Car audio shops are in all corners of the earth, including North Pole, Alaska.
In a town of 6,000, where temperatures can drop to negative 50, the shop called Eksessiv Audio, does about 800 remote start installations in a year.
More than 80 percent of the town’s population has remote start and over 95 percent of them buy long-range; two-way models. There’s little skimping. Even when a customer has a car with factory remote start, he will buy an aftermarket longer range unit.
“The majority of remote starts I do are where people have an existing remote start,” says owner Rob Wallach.
The building walls are thicker in the area (8 inches instead of the common 4), and use more insulation, which can shorten the range capability for remote start when indoors. “People want the 1.2 mile to 1 mile range,” he said, noting, also, when they finish shopping at the mall they want confirmation that car has actually started and is warming up.
When Wallach arrives at work in the winter he’ll start up all the cars waiting in the lot and run them for 45 minutes. Then he’ll make sure each car he’s about to work on is started and running about an hour in advance (so it’s warm enough to work on).
Eksessive sells car audio but most of the business is in remote start, as well as OEM integration and car video and most of it occurs over a 5 month period starting around October. He uses Compustar for remote start exclusively.
Wallach takes off in the warmer months and travels to Dallas where he has another shop, Excessive Audio, which is a mobile operation. He shares a building in North Pole with an automotive repair shop called Pearson’s Automotive, which handles warranty work for Eksessive during the off season. Pearson winterizes a lot of cars, while Wallach adds remote start.
In October and November, Wallach has help from a temporary installer. They’ll each do about 6 to 10 remote starts a day.
The shop has about 100o square feet and is in the process of a remodel that will expand it to 3,600, but he shares that with Pearson’s. On completion he’ll have 3 bays and a showroom, where he now has 2 bays.
It should be noted there are two military installations in North Pole. Wallach is originally from Delaware, but he ended up in Alaska as part of his 20 years of service in the military. He retired in 2011 from the air force where he performed vehicle maintenance.
Source: CEoutlook
I wonder if Santa Claus has a remote start?