New data from Autotrader, the UK’s largest automotive marketplace, reveals 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 launch in 2024.
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 Intelligence, Co‑Driver is built on the 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.
Edward Westlake, group buyer at MM Bellinger & Sons, and customer, 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.”
Karolina Edwards-Smajda, chief product officer at Manchester-based Autotrader, added: “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.”
Autotrader has also 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.”
