10:17 am, October 3, 2022
The former boss of used car data firm Cazana has spoken about selling the firm off to Cazoo.
In the latest episode of the Car Dealer Podcast, Tom Wood explains Cazoo wanted the used car data insights firm for itself.
Cazana used to sell its data to car dealer groups and manufacturers, but since Cazoo snapped it up for £25m in September 2021 those services have been slowly brought to a halt.
Wood and his team left the business when the deal was done and he is now concentrating on running Car and Classic, the specialist marketplace for classic cars.
Wood tells the latest episode of the podcast: ‘I think they wanted the technology and the data for internal use. And they continue to use that.
‘I think there are kind of ongoing contracts that they’ve kind of run out with them. But I think the intention was they wanted to shift a lot of cars, and they are shifting a lot of cars, and they wanted that data for their own purposes internally.’
In the latest podcast episode, Wood explains how his offer to buy the Car and Classic website was first rejected, but the owners returned a few years later to take him up on the deal.
He said that when Cazoo boss Alex Chesterman came along wanting to buy Cazana, he saw the opportunity to finally split the two businesses and go it alone with the classics website.
Wood explains that buying the website originally was like a ‘barn find’ – it had great potential but needed some serious tinkering to get it performing.
He said: ‘If you find something of value that’s there or rusting away, or covered in dust, and you think, well, I could turn it into something, that’d be a pride and joy. That’s kind of what I felt like with Car and Classic.
‘This thing has got so much potential, it is the hub and it’s always been the hub of this passionate group of enthusiasts that buy and sell.
‘It really needed some love, you know, the technology was super outdated. The user experience was super outdated. And so I thought that it would be really interesting to buy and do something interesting with.’
Car and Classic offers free listings and currently has 35,000 cars for sale. It gets around three to four million visitors per month.
Some 1,800 car dealers across Europe actively use the site to sell classics.
Wood said: ‘About a third of those dealers only have Car and Classic as their web presence – they don’t have their own websites, they don’t have their own DMS anywhere to put their stock in, we are literally their shop window.’
The website also launched an auction function 18 months ago which is now selling some 150 cars a week.
In the Podcast, which you can find on all good podcast platforms, Wood also discusses the latest news headlines including some of the big car dealer group results and the Pendragon and Hedin saga that unfolded last week.
