For a long time in the car business, you could appraise a used vehicle without getting out of your chair. And somehow that became completely normal.
- VIN.
- Mileage.
- Run it through vAuto.
- Look at the market.
- Does it fit the percentage?
- Buy it.
The fucking thing could smell like a family of raccoons had been living in it.
Didn't matter.
The number worked.
I'm exaggerating.
But not by much.
And what happened next taught me something I've been thinking about a lot lately.
Not just about cars.
About AI.
- people.
- businesses.
And about the difference between something and the systems we increasingly use to interpret it.
When tools like vAuto started becoming ubiquitous in dealerships, they solved a very real problem.
Before that, appraising a used car required a lot of local knowledge.
- Auction experience.
- Phone calls.
Knowing what similar vehicles had sold for.
- what you had sold.
- your local market.
- your clients appetite
Knowing the difference between something that looked good on paper and something people actually wanted.
Then suddenly you could run a VIN and have an extraordinary amount of information sitting in front of you.
- What similar vehicles were advertised for.
- How many were available.
- How long they'd been sitting.
- Auction information.
- Market pricing.
- Supply.
- Demand.
At roughly the same time, marketplaces like AutoTrader and CarGurus were making retail inventory increasingly visible and comparable.
This was incredibly useful.
And dealers learned to use it.
They learned it really fucking well.
Maybe too well.
Because slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the tool stopped informing the decision.
It started becoming the decision.
If a vehicle didn't fit within whatever percentage of the market a dealer's acquisition rules allowed, buyers often weren't allowed to buy it.
Didn't matter if they loved it.
- if experience told them it was a great piece.
- if there was something unusual about it that the available data wasn't capturing very well.
It had to fit.
At retail, another version of the same thing was happening.
Price too high relative to the marketplace?
Now you're buried 3 pages deep where nobody looks.
So everybody learned the rules.
And everybody adapted.
Over time, I started noticing something.
A lot of dealer inventories were beginning to look remarkably similar.
- White.
- Black.
- Grey.
- Safe equipment.
- Easy-to-compare vehicles.
And some pretty stripped-down stuff.
We used to call them beer cans.
Sometimes rental-car-level equipment.
Every simulast buyer frantically bidding to get a buy fee before Carvana stepped it and bid it to the moon
Meanwhile, a loaded version of essentially the same model might not bring enough more money for the dealer's acquisition system to justify paying what it took to own it.
The retail customer might absolutely prefer the loaded one.
But the guy buying inventory had another problem.
It didn't fit.
I spent a lot of years wholesaling vehicles.
And I learned not to fight this.
I learned to play inside it.
One of my favourite examples was the Ford F-150 XLT.
Ford had equipment groups called 300A, 301A and 302A.
Same F-150 XLT badge on the tailgate.
But there could be meaningful differences in equipment.
- Then add engine.
- Box length.
- Two-wheel drive.
- Four-wheel drive.
- Mileage.
- Colour.
- Condition.
- History.
- Pedigree
The tools could resolve some of those variables very well.
But there were places where the resolution got muddy.
And that's where things became interesting.
The same phenomenon existed elsewhere.
Ram 1500 Sport.
GMC Sierra SLT.
Usually somewhere in the middle of a model range where manufacturers gave buyers lots of ways to configure essentially the same vehicle.
The bottom trims didn't give me as much room.
Neither did the obvious top trims.
It was the middle where things could get weird.
So I started paying attention.
Not just to the trucks.
To the dealers.
Which appraisal tool did they use?
- vAuto?
- AutoNiq?
- Something else?
Which retail marketplaces mattered to them?
Where did their management allow them to buy?
What percentage of market did they have to stay within?
What did they stock?
What did they avoid?
What did they call me looking for?
And eventually I'd hear something like:
“Nah. We do better with the 300s. I can never buy those equipped ones. They don't fit. I’ll take it for 300a money”
That was useful information.
Because he hadn't just told me what he liked.
He'd told me the rules of his little world.
If he couldn't buy the 302A because it didn't fit his system, he might become a pretty good source for 302As.
And if his system loved 300As, he might pay me a little more for the right 300A with good miles, the right colour, a clean history or some other story he could justify.
Somewhere else there would be another dealer operating under a different set of rules.
Maybe he liked the equipped trucks.
- or his customers did.
- or his appraisal system interpreted them differently.
- or his management gave him more latitude.
Maybe something that didn't fit inside one dealership fit beautifully inside another.
I didn't need to convince either of them that they were wrong.
There was ALWAYS something
I needed to understand the world each one operated in.
That's something I came to understand about dealerships generally.
Every dealership is its own little world.
Almost like somebody dropped a dome over the building.
Same cars.
- manufacturers.
- banks.
- auctions.
Same basic business.
But inside the dome?
Different rules…
- decision makers.
- personalities.
- processes.
- software.
- appetites.
- customers.
- definitions of risk.
Even dealer groups were really collections of little worlds inside a bigger one.
Learn one and you started understanding how to learn the others.
Ontario.
Michigan.
Quebec.
Georgia.
South Carolina.
Same thing…Only different.
My job wasn't to force them all to see the market the way I did.
My job was to understand how they saw it.
Then cultivate the outs.
If this guy doesn't want the truck, who does?
If this system undervalues something, where is it properly valued?
If this dealer's rules make one vehicle difficult to buy, does that create an opportunity somewhere else?
I wasn't trying to defeat the algorithms.
I was looking for the spaces between what they could resolve and what was actually there.
