Does Retail Automotive Need a Search Engine? Au.to Says ‘Yes’
Outside of NADA 2015, Charlie Vogelheim, a correspondent for DrivingSales News caught up with Adam Jansen, the Vice President of Business Development at Au.to. The .to is the domain sign for Tonga, it’s it was purchased so that the company could simply be known as “auto.” This startup would like to be the Google for cars.
Jansen explained, “Our system goes out and gets all this information and we aggregate it in a sense that makes the most sense for a consumer so say we’re Google for cars, we do the same thing. Text-based search you can go out and get this information we put it right in front of you we rank it with our auto-rank, and one of the first few cars that’s gonna come up is something that you should probably buy.”
According to Jansen, the website works by bringing dealers together with buyers. The goal is to be hands-off. Speaking about the Au.to business model, Jansen said, “We’ve come up with something that’s much more consumer-driven, there’s no middleman. Its dealers have inventory, we’re putting the buyers with the sellers. We kinda step back and allow that process to happen naturally.”
Jansen told Volgelheim that another aim of Au.to is to improve the consumer experience so that they can connect with dealers however they want to. Jansen explained their effort to improve the customer experience when he said, “We’re taking the middleman out of the process we’re allowing the consumer to engage directly with you (dealers). Whatever process they want to have whether they want to call you directly, email you directly or live chat with a dealers internet or BDC department, they can do that without us convoluting the process or creating a barrier at all.”
Au.to is apparently seeking to become a search engine just like Google and to eventually work with dealers to offer advertising similar to what Google does. Speaking about their Google-level ambition Jansen said, “Google does about 5 percent of their total business on pay-per-click advertising with dealers. So if we can step into that market that’s already proven and give dealers the same experience for maybe a lesser price then we feel that we will be able to compete with all facets of that business.”
What do you make of this organization? Do you think that there is a need for a vehicle purchase search engine? What does this company need to do in order to be valuable for dealers to work with?
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I’m a user on the DealerRefresh forums, and there was a thread going on about this topic awhile back. A company called MotoMiner (another startup) posted in that thread claiming the same thing. I’ve kept my eye on them since then. They seem much more like an _actual_ search engine. They index dealer websites (no feeds), search results return vehicles that link straight to the VDP, search is clean, simple, and responsive. They have deal ranking, they just partnered with DealerRater for dealer ratings and reviews. Another thought is that like Google or Bing, if you are a real web search engine, you’d have things like a clearly defined crawler/bot, ability to submit url’s, ability to opt out of being indexed, etc. MotoMiner actually has all that stuff. I don’t know, I just have gotten so fed up with the crappy search sites with ads all over and having to fill out lead forms all over, I was so glad to find a place to search that is simple and uncluttered. As far as if automotive really needs its own search engine, at least at this point, MotoMiner is much closer to a real search engine than anything else I’ve seen. My $.02.
Definitely some potential here, yet a lot of unanswered questions. There’s a pretty good discussion going on about au.to over on the DrivingSales.com community forums. Check it out!
http://www.drivingsales.com/forums/site-aiming-to-be-google-for-cars
I’d like to see this be a huge success as well, the site looks and functions very nice – but I can’t help wonder how they intend to create the awareness needed to drive the business. Starting up a new search engine seems like an impossible task. Best of luck to them!