Autotrader AI tools saves retailers over 20 years in advert creation as co-driver hit 85% adoption in first year
Autotrader, the UK’s largest automotive marketplace, has revealed that its AI-powered Co-Driver tools are now used by 85% of retailers advertising on the platform — equating to around 11,000 businesses — saving the industry an estimated 200,000 hours (or nearly 20 years) of manual work in just over a year since launch1. Adoption is even higher among retailers accessing the AI solution via Autotrader’s customer Portal accounts.
Co-Driver uses Autotrader’s rich vehicle taxonomy, pricing and market data, overlaid with its unique car buyer insight to generate vehicle descriptions, manage images and identify key highlights, significantly reducing the time and effort required to create compelling and highly accurate adverts.
In the last 12 months alone, Co-Driver has generated more than 2.5 million AI-created vehicle descriptions and smart image re-orders, moving AI beyond industry hype to become a standard part of day-to-day advertising for thousands of UK automotive businesses. That scale of usage is reflected among Autotrader’s customer Portal customers, where adoption has reached 98%. For retailers operating across multiple platforms, Co-Driver can also be embedded directly into existing systems and workflows via Autotrader Connect’s API solutions, allowing AI-powered advert creation to sit seamlessly within their own technology environments.
Powered by Autotrader Intelligence2, Co‑Driver is built on the UK’s deepest understanding of how car buyers actually behave. With the largest and most engaged car buying audience — over 10 million unique visitors every month, spending seven times longer on Autotrader than on all major competitors combined — the platform has unparalleled visibility into what captures buyer attention. Combined with Autotrader’s comprehensive vehicle data, this insight underpins how Co‑Driver creates highly accurate vehicle adverts, ensuring listings reflect genuine consumer priorities.
Commenting on how Co-Driver has driven efficiency across their business and freed up more time for their sales team, Edward Westlake, Group Buyer at MM Bellinger & Sons, said: “Before Co‑Driver, our team spent a significant amount of time writing out lengthy vehicle descriptions; it was a huge administrative bottleneck. With the new technology in place, the AI helps do the heavy lifting for us in seconds, and the adverts are just as detailed and engaging as when we wrote them manually. It's really helped our daily operations by being a great time-saving tool.”
Whilst everyone wants to talk about their latest AI gadget, Co-Driver is the real deal - it delivers the full scale of our data and technology capabilities, and the pinnacle of more than a decade of AI investment into our retailers’ hands. We’ve spent years building this suite of tools from the ground up to solve the real everyday frictions our retailers face, whilst also ensuring that we deliver more value for them – and we’re continuing to refine and improve it, with retailers feedback, with the product already on its seventh major iteration.
To see close to 11,000 businesses adopt this tech in just a year shows that AI is no longer a competitive edge; it’s become the new operational baseline for automotive retailers. Our partners are able to create more complete and effective adverts so that they have more time to focus on what really matters to them—sales - which in turn also results in a better car buying experience.”
In addition to Co-Driver, Autotrader has applied its foundational AI capabilities to the consumer search experience. In February, the platform introduced AI-powered intuitive search categories such as ‘Family cars’, ‘Big boot’ and ‘First cars’, helping buyers find the right car based on how people actually search in the real world. Developed by Autotrader’s in-house product and technology team of more than 400, the technology accurately surfaces relevant vehicles even when buyers are unsure what they’re looking for, reflecting Autotrader’s long-term, ‘non-gimmicky’ approach to AI.
Edwards-Smajda, added: “Because our AI is foundational, rather than experimental, we’re perfectly placed to continuously evolve. We’ll continue to build on these strong foundations, testing and adopting new capabilities when we believe they add genuine value to the car buying and selling journey.”
About Autotrader
Autotrader Group plc is the UK’s largest automotive marketplace. It listed on the London Stock Exchange in March 2015 and is a member of the FTSE 100 Index.
Autotrader’s purpose is Driving Change Together. Responsibly. Autotrader is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive culture, it aims to build stronger partnerships with its customers and use its voice and influence to drive more environmentally friendly vehicle choices.
With the largest number of car buyers and the largest choice of trusted stock, Autotrader’s marketplace sits at the heart of the UK car buying process. That marketplace is built on an industry-leading technology and data platform, which is increasingly used across the automotive industry. Autotrader is continuing to bring more of the car buying journey online, creating an improved buying experience, whilst enabling all its retailer partners to sell vehicles online.
Autotrader publishes a monthly used car Retail Price Index which is based on pricing analysis of circa 800,000 unique vehicles. The same data that powers the Index is used by the Office for National Statistics to make the UK’s official measures of inflation more robust, as well as the Bank of England to feed the broader UK economic indicators.
For more information, please visit: https://plc.autotrader.co.uk/
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