7:14 am, August 3, 2026
Every 10 to 15 years a technology shift changes how cars are bought and sold.
The internet and smartphones both led to huge shifts in behaviour and created entirely new business models.
Motorway itself was built on another, when phone cameras got good enough that a seller on their driveway could produce a smart profile that a dealer could buy remotely with confidence.
AI is the next big shift, and I think it may be far more impactful than the ones that came before.
Every technology leap before this changed how people transacted, but none of them changed who could build things. You still needed software engineers, big budgets and a lot of time to build meaningful applications.
AI has dramatically lowered that barrier. And that is the most exciting part of what is happening in the used car industry: Not simply what companies like Motorway are building with AI, but what dealers are beginning to build for themselves.
What I’m seeing dealers build
The first time a dealer showed me their own AI agent a year ago, it blew me away. It took our daily auction data, combined it with their own sales history, prep costs and third party retail pricing, and gave them a shortlist every morning: Here are the right cars to bid on, here’s what to pay, and here’s why.
This dealer didn’t have a technical background – what they had was intense curiosity, deep knowledge of their business and a willingness to spend time experimenting with emerging tools.
Another dealer had pointed AI at his email inbox. Stock notifications from multiple platforms and customer enquiries now feed into a single live view showing which deals are moving, what needs attention and where every sale sits, and integrated into their DMS.
This is not technology for technology’s sake. Dealers are applying it to the practical, repetitive work that drives how well their businesses operate.
We’re now seeing versions of this across hundreds of dealerships, and we see the output of it in our own marketplace. Dealers experimenting most actively with these tools are also bidding more frequently, buying more vehicles than ever, and becoming increasingly precise about what they buy and what they pay.
Gut instinct was actually data all along
When we started Motorway 10 years ago, some of the pushback I heard most often was some version of: ‘I’ve been in the trade 20 years. My gut tells me what to buy and what to pay.’
But that instinct wasn’t some kind of magic. It was data – experience and context accumulated over years of trading and learned, often painfully, through thousands of individual decisions and transactions going right and wrong.
That is why I don’t see AI as a threat to trade experience. Experience defines which questions are worth asking, and what to protect against. AI is the first technology that allows almost anyone to put live data underneath that instinct and begin automating actions on top of it.
Where Motorway fits in
We believe Motorway has an important role to play in this shift. Our job is to make our data easier for dealers to build on, and help dealers make what they invent more powerful and useful.
Not everyone has to build their own tools from scratch, and we’re also building AI into our own dealer experience, so that everyone can benefit from this new level of intelligence.
AI runs through our own products too, from damage detection trained on the 1.5m photos we receive every month, to service histories turned from handwritten notes into clean, structured data for dealers to process. All of it is there to increase speed and clarity in the platform and help dealers buy with confidence.
Don’t wait for everything to be easy
AI tools get more powerful and easier to access every month, and the dealers who started experimenting last year when the technology was really hard to work with are seeing the benefits now.
So if you haven’t started experimenting with AI, don’t wait for someone else to make the perfect system because by then the advantage is gone.
Pick the one problem in your business that annoys you every day and ask AI tools how you can solve it this month. You’ll get some of it wrong and it can be extremely frustrating, but everything you build makes you more confident with the technology and increases your ambition.
I think the next five years in this industry will be more disruptive than the last 20 – and the dealers who make the most of them won’t be the biggest or most technical – they’ll be the most curious.
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AI Week is running from August 3-7 on the Car Dealer Magazine website. Check out our dedicated features every day and special podcasts wherever you get your podcasts.