What Universal Analytics offers to developers is the ability to collect data from multiple devices and platforms.
Old Google Analytics would only report website traffic, with Universal Analytics you can track actions in mobile apps, game consoles, and information kiosks. For the automotive industry, the extra device tracking is not a huge perk. However, when an account has Universal Analytics enabled, you can see details about which search engine was used arriving on the site, user behavior details like session timeouts, referral exclusions, and search term exclusions.
Referral exclusions can be useful for providing more accurate data about user behavior. For example, if your site has a sister site at a different domain, and users could bounce back and forth between the 2, you would want to exclude each of the urls so that this behavior is reported as the same session instead of referral traffic.
Excluded search terms allow you to mark organic search traffic from specific terms as direct traffic instead. If you would prefer that when people search for your company name to get to your website, they are considered direct traffic instead of organic search traffic, you could add the company name as an excluded search term.
All behaviors from these exclusions are still recorded, but the user’s intention and process becomes more clear.
Hopefully, this clears up some of the changes in Universal Analytics.