Minder, that classic television show from the 1980s, is still being repeated regularly on our tellies, and it’s a wonderful, occasionally horrifying reminder of how one went about buying a used car almost 50 years ago. Rock up with a roll of tenners in your pocket and take your chances matching wits with a slippery salesman (and it always was a man, back then, alas). With luck, you’d drive off in something that wouldn’t let you down by the end of the week or turn out to be stolen/recovered.
Things are a bit more sophisticated now, and Arthur Daley would drop his cigar in horror at how well educated car buyers are before they hit the forecourt. Artificial intelligence (AI) is starting to help in that quest, and DoneDeal Cars is one of the first in Ireland to integrate AI into its searches, and to integrate itself into other AI apps.
Bill Tector, DoneDeal’s head of product, tells The Irish Times: “People are looking for what they need, which might be a large boot, or it might be a long-range EV, but they’re not tied down yet to one specific model nor brand. This is where the leverage of something like AI and natural language search can really play in.”
DoneDeal is working on AI from both ends, appearing in ChatGPT searches but also integrating its own AI assistant, named Cara, in its smartphone app to help people with their car searches.
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“A traditional make and model search can be a bit intimidating for some people,” says Tector. “Seventy per cent of our users on site would say they’re not car experts when they go out to buy a car. What AI and natural language search is helping us to do is turn long string queries into something needs based. We want to eliminate that buyer’s remorse, so that by the time you get through to actually buying the car, you feel like you’ve made the best decision.”
Interestingly, Tector says AI-based queries rose steadily last year but then plateaued after October. Equally, AI searches aren’t necessarily taking over from more traditional methods: “As people become more AI fluent, they’re using large language models earlier in their search process; about 70 per cent of users only sent one message, and then once they got some levels of results, went off about their regular search and just refined in the old way. They’re using AI as a jumping-off point.”
In theory, then, AI can be helpful, bringing buyers to the cars they want, and happy buyers mean more business for the likes of DoneDeal and the dealers and individuals who advertise their cars on the site.
Of course, care has to be taken – according to Tector, AI can help build such search systems rapidly, but you still need careful human input to ensure that the AI results are free from “hallucinations”, where the software makes stuff up because it’s eager to please. “We have to make sure that the AI agent understands the job at hand and that the results hold up. It carries our name, so it has to meet the same bar our users expect from DoneDeal Cars generally.”
AI is also working when it comes to how much your old car is worth when you’re trading in. Irish start-up TradeBid, founded by Conor O’Boyle and Shane Ennis in 2021, was bought up by US auctions giant ACV in 2024. TradeBid’s products allow dealers to send potential customers a link through which they can describe their current car, and upload photos, creating an instant, and hopefully accurate, trade-in value.
“We use AI in terms of detecting damage to a vehicle at the valuation stage, and we have data on the auction value of cars going back as far as 2019,” says O’Boyle. “This means we can produce a very accurate valuation of any potential trade-in for a dealer, which that dealer can then present to the customer. We can also monitor the live sales in a particular dealer’s area, and looking at their own sales history, recommend cars for them, using our AI models, which will sell well, and sell quickly.
“We can also reassure the consumer that they’re getting a fair valuation, which is better than them just looking at classified ads, because then they’re looking at the final retail price for a car similar to theirs, which is never the same as the trade-in value.”
