AutoAcquire AI founder Anthony Monteiro on how car dealers can buy inventory from their own customers with instant offers, phone inspections and AI pricing.
Car dealers can refill their used car inventory by buying directly from consumers, starting with the tens of thousands of customers already in their own databases, if they can give an instant price. That is the case Anthony Monteiro, CEO and founder of AutoAcquire AI, made on Episode 25 of Built This Week. AutoAcquire gives everyday dealers, small, medium or large, a Carvana-style way to buy cars from consumers, with instant offers, phone-guided inspections and AI pricing.
Anthony has spent about 30 years building software for car dealers. His goal with AutoAcquire AI is to smooth out what he calls a clunky process, for both the dealer and the seller who just wants a check and someone to pick the car up from the driveway.
Jordan built a demo for Anthony after their prep call: a lead intent workflow builder. A web form triggers a webhook, AI analyzes the person's intent, and a high confidence score sends an automated SMS from a template, such as confirming that a 2021 F-150 is still on the lot and offering a test drive. A low score sends the lead to an email drip instead. Every step, threshold and template is editable, which Jordan thinks matters because dealers are mostly non-technical users who will want to A/B test what converts.
Anthony liked it, and said vibe coding tools have changed the game for his team:
And the days of having a massive room full of developers and scrum teams of 10 people and review and peer reviews and all of the things that really slow down code development, I think, are in the past.
— Anthony Monteiro, Episode 25
He added that humans are still needed to prompt the engines, test the code and connect it to other APIs. He saw the same flow working for acquisition: asking an owner whether they would like to sell their car, with an offer attached, without tying up staff.
Watch Anthony Monteiro on the used car inventory problem in Episode 25 (starts at 12:08) · Episode 25 notes and transcript
Anthony says the right channel depends on the dealer. One with a big BDC can hand calls to agents; one without might need a voice AI agent to ask about exterior and interior condition. Either way, he says sellers want immediate gratification: what is my car worth, right now, even inside the same text thread. The status quo of sending people to fill out a form and wait for a call loses them.
Sam had just lived this. He was selling two cars, asked his dealer for a price, and 24 hours later still had nothing, so he moved on. Anthony found that shocking:
How do I not give you an instant price on my website? Like, why do I need to have a human do that part of this? It's math. It's algorithmic.
— Anthony Monteiro, Episode 25
He says values are available across many databases, and most cars fall somewhere in the middle between excellent and poor, so AI can smooth it out. If a seller rates their car excellent, he would nudge it toward average.
With a dealer on AutoAcquire, a seller fills out the questions on the dealer's website and instantly gets a certificate with an offer. The certificate links to an inspection that works a bit like depositing a check on your phone: it tells the seller where to stand around the car and captures 14 exterior photos and four interior ones, including the dashboard so the odometer is visible.
Computer vision then zooms in to look for dents, scratches, dings and tears in the seats. Anthony's point is that the seller has now spent ten minutes engaging, and the dealer has the information without asking them to drive in. Otherwise, he says, the seller weighs a trip to the dealership against Carvana offering to deposit the money and pick the car up on Thursday.
Anthony says it is now hard for an average dealer to buy cars at auction, because big buyers such as CarMax, Carvana, Lithia and Sonic send teams of buyers and take most of what is there. Add auction and transportation fees, and by the time the car is reconditioned and sold, margins are very compressed.
So AutoAcquire looks for cars already sitting in dealers' customers' driveways. He says most dealers have 20,000 to 50,000 customers in their database. A dealer that needs five F-150s can reach out to the F-150 owners it already knows and put a price on each car right away. He told Sam that if his dealer had texted him a couple of months earlier with an offer for his Pathfinder and Rogue, the deal would already be done. Dealers that don't do this, he says, lose the trade and end up in a downward spiral where they can't get inventory.
For more on how AI is reaching dealerships and carmakers, see our AI in automotive page.
Anthony joked that he sometimes wants to take AI out of the company name, since many companies put an AI layer on legacy software and call themselves AI companies. AutoAcquire started from scratch. His previous startup was a vehicle pick-up and drop-off logistics platform that had to lean on AI for routes, timing and driver behavior well before today's LLMs.
The automobile industry and especially what we do with vehicle values, it's very structured data.
— Anthony Monteiro, Episode 25
Year, make, model, trim, color, options, mileage and service dates are the kind of finite data points he says machine learning loves. AutoAcquire looks at every vehicle listed for sale online and builds algorithms for what a car is worth in that market right now, instead of waiting for auction data or feeds that lag. News or an economic shift can change a car's value in a minute, and he says you can't process that much information without AI.
In the news segment, Sam brought up reports of Waymo raising $15 billion at a $110 billion valuation, after taking his first Waymo ride the week before. Anthony thinks it is crazy to raise that much on that model, because Waymo's cameras and LiDAR cost far more than Tesla's setup. In his view Tesla can put out a Robotaxi for a third of the price and already has driving data from its owners.
Jordan, a Tesla owner who called FSD 14.2 incredible, played devil's advocate on whether Waymo could cut its hardware costs on a cheaper vehicle. Then he made a prediction: he thinks the most likely path is that Tesla licenses FSD to other carmakers as a camera and hardware kit, because he doesn't believe Tesla can ever build enough vehicles, or enough kinds of vehicles, on its own. Anthony agreed:
Once it goes into Fords and Chevys and Toyotas and Hondas, then it's game over because I could build the fleet of taxis with any brand just with software at that point.
— Anthony Monteiro, Episode 25
On complaints that Tesla's full self-driving marketing is deceptive, Jordan said it is not full self-driving until he can sit in another seat, though he sees it more as a matter for consumers than states. Anthony called it assisted rather than full, and expects Elon Musk to keep pushing anyway.
See Jordan's lead workflow demo and Anthony's full take on dealer inventory in Episode 25 of Built This Week, where the full transcript is also on the page.
