He began working there in 2002, and his tire industry career spans over 50 years. As CEO, he grew TIA’s membership from 2,700 to 13,000. He started his career in 1975, volunteering for Sen. Thomas McIntyre, D-NH, and worked for Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-CA, a few years later. His experience in politics taught him the importance of building strong relationships and paying attention to details. Roy earned a Ph.D. and teaches history, politics, and law at Catholic University.

In this episode…

The Tire Industry Association is working with government officials, on behalf of its 14,000 members, on two issues that are very important to independent tire and auto repair shop owners: fines associated with tire registration and Right to Repair legislation. Right to Repair allows independent shops and car owners to repair vehicles on their own without requiring that they be taken to a dealership.

According to Roy Littlefield of TIA, association members have indicated that repair facilities generate about 70 percent of their income — which makes Right to Repair legislation vital for shop owners who are not affiliated with a manufacturer or retailer. Meanwhile, Roy emphasizes that independent shop owners should familiarize themselves with tire registration laws as soon as possible to avoid large fines that could completely derail a small business.

On this episode of Gain Traction, Roy joins Mike Edge for an important conversation about Right to Repair legislation and tire registration fines. Roy provides context on why both issues are important to tire and auto repair shop owners, explains how TIA is working with government officials on both matters and emphasizes the immediate need for shop owners to get up to speed on tire registration laws to avoid devastating fines. You don’t want to miss this episode!

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Roy Littlefield talks about how he worked his way into the tire industry
The secret to solving disagreements between tire manufacturers and retailers
Why Roy considers the Right to Repair so vital
How President Biden feels about the Right to Repair Law
Roy details the current tire registration issue and the potential risks associated with it
How the fines for failing to register tires get so large

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to the Gain Traction Podcast, where we feature top automotive entrepreneurs and experts and share their inspiring stories. Now let’s get started with the show.

Mike:

Hello folks. Welcome to the Gain Traction Podcast. I am Mike Edge, your host today. The Gain Traction Podcast is where I talk with top automotive business leaders and tire leaders about what’s going on in the industry. Today, I’d like to encourage you, if you have not already, to listen to a recent podcast I did with Jason Brook, President and CEO of Independent Tire Dealers Group, also known as it ITDG. I’m a little biased, but it was just a great interview and I think you guys can get a lot out of it.

This episode is brought to you by Tread Partners. Do you sell tires and automotive repair services and have multiple locations? Did you know that most tire dealers spend way too much money with regards to Google AdWords or their PPC programs? To make things a little easier on you, get an audit and see if you can be spending your money wiser. PPC should be your most effective and cost-efficient way to increase car count. If it’s not, maybe there’s a problem. Get your program evaluated today.

Feel free to check out treadpartners.com or you can email me for directions on how to do this, [email protected]. Our guest today is Roy Littlefield. He’s the former CEO of the Tire Industry Association, also known as TIA, and currently runs their government affairs office. Roy, I’m excited to have you on the program. Welcome.

Roy:

Thank you very much, Mike. It’s great to be here.

Mike:

So just from a biographical standpoint, tell us a little bit about yourself, Roy, and where you came from, and maybe what was your family like growing up and were you always around tires or how did you finally get to the tire world?

Roy:

I grew up in a small mill town in New Hampshire. And went to college at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. Then I went to Washington DC to go to grad school. And I wanted to go to Washington and I wanted to work on the Hill to get that exposure and that understanding that’s not in the textbook. And so I walked into my senator’s office and said, “Can I be a volunteer?” And they said, “Sure.” So I did that and then a couple months later they offered me a job at $10,500 a year. In 1975, that was a lot of money. And in my little mill town, if you made 10,000, you were in the upper crest. And so I never told my parents how much I made because I didn’t want to embarrass them. But I was on the hill for four years and then I got the opportunity to work for, at the time, National Tire Deals and Retreaders Association. And so it was a great experience. And the person who hired me was actually from New Hampshire.

Mike:

Oh yeah.

Roy:

If any of you remember Phil Freeland and Russ McCleary. Phil used to say that he wasn’t sure that Russ and I weren’t relatives because New Hampshire’s not very big. But Russ said he had three piles and he said they had over 300 applications. A number kept going up, but he would tell the same story. He would say one was for somebody who had capital Hill experience, one was from somebody who had writing experience and one was … he never said what the third one was. So finally I said, Russ, “Why don’t you just tell the truth? The third one was for people from New Hampshire and I was the only one in that pile.”

Mike:

That’s great.

Roy:

So that’s how it started. And I got my PhD and you have different fields of study and one of them was law. So I had that background. I had the American political history background and I had the politics background. And then I had four years experience on the hill. So it made a great difference going in. So right off the bat we were able to get through a series of bills that they had been kicking around for 20 years. Nobody ever voted against them, but nobody ever voted for them either.

