ABM Q4 - Flipbook - Page 74
Motorway
A roundup of the key points from a recent podcast
interview with James Wilson, COO at Motorway,
which looked at de-fleeting, remarketing, and the
work being done to provide more stock for the
dealers using the platform
I
n May, Motorway used its experience in used
car marketing to offer its services to the
fleet remarketing sector for the first time.
This venture was designed to support the
fleet sector in easily de-fleeting vehicles, as well
as providing more stock for the dealers using its
platform. James Wilson, COO at Motorway, told the
Automotive Business Podcast that the move into
fleet remarketing centres on applying technology
developed in its consumer vehicle marketplace to
remove time and friction.
He explains: “We saw an opportunity to take
advantage of the technology that we've built
for our core business, in particular, the ability to
profile vehicles.”
The key capability is remote vehicle profiling,
which allows a customer approaching the end of
a lease to use Motorway’s Inspect and Collect app
to assess the vehicle themselves. This creates a
condition report and preliminary costing, giving the
customer an indication of potential charges before
collection. The vehicle can then enter Motorway’s
daily auction, giving its network of registered
dealers the opportunity to purchase it before it has
physically entered traditional remarketing.
Once sold, a BVRLA-standard trained driver
collects the vehicle, carries out the final inspection
and transports it to the purchasing dealership. This
reduces vehicle movements, storage and logistics
costs, all while shortening the time between the
end of the lease and the vehicle reaching its
next dealer.
“It's fast, and it's efficient,” Wilsons says. “It
means there are less movements of that vehicle.
There's less logistics cost, storage cost, etcetera.”
The early experience of the proposition has
also highlighted the potential value of bringing
information about vehicle condition forward.
Wilson says fleet managers “want better
visibility” of their assets, rather than “waiting
until a vehicle comes back from the lease to do
the inspection.” Earlier information therefore
gives them more scope to decide how a vehicle
should be treated, including whether it should be
remarketed or potentially re-leased.
Some fleet managers are interested in going
further, gaining visibility of vehicle condition
throughout its life-cycle. Wilson sees an
opportunity for data from sources including
remote profiling and telematics to “enable fleet
managers to make better decisions about how
they want to manage the vehicle.”
Alongside these changes, Wilson sees AI
adoption among dealerships moving rapidly
from experimentation towards practical
implementation.
“There are people who are very tech-forward
and some who are not,” Wilson explains. “I always
come back to ‘what is your biggest business
problem?’. We are not wanting to implement tech
and AI for the sake of [it]. We are trying to solve
a problem or capture an opportunity. If you start
there and typically start small, you can learn skills
and then roll it out to more of your business.”
He is now seeing businesses embed it directly
into their operations, including using AI to assess
and purchase stock and inform vehicle pricing.
Other practical applications include virtual
assistants capable of handling customer enquiries
outside opening hours and even arranging
dealership appointments.
For dealerships that have yet to engage with
AI, his central message is therefore to start now:
competitors are already using the technology,
learning from it and building advantage gaps that
could become increasingly difficult to close.
The full interview with James Wilson, covering everything from
the future of the fleet model to used car stock and the unresolved
question of Chinese brands, will be available in Season Two of the
Automotive Business Podcast.
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AUTOMOTIVE BUSINESS
Q4 2026
