AI Buys Cars: Inside WeBuyCars

WeBuyCars started out tracking two thousand sales a month in a spreadsheet. It now buys and sells around 180,000 cars a year, runs more than a million vehicle valuations a month through a machine learning pricing engine, and has bought over 2,800 vehicles using AI agents with no human in the loop.

Colin Iles talks to Dr Wynand Beukes, Deputy CEO and Group Chief Digital Officer, about what is actually running underneath South Africa's largest used car business.

The conversation covers the three questions the whole model turns on, what to pay, what to sell for and how long to hold; what changes when you stop taking the market price and start setting it; and the harder problem of running a marketplace where the right price might leave both the buyer and the seller slightly unhappy, and you still need them to recommend you.

It also looks at what is coming: Chinese brands now taking close to a fifth of new car sales, what the Kavak story says about this business model, electric vehicles, and where AI goes next.