Mike:

Just laying there basically. Yeah. So the tire industry, you obviously got to it and you stayed in it. What attracted you?

Roy:

Well, what they told me when they hired me was, we can’t teach politics here, but we can teach you about the industry. Also, for the first few years, just so I would get to know the industry better, every time there was a recess in Congress, I would go out and visit a different kind of member. A distributor, a tire dealer, a commercial dealer, a passenger dealer, a retreader. I would do all those kind of things. And because I grew up in a mill town, pretty blue collar and so I felt comfortable with everybody there.

I’d worked on the Hill, so I felt comfortable with the CEO’s. I worked in mills and stuff. I was very comfortable with people at all levels. And I think that helped me a lot. And I didn’t try to ever say something that wasn’t right. And when I lobbied, I always brought in dealers because my philosophy was, you are the experts, and nobody can tell your story as good as you can.

My job is to plug your expertise into the right place at the right time. So we had a great string of legislative victories over the year, the state scrap tire funds, we worked on 47 of those, I think. All of those kind of things. And we would have lobby days and have people come in. I hope a lot of your listeners after we talk will want to participate because they make the difference. And in Congress it’s who they hear from. I can remember one time in congressman talking about a tax bill and who was going to get taxed more and who wasn’t. And he said, “If you look at a scoreboard, in the end, the people who came to Washington and talked about it, didn’t get the new taxes, but all the other industries did because we just figured they didn’t care.”

Mike:

And that’s so interesting. But it goes back to that old, the squeaky wheel gets the oil right?

Roy:

Yes.

Mike:

And so as an advocate, it’s your job basically to bring as many people together with TIA, the Tire Industry Association, and voice the concerns within the industry. And for the most part, everybody inside the industry want the same thing, I would assume.

Roy:

Yes.

Mike:

Okay.

Roy:

Sometimes there’s a difference between manufacturers and retailers, but that’s that way in any industry. And if you can talk it out, that’s the best thing.

Mike:

And what you try to do there, from my understanding, prior to us recording the podcast, you try to bring the parties to the table to work out what could benefit both sides.

Roy:

And there are a lot of different things involved in that. But I used to have meetings every year with our executive committee, with all the CEO’s of the major tire manufacturers or the leading people in the United States and Canada. Just so we knew each other. So when something happened, we could get on the phone and talk to each other. And those stories about … I had one dealer who committed suicide when he got cancer and called up the manufacturer and how they worked it out. And I had another dealer who left his wife and got on a boat and went around the world, and a major manufacturer came up and helped the family get the business in order and to sell it. And just those kind of things that you never talk about publicly, but are all part of industry relations. And I think that when you have those kind of relations with the manufacturer and you call up, they know who you are and they know that you’re serious.

Mike:

No, that’s true. Well, I’ve only been in the industry for, I consider it a short time, say roughly 15 years. And it’s always been on the marketing or the media side, such as what we’re doing here with the podcast. But it gets in your blood. I love the people like you said, and I enjoyed meeting a wide range of people. But what is really fun about it is, from a networking standpoint, that old cliche, you’re six degrees away from anybody in the world. And in this industry I think you’re literally two degrees or less.

You can connect with people so quickly in this industry and for the most part, I think people want to help each other. But it’s important, and this is why I asked you to be on here, I think TIA plays such a critical role with communication and advocacy. And one of the advocacy issues I think we’re talking about today is right to repair. That you guys are involved with that as well. But I know it affects so many of our listeners. We have a lot of retailer listeners, multi-location listeners. And I think for those that are maybe catching the headlines, if we could dive in a little bit deeper for those guys to let them know the significance.

It means a lot to the bottom line of their operations and what the future means for the industry if we don’t collectively win on this issue, do you want to take off on that a little bit? The right to repair.

Roy:

Sure. In our surveys with the 14,000 TIA A members, the repair facilities now is about 70% of their income. There was a time back in 1970 when I started that a lot of dealers at that time was just selling tires, weren’t selling repair services. So it’s extremely important to us. And I’ve seen Better Business Bureau surveys, which said, they put out a hundred professions and they said rate them as, who do you trust and who don’t you trust? And tire dealers were about 8% top eight. Not the bottom eight. Top 8% that consumers trusted the tire dealers. Service station dealers were high, and automobile dealers were number 100.

Mike:

Wow.

Roy:

And now you’re trying to force people into those automobile dealerships and almost anything you’re talking about. People just don’t want to go to the dealerships, because an oil change, instead of costing $40 at a tire store would cost maybe $80. Everything costs more at the dealership.

And to exclude the automotive, the independent automotive aftermarket, it is just not fair. And to do it through legislation and laws. You look at what happened in Massachusetts. It passed the legislature, but then it had to go on a ballot. On the last three weeks before the ballot vote, the automobile manufacturer spent 27 million dollars on ads that were really disgusting talking about telematics and how that’s going to keep ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends from tracking a woman. And they would show pictures of women getting mugged in parking garages and things like that. It was really unfair.

