Auto Detective: AI Automotive Intelligence Platform

Canadian car buyers were making $30,000–$60,000 decisions with almost no reliable intelligence. Comparing real market value across listings required manually visiting 6+ sites. Understanding hidden costs — insurance, registration, fuel estimates, historical recall data — required hours of research across a dozen sources. Most buyers either gave up or made decisions based on gut feel.

Dealers had the opposite problem: pricing had to be done manually by experienced used car managers relying on experience and gut feel. One dealer's used car manager was spending 45 minutes researching one vehicle before pricing it for their lot. With 100+ vehicles in inventory moving in and out, that's an impossible time commitment if done properly — so most dealers cut corners on research and accepted suboptimal pricing.

Both problems had the same root cause: Canadian automotive market data was fragmented, inaccessible, and not connected to an intelligent layer that could synthesize it into actionable guidance. The data existed — it just wasn't being used.

Existing automotive intelligence tools were either consumer-grade (too shallow for dealers) or enterprise dealer systems ($500–$2,000/month) too expensive for independent and smaller-volume dealerships. There was nothing in the middle — a professional-grade tool at an accessible price point.