May 7, 2020—About 90 percent of the auto industry applied for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) under the CARES Act and approximately 40 percent got approved, according to an Automotive Service Association (ASA) webinar held Wednesday.
The ASA received responses from an industry-wide survey and the data comes from the time period of around April 22. At the time of the survey, little over 20 percent of the auto industry had seen funding already. Around 84 percent of the industry had received no response.
After Congress ran out of money for its third stimulus package that funded $349 billion, Bob Redding, Washington, D.C., representative for ASA, says Congress passed a "3.5" stimulus package that put $321 billion into the PPP.
As of Wednesday, Redding says there is about $100 billion left in the program. That money could run out in the next few days.
"I know this can create a lot of anxiety among repairers and what we've been trying to do is provide facts through social media and other media platforms that ASA provides our members," Redding says. "It's critical here that Congress is working behind the scenes on a fourth stimulus package."
Redding says they are pressing for multiple pieces here. Number one is that the PPP fund is replenished to make sure that all automotive repairers that apply and are approved can receive funding. Secondly, through two separate coalitions that ASA is involved in, they're looking to expand the PPP to go beyond the timeframe that was established in the original CARES Act.
"What we're concerned about is that when all of this is over and let's say eight weeks of the loan are forgiven that we still missed a lot of revenue here with a drop in business, and whether you're mechanical or collision, we lost money," Redding says. "We are concerned about shops not getting back to their first quarter 2019 gross revenues."