But in the end, the citizens voted for it by 85% to 15%. So consumers want to … you buy a car, you should be able to go where you want to get it fixed. You buy anything else, you can go where you want to get it fixed. And this shouldn’t be something that the government does to protect automobile dealers.

Competition should be the deciding factor. Competition and cost. Well. So yeah, very engaged in this. The President, and I don’t want to get into politics, but President Biden has signed an executive order supporting the independent repairers. He supports the right to repair law. And he has named a committee of five, of which I’m fortunate to be on, to talk between the Federal Trade Commission and Congress to figure out a way that the Federal Trade Commission can have more authority over preserving the independent rights and options. So we think it’s the number one issue right now. We’ve got some very important ones, but this is the number one issue because this industry is so dependent on it and rightfully so because you’re doing such a great job.

Mike:

Absolutely. And you’re right. It is a majority of most of the tire dealers I talk to … it is usually when you think about the split today … it is the majority of their income. And it’s paramount. And it’s the big guy versus the little guy kind of syndrome. But the frustrating thing is to think that, you know, can’t win in the marketplace, so I’m going to win trying to legislate the little guy out of it basically and legislate that I’m the only, meaning the dealers, are the only places you can take your car. Which to your point, you’re absolutely right. There’s always hesitancy in the marketplace to take their car back to the dealer because they know their independent dealer better. They know that guy that’s been in there for years. They know the mechanic. They drop the keys on the counter, can walk out and say, “Joe, call me when it’s finished.”

And to that point, I literally just did that Friday, for my son’s vehicle. And I’m a prime example of that just happening right now. And I didn’t even know what it was going to cost. I just knew that I could trust the guys.

Roy:

Exactly.

Mike:

I would’ve been very worried if I had to take it to the dealer because I don’t really know people and people they shuffle. And I may know the ownership of the car dealer, but at the same time they’re not running the service department. And everybody’s got different motivations. So I applaud you guys for doing this. There was another issue I know that you wanted to talk about and our time is short, but let’s dive into tire registration. That seemed very significant on your mind.

Roy:

There’s another fight going on in tire registration. The law originally passed in 1971. By 1982, the fines for a member not registering a tire, a tire dealer not registering a tire, requires a thousand dollars per tire up to a total of $700,000 per location. Now we’re in a situation where those same tires that are not registered, the dealer could be fined $23,000 per tire up to 118 million dollars per location.

Now I’m sure that NHTSA inspectors are not going to fine a tire dealer 118 million, but they could find a tire dealer a lot of money and put somebody out of business. And in an industry that there is so much merging of companies and so forth, they could hit 10 of your stores in a week and what would the fine be if you’re not doing it? Now the manufacturers were under the gun from NHTSA because the registration rates, according to the manufacturers, was so low and that was having an impact on the recall rates.

However, the law of 1971 stated that you could have third party status with the manufacturers. So you take a lot of the big companies. They could be registering the tires, keeping the records themselves, and then producing the records when there’s a recall. And if you added in those, the registration rates would be between 95 and a hundred percent.

So this came up in the transportation bill, on two bills back and it was introduced by Lindsey Graham of South Carolina in a markup session. There were no copies of the bill. There were no hearings on it. There was no discussion on it. He didn’t have a title for it, but there were like 37 bills raised. And it was a situation where the Republicans supported the amendments and the Democrats refused to vote. It went to the floor of the house and once again, 200 plus amendments were introduced by the Republicans.

And in that final vote, no Democrats voted and the Republicans passed it. And then it went to the floor of the house where, and some more amendments were introduced. Now I had gone up to New Jersey to meet with the chairman of the committee, who was a Democrat in the House at the time and said, “What was happening here?” And he said, “Well, this isn’t fair at all.” And so he put in a last minute milli, he said, “I can’t kill this bill because we’re running out of time in Congress and we’ve got to have a highway bill.” And so he put in an amendment that there had to be a study done between the manufacturers and the dealers to try to come up with some solutions on this. And we have been meeting for several years now. And the individual manufacturers have really sat down and talked to us about it and done a good job.

We’re in a situation now where the fines, if this was adopted, but not all the manufacturers are in support of this, it would be two … if inspector came in, the first two violations, the first two visits by an inspector would not be any charge at all. And the next one would be $250. The next one would be $500. And then after that it’d be a thousand before it started going up. Well, that would give you five chances. You might not have ever had a NHTSA inspector in your store, but if you haven’t, I can’t imagine you’re going to have five and not pay attention to it. So I think that that’s what we’re trying to do right now. The manufacturers are split on the whole thing. The smaller manufacturers don’t like the idea of electronic identification. NHTSA has done a study saying the technology is available.

