An auto dealer software company is pitching AI-powered kiosks designed to replace car salesmen on showroom floors. Automotive News says the industry is “skeptical.” But be honest—would you really rather deal with the average car lot shark than a computer?
Epikar, a South Korean company that cooks up digital management solutions for car dealers, has named its new AI invention the Pikar Genie. The idea is that customers can talk to this device, ask it product questions, and basically do everything you’d do with a car salesman except for actually closing the deal and signing paperwork.
So it’s not quite like ordering nuggets from one of those giant-screen ATMs at McDonalds, but kind of the same idea.
Renault, BMW, and Volvo are already using some Epikar products at South Korean dealerships, but this new customer-facing AI product is still in its infancy. AN reported that “Renault assigns three salespeople to its Seoul showroom enhanced with Epikar automation compared with six for other Renault showrooms in South Korea,” according to Epikar CEO Bosuk Han.
The company’s now looking to expand into America and is apparently already testing its products at at least one dealership stateside.
Car-dealer consultant Fleming Ford (Director of Strategic Growth at NCM Associates) indicated to AN that U.S. dealerships “aren’t ready for fully automated showrooms.”
“The showroom isn’t just where you buy a car,” Automotive News quoted him saying. “It’s where you decide who to trust to help you to choose the right car.”
I have to admit, I’ve only been inside car dealerships as a buyer less than a dozen times. But, sorry, “trustworthy” is not the vibe I’ve ever gotten from a commission-motivated salesperson.
In fact, every conversation I’ve ever had with an actively working salesman has felt a lot more like talking to a chatbot than an actual person.
Now, I don’t mean to personally disparage folks in the car sales trade. I get it, you’re just trying to get your quotas done and get home like everyone else. But in my experience, on-duty car salespeople don’t really converse so much as work their way through a script to get whatever’s been sitting on the lot the longest into your driveway.
Case in point, I helped my grandfather buy a new Nissan Frontier not too long ago. He’s been driving pickups since the 1960s and very specifically wanted a low-spec, short-cab Frontier as, most likely, his last truck.
I went with him to a Nissan store, where I explained the above. The salesperson jovially nodded and typed out what sounded like the entire script of a feature film on his computer, then printed a spec list and handed me a deal … for a four-door top-of-the-line PRO-4X. We walked out.
Days later, we were able to get him the rig he wanted from a different dealership—I had to literally read the sales guy the inventory stock number from the store’s website to get him off his butt and into the key locker.
So, yeah, I would not consider myself a “fan” of AI, but this is not a human-job deletion I’ll be particularly sad about. That said, who knows if Epikar will be the real catalyst here—I can’t get its website to load on any browsers as of this writing (not a great sign for a tech company).
Car dealers have a reputation for resisting change, and it might take considerable time to AI-ify car sales because of the paperwork involved in car ownership (loans, insurance, titles, registration). But once the tech is in place, dealership owners are going to be all about robot sales associates. A salesperson who never takes a smoke break, can instantly access the whole internet, and most critically, never takes a commission? Those attributes are going to be very popular with managers, no matter what consumers think of them.
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