Cars.com Isn’t What It Used to Be

Cars.com CEO Alex Vetter recalls a colleague using a device to do an impromptu diagnosis and valuation on a ride-hailing car, much to the driver’s amazement.

“We were getting an Uber ride and talking to the driver about our Accu-Trade platform,” Vetter tells Wards. So, his colleague did a quick demonstration.

He connected his device to the OBD2 portal under the car’s steering wheel. The resulting information included a mechanical and an electrical condition report of the vehicle as well as an appraisal of its value.

“The driver was pretty amazed,” says Vetter, who calls Accu-Trade a benefit to both dealers and customers trading in their vehicles.

Accu-Trade (Accu-Trade multi-platforms pictured below story) began as an appraisal tool for the dealer-to-dealer automotive wholesale market. After acquiring Accu-Trade last year, Cars.com expanded its use to auto retailing.

In a Wards Q&A, Vetter talks about that, the ways vehicles are bought and sold today, how Cars.com has changed with the times and the continued importance of car dealerships. Here’s an edited version of the interview.

Wards: What’s so special about Accu-Trade?

Vetter: It is the fastest-growing product in Cars.com history.

It focuses on the health of the vehicle. Manually, dealerships can spend up to 45 minutes appraising a vehicle. Accu-Trade does it in four.

And virtually anyone at the dealership can use it. It’s not just for an appraisal specialist. A dealership clerk can use it to provide a factual value, not a mystical figure.

It provides an informational layer that can educate the seller of a trade-in as to why the value of the vehicle is what it is, based on our vast data set.

Wards: Where does the data come from?    

Vetter:  We’re first pulling it from the vehicle itself. Then we are comparing that with 60,000 dealers’ inventories nationally, then with retail-demand data. It is predictive data. The market can change in 90 days, as we’ve seen.

Wards: What changes?

Vetter: Prices, consumer demand, electric-vehicle online searches. You are seeing real-time consumer behavior. It helps dealers decide if they should take a vehicle in for a trade.

Wards: If you take it as a trade-in, you know the used-car market demand for it?

Vetter: Yes, and we can effectively predict the time it will take for the vehicle to flip at the retail level. If the dealer decides to take the vehicle in for a trade but doesn’t want to retail it, we can get it into the wholesale market and off the dealer’s books.

Wards: And this Accu-Trade information is shared with the trade-in customer?

Vetter: That’s right. Accu-Trade can show the consumer the vehicle’s diagnostic results, illustrating its value. That’s a figure from a trusted third party. The dealer doesn’t have to fight to defend a value figure.    

Wards: What sort of information is extracted?

Vetter: All of the electrical and mechanical equipment’s condition. The age of all the depreciating parts, so you know what parts will need to be replaced and when based on parts-replacement histories.   

The dealer knows what reconditioning should be done to make the car frontline ready.

Wards: Cars.com started in 1998 as a newspaper consortium’s online classified ad site. When did you start branching off into other things?

Vetter: Our first foray was 2016 with the acquisition of DealerRater. So many people in this industry obsess about the product. But it’s about the buying and ownership experience as well.

Dealerships are the best to deliver a good customer experience. A lot of people talk about the direct-to-consumer selling model. But let’s face it, dealerships have proven to be the most effective in helping people take care of their vehicles over time.

DealerRater helps communicate the “why-buy” messages for sales and service. We know from our data that that’s as important as the price of the car.

Our journey was accelerated through DealerInspire (an online marketing service). We now have Fuel, a unit which provides local dealer advertising, and Credit IQ, which digitizes vehicle financing.

The common thread is to enable the dealer to be the hero of the consumer’s journey. We look at the car as the star, but the dealer is the hero. 

Wards: In the old days, no one focused much on the automotive customer experience. Now, it’s ubiquitous.

Vetter: Every generation brings new expectations.

The upcoming car buyers do everything on their phone. They want things to be instant, data-driven and transparent.

Ironically, it’s all a build-up to a face-to-face experience at the dealership.

Surveys indicate most consumers want to visit the dealership. In that last mile, they should encounter professionals. 

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