Dan Berg’s office is covered in fishing photos. The new manager of Jacobson Ford loves the sport and the outdoors, which is why he took the job to run Revelstoke’s only car dealership.
“They needed a manager here and because I love being outside,” he said when asked what brought him here. “I should have been born and raised here.”
I met Berg last week after learning he had taken over the dealership from Cory Herle, who moved on to Saskatchewan. Berg is from Norway but grew up in Grand Prairie, Alberta. He started selling cars in Calgary 22 years ago, when he was 18.
He was working in construction when his boss suggested he apply for a job as a car salesman. “I had the gift of the gab,” said Berg. “He said I don’t want to be in construction for the rest of my life, I’m a car salesman.”
He wasn’t a car nut by any means, but the job fit and he stuck with it, eventually becoming a finance manager at a Ford dealership in Kamloops. He did that for 14 years before being promoted to branch manager.
“I’ve done all aspects of the business for a long period of time,” he said. “I’ve managed a couple of very successful stores.”
Revelstoke’s dealership, he said, “Has all the potential in the world.”
“They’ve got great product, great people,” he added.
I decided to pick Berg’s brains about what people want in a vehicle in Revelstoke. There were two main subjects we touched on — winter driving and off-road driving. We figured they separated driving in Revelstoke from driving elsewhere — navigating snowy streets, or pounding up a logging road to access your favourite trail.
“I don’t know if I could tell you what build’s the more perfect vehicle,” he said. “If it was a hoverboard and you could fly up to the top of the hill, wouldn’t that be something?”
Naturally, Berg referred to Ford products while we spoke. He said the F150 pickup truck and the Escape SUV were the biggest sellers. Notably, they are both all-wheel drive. He said the technology had come so far, that the vehicle can manage the handling almost by itself.
“The technology that they have in these vehicles, they can literally put 80 per cent of the power of the engine to one tire. If you’ve got three tires slipping and one tire’s not, it’s such an intelligent system that it sends all that power to one tire.”
He said new all-wheel drive systems were just as powerful as four-wheel drive ones. “In winter, in bad conditions, an all wheel drive is just as capable as that beast you have to lock into four-by-four,” he said. “To drive a four-by-four effectively you need to know when to engage and when not to engage. A lot of people are in four-wheel drive when they shouldn’t be. Now you don’t need to know — let the vehicle do it for you. The vehicle makes all the decisions for you that you don’t know how to make.”
For backroad use, Berg said the new aluminum bodies are much stronger than before, and are rustproof. Beyond that, he recommended a feature called four-wheel differential lock. It allows you to set the car so an equal amount of power is sent to each wheel.
“Four wheel differential lock is a tank to crawl you out of four feet of mud,” he said. However, he added, it shouldn’t be used on dry pavement because it affects the handling.
Berg also brought up comfort as a factor. Things like heated seats, heated steering wheels and even heated windows will make a difference to your driving experience, especially in winter.
“You can click on the heated seat and the heated steering wheel, and you can still see your breath, but your hands are toasty and your ass is toasty,” he said.
Revelstoke is an ideal location for new vehicles because of the way it maximizes their potential.
“People are only enjoying a small percentage of what these vehicles can do when they’re living in a place that doesn’t dump 30 feet of snow a year,” said Berg.
You can ask more questions of Berg at the Jacobson Ford dealership on Victoria Road. He said he “does things differently than most other dealerships.”
“When customers come to this store they will always get upfront my best price, what the trade in is worth, what the payments will be, what the interest rates are,” he said.
