7:17 am, August 5, 2026
Savvy car dealers are increasingly using artificial intelligence across their businesses to help them buy more cars and deal with problem customers.
In part two of our special AI Week podcast mini series, car dealers have been explaining how they have automated monotonous tasks and built solutions to help them identify which cars to buy.
The dealers feature in Part 2 of The AI Revolution: Will it change the motor trade forever? podcast which is published today on all good podcast platforms, including Spotify and Apple.
In the episode, host James Baggott speaks to Steven Douglas, owner of Really Easy Car Credit and co-founder of Dealerway, about how he has built a car buying solution for his business using Claude.
He explains how sitting down with the AI system for a few days enabled him to build a tool that shortlists cars in auctions and even tells him how much to bid.
He said: ‘Every day when I come into work, I’m presented with a list inside the app that says “these are the sort of cars you would normally shortlist, I’ve priced them all for you, and here is what I think you should bid for them”.
‘I’ve connected it to our DMS system and it knows what we’ve got in stock and what cars we’re short on.’
The system uses information about Douglas’s buying habits, including the models and engines he prefers or avoids, and continues learning as he accepts or rejects its recommendations.
It is also connected to the dealership’s valuation tools, allowing it to price each vehicle before suggesting a maximum bid.
During the podcast he also explains how he is using AI to analyse long email chains, gather information about customer complaints and prepare detailed responses using data from across the business.
He added: ‘Has AI changed my life? Yeah, I suppose it has. It’s actually changed my daily routine massively.’
Building solutions
George Manning, director of used car supermarket Hilton Garage says he has lost countless hours working on building solutions for his business with AI.
Another Claude fan, he says he uses the technology to help him analyse his hundreds of car adverts and rewrite them where needed. He also uses it to shortlist cars to buy.
Hilton Garage stocks more than 2,000 vehicles, meaning even small improvements in the way cars are prepared and advertised can save considerable amounts of time.
Manning said: ‘There’s not really a single area of the business that we’re not using AI in at the minute.
‘It starts with stock sourcing, helping vehicle buying, purchasing, checking cars, stocking cars, advertising cars, in fact all the bits that go on behind the scenes to get a car on sale.’
He has also built a system that checks Hilton Garage’s adverts against Autotrader’s best-practice guidance, scores them and rewrites them where improvements are needed.
Manning added: ‘I set up a process last week to check our adverts and score our adverts versus Auto Trader’s best practices. That took me an hour to set up. It now writes all the adverts for me. That used to be a team of three or four people doing that when you’ve got 2,000 cars. That’s an instant saving.’
However, Manning said the ease of building new tools can become addictive and does not always result in genuine efficiencies.
He said: ‘It also creates you a lot more work. You start getting extremely excited about things and stay up until four o’clock in the morning building completely pointless tools that are never going to get used!’
Lead handling
Michael Bell, chief executive of Available Car, was an early adopter of AI and deployed a solution from Impel to help manage the large volume of leads received by the used car supermarket.
In the podcast, he explains how the technology allows the firm to communicate with customers around the clock, including those searching for vehicles outside normal showroom hours.
Bell said: ‘We want to make sure our customers are dealt with as quickly as we possibly can and as efficiently as we possibly can.
‘We use Impel, which allows us to communicate with customers 24/7.’
He revealed that around 30% of AvailableCar’s customers are actively searching for vehicles outside the company’s working hours.
Bell added: ‘It allows us to communicate with those guys all the time. It then also helps us constantly support customers through the journey in a busy showroom, with lots of customers coming in and lots of customers calling.’
However, Bell stressed that the technology works best alongside human staff rather than in isolation.
He said: ‘It’s really important that it works alongside our contact centre and our team really well, because on its own it’s just not going to be as effective.’
Available Car is now exploring further uses for the technology in workshops, staff communication and other parts of the business.
Also in the podcast, Car Dealer editor in chief and founder of used car dealership the Clever Car Collection, explains how he has used AI to build his business.
Interviewed by regular Car Dealer Podcast host Jon Reay he explains how the technology has helped and hindered him as he built the award-winning business.
Earlier this week the first part of The AI Revolution: Will it change the motor trade forever? podcast was published. You can listen to both episodes now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
AI Week is running from August 3-7 on the Car Dealer Magazine website.