What they’re proposing is to have a scanner that the manufacturers would pay for in your location. So if anybody came in just for an oil change or anything, you could just scan the tires. And no matter if you were doing a road service call, you could just scan the tires. And if they are in fact recalled and you didn’t know it, they could be changed at that time. And I think that’s the only way you’re really going to get the recall rates up.

But it’s been a tough one. And most dealers have no clue. We have dealers who are multi-million dollar lawsuits now over something that’s happened because of the registration. So even though they’re not enforcing it right now, or I shouldn’t say that because then someone who gets caught, but they don’t seem to be enforcing it right now, hoping that the industry can come back with a solution. But this is very serious and they’ve never registered truck tires before on a massive scale. And the registration rates are very low on what the manufacturers are getting back from passenger tires. So it’s an issue that’s very important. And we’ve got to work with numbers of Congress and we need all your involvement because this is a tough one.

Mike:

And I’d like to emphasize that from the retailer standpoint. If you’re a retailer, please get aware of this issue, tire registration and your potential risk. And then, if you’re not involved with TIA right now, get involved with Tire Industry Association and voice your opinion and let it be known because otherwise, I mean to Roy’s point, you could be hit with fines that are really ridiculous. And that’s another question, Roy. Who makes up the fines and how do they get that large?

Roy:

Congress passes the laws to make the fines for NHTSA and NHTSA comes up to them and says, “This is what we need.” And Congress doesn’t break it out. So you’re getting the same kind of fines for a tire dealer as you get for an automobile manufacturer. And that’s not fair. So that’s how the fines get so high.

Mike:

Gotcha. That’s just not … I gotcha. And you’re saying NHTSA, but go ahead and tell the audience or listeners what that stands for, please. National-

Roy:

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Mike:

So folks, just do yourself a favor, get aware of tire registration so that you’re not caught with one of these fines. And it sounds like Roy, what you guys are trying to do, at least in the interiorium is … if I’m stating this correctly, is at least create a buffer before someone has to be hit with a heavy fine that you might have somewhere between three and five chances of a visit. Is that accurate?

Roy:

Yeah, that’s very accurate. Thank you.

Mike:

Okay.

Roy:

And on these things, I’m getting active. Give me a call at TIA a or send me an email or whatever because we’d love to have you come to town and you’re going to be amazed. You’re going to go up on the Hill and you’re going to talk to a legislative aid or to a senator or a congressman who has no industry background. Very few do. Gabby Giffords … she had a tire dealership before she was shot. Now her husband’s a senator and we just were up in his office a couple weeks ago, and he signed on for the Right to Repair Act. I think we got 28 senators now or members of Congress that are co-sponsors. But he understood the … he said, “I couldn’t go home and see Gabby if I didn’t sign onto this law. This is important.” And somebody knows somebody. And that’s the thing. That’s the beauty of it.

I remember we had a meeting with a congressman who was a committee chair from West Virginia. And we brought in some dealers from West Virginia. We found one who went to school with him. So they came in, they started talking about how they both had a crush and the same girl in eighth grade and she ended up marrying somebody else they both thought was a jerk. And he didn’t even ask what the bill was. He said, “What’s the number? I’ll co-sponsor it.” And that was a committee chairman who didn’t bring it up for a hearing for two years.

Mike:

Wow. So it just goes to show you though, Roy, as an industry, we just have to make our voice heard. And organizations like TIA are great for the credibility factor because it brings us all together, and then you guys represent us in a way that presents it to these guys that really, they can’t be educated on everything. We can’t expect them to be. And it’s our job to be their educators. But I think this is rational. This makes sense. And I think if they understand that, hey, if I was a dealer, I should have the right to fix any automobile that comes in my door. And I shouldn’t be excluded simply because the larger guys want to create a law that says I can’t. Yeah. And that’s on the right to repair side. But on the tire registration side, same thing.

We appreciate your all’s advocacy and all the work you guys do, Roy. And I think it’s great for the industry. And I would encourage many of you guys listening today, if you’re a dealer, join the organization. We’re one big voice and then you can let Roy know what your concerns are. And Roy, give them your email address right now if you don’t mind.

Roy:

[email protected].

Mike:

That’s great. Well, Roy, I’ll tell you what, I can’t express enough gratitude for you being on today. It’s been a pleasure. And we would probably like to have you back sometime to talk about other issues.

Roy:

Would love it. Would love it.

Mike:

Okay, great. To all our listeners out there, thank you for being part of the podcast today. If you’d like to recommend a guest to us, please email me at [email protected]. And till next time, be safe and have a great day.

Announcer:

Thanks for listening to the Gain Traction Podcast. We’ll see you again next time. And be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.

Transcript

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1 In this episode…

1.1 Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

1.2 Resources mentioned in this episode:

2 Transcript

In this episode…

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Transcript

Transcript

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