And then I went looking for evidence that I was right.
A conversation…
- sale.
- another sale.
- dealer calling me looking for the same thing again.
- patterns.
Eventually, somebody had to write a check.
I could have all the clever theories I wanted.
Reality still got the deciding vote.
I've been thinking about those trucks again lately.
Not because I particularly miss wholesaling F-150s.
Because I think something similar is happenning with people and businesses.
AI systems are becoming extraordinarily capable at retrieving information.
- Comparing it.
- Cross-referencing it.
- Synthesizing it.
- Interpreting it.
And increasingly, people are going to use those interpretations to make decisions.
- Which company should I call?
- Who knows the most about this?
- Is this person credible?
- What does this dealership specialize in?
- Who has experience with this problem?
Tell me about this executive…
- doctor, lawyer, company
The systems will get better…
- tools will change.
- rules will change.
And just like dealers did with vAuto, we're going to learn what the systems seem to reward.
Then we'll optimize for it.
Of course we fucking will.
- Websites.
- Content.
- Schema.
- Profiles.
- Citations.
- AI search optimization.
Whatever else comes next.
A lot of it will probably be useful and there will be thousands of vendors with the ultimate “game changing” tool
But I learned something watching a generation of dealers increasingly organize their behaviour around what appeared on a screen.
The representation of something is not the thing itself.
The F-150 was still a Ford F-150.
It mattered who was looking at it.
And why.
A business is still the business.
A person is still the person.
But different observers may have access to different information.
They may be looking for different things.
Or they may interpret what they find differently.
And increasingly, there may be a machine sitting somewhere in that process helping them do it.
For the last couple of years, I've spent an absurd amount of time thinking about how we make people and businesses more understandable to those machines.
- Better websites.
- Structured information.
- Content.
- Connections.
- Citations.
- Search.
- Machine legibility.
I still think all of that matters… A LOT
But lately I've become increasingly convinced I've been starting one step too late.
Before I worry about how a machine interprets a person or business, I want to know something much simpler.
What does it actually have to work with?
Not the marketing version…
- the generic About Us page.
- the 40 articles somebody generated because an SEO tool told them to.
The actual thing.
How did this company get here?
- Who built it?
- What happened along the way?
- What does it know that its competitors don't?
- What mistakes shaped how it operates today?
- What do its customers know about it that the internet doesn't?
- What has it actually done?
And the same goes for people.
- What happened to you?
- What did you learn?
- What did you get wrong?
- What changed your mind?
- Where did your judgment come from?
- What have you built?
- What methods did you develop because the existing ones didn't work?
- What do you believe?
Why?
- What stories exist only in your head?
- What can be corroborated?
- What can be shown?
EVIDENCE?
I think a lot of accomplished people have this backwards.
They look at what's happening online and think the answer is becoming some kind of fucking influencer.
So they stay out of it.
I understand.
If you've spent 25 or 30 years actually doing the thing, the idea of suddenly performing expertise on the internet can feel ridiculous.
So don't.
Don't manufacture authority.
- Document the authority you already earned.
- Tell the stories.
- Preserve the history.
- Share the Scars and the Solutions
- Show the work.
- Capture the methods.
- Publish the photographs.
- Explain where the ideas came from.
- Record the mistakes.
- Give the things you've learned somewhere to live.
- Do the same for the business.
Before we spend all our time trying to engineer the representation, make damn sure we've preserved the source.
That's increasingly what I've been doing with something we built called The Polaris Method.
- Going upstream.
- Digging.
- Trying to understand what's actually there before deciding how any of it should be represented.
Because AI can make the downstream stuff increasingly easy.
- It can write.
- Design.
- Code.
- Summarize.
- Organize.
- Publish.
- Optimize.
And it's going to get much better at all of it.
But there's one problem…
It wasn't there.
It didn't spend 30 years in your industry…
- wasn't sitting in the room when the company nearly died.
- didn't make the decision that saved it.
- didn't piss off the customer.
- didn't learn the lesson.
- didn't develop the weird little method you've used ever since.
- doesn't remember why the business changed direction in 2009.
It certainly wasn't standing beside you in 1997 when you opened a Compaq laptop and started wondering what the fuck this internet thing was going to become.
You were.
That's the source.
And before we become too obsessed with what the machines can create from it, I think we should get much better at preserving what only we can provide.
I never needed every dealer to value an F-150 the same way.
They weren't going to.
I needed to understand the different worlds they operated in and make sure I had enough outs.
The truck was still the truck.
Today, I think the same principle applies to us and our businesses.
We don't know exactly who…or what…is going to be looking five years from now.
We don't know what system they'll use or precisely what it will value.
That's okay.
Maybe the first job isn't optimizing ourselves for every possible observer.
Maybe it's making sure that when they come looking, there's something real for them to find.
EVIDENCE?
Bob
About Bob Manor
Bob Manor is the founder of South Ontario Auto Remarketing , Can-Am Dealer Services , and co-founder of Auto Auction Review . He’s also the creator of Influence.vin , a branding and communication studio built for the car business. With over 30 years in the automotive world, Bob specializes in wholesale, dealer services, and identity-driven brand strategy. He’s a regular contributor to well-known automotive publications and uses his platforms to help industry pros re-align with who they are, not just what they do.
Disclaimer:
These are my own observations and interpretations, based on lived experience inside this industry.
This is not financial, legal, or professional advice ... it is pattern recognition, shared for awareness and strategic consideration only
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