Autozen and the art of selling used cars

Buying a new vehicle often ranks as one of the least desirable activities you can undertake, somewhere between having a root canal and being audited by the CRA.

Selling a used car isn’t too far behind, with lots of noshows, low-ball offers, and sketchy money exchanges.

Then there’s inviting perfect strangers into your house — or at least your driveway.

Olivier Vincent goes so far as to call the experience medieval. So, the self-described serial entrepreneur and technology executive came up with a concept, and a company, designed to drag the selling of a used vehicle experience into the 21st century.

Autozen is a Vancouverbased consumer-to-business (C2B) auto retail platform that launched with a $4.2-million seed round of financing in January, followed by a soft launch in the spring. Today, it’s up and running at full-bore.

“It’s baffling how selling a car in 2021 is as aggravating as it was 20 years ago,” said Vincent, the CEO and cofounder of Autozen. “We’ve consistently heard from consumers that this industry has been stubbornly low-tech for too long.”

Vincent has a strong track record in tech, having founded Canpages, a digital company which grew to over $100 million in revenues before being sold for $225 million, and was most recently president of Weatherbug, a 15-million users real-time weather app. Autozen serves as a broker between a used car seller and a dealership. It is a free service to the seller and makes its revenue from a percentage fee charged to the dealership on every sale. Dealers bid online at an Autozen auction site.

Langley’s Arnet Tkachuk works in IT, and first heard about Autozen during that initial round of financing.

“It was on a B.C. website that has news and information about technology companies,” Tkachuk said. “It looked pretty interesting, particularly the part about offering an easier way to sell your car.”

He filed it away as he wasn’t ready to sell his car at the time, but in June he circled back, calling Autozen to see where the company was at in terms of operations. He had been following the news that used car sales were heating up in the face of supply issues with new vehicles and a trend towards former transit users choosing instead to commute in their own vehicle. He’d decided to sell his 2015 Kia Optima Hybrid and buy a 2021 Buick Envision.

“I figured I’d take a shot with Autozen, expecting it to take a couple of months, maybe three, to get a deal done,” he said.

He went to the Autozen website on a Friday afternoon to get the process rolling — which included creating a personalized account with a password and setting up an appointment for an Autozen rep to come check out the vehicle. On Monday he received a text from the company saying “we have an offer on your vehicle.”

“I thought, well, that’s pretty interesting but I figured it would be a low-ball offer,” he said, but when he logged into his account on the site, the offer was higher than what he’d expected to get from the outset. “I figured, let’s do it.”

And he did. The entire process took five days, according to Tkachuk. Needless to say, he was impressed as most of the work was done online, except the visit from the Autozen rep to check out his Optima.

“I equated it to selling a house,” said Tkuchuk. “Everything is measured, checking the brakes, checking the inside, checking the odometer, checking for scratches. Took it for a drive around the block. Very thorough.”