Southeast Asia’s 1st AI-driven car valuation tool lets you sell 2nd-hand cars within 3 days

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is more prominent in our lives than we realise.

Siri, Alexa and even everyday apps like Grab use AI to determine how to make our lives easier by delivering the information we require in the shortest amount of time possible.

And now, dealing with lowballers may become a thing of the past sooner than we think because of AI.

Powered by AI, UCARS devised Southeast Asia’s first AI car valuation tool that estimates a car’s resale value within seconds — a fraction of the usual time (at least one day) it would take on other automotive platforms.

Singapore car owners can expect to sell their vehicles within three days at the most suitable price points.

According to the Singapore startup, the AI Valuation Tool is the fastest valuation tool available to consumers in the region.

A digitalising society

The traditional processes of the automotive industry in Singapore is one deeply etched in brick.

Cho Kok Yick, Chief Technology Officer at UCARS, noted that the industry struggles with communicating and forging meaningful consumer-seller relationships due to “obsolete and inefficient operating processes”.

Consumers lack “trust and confidence” in local car dealers, a joint press release by UCARS and Huawei claims.

Inspired by this, UCARs seeks to eliminate the need for consumers to disclose their personal contact with the platform’s built-in chat system, allowing consumers to communicate with sellers without divulging personal information.

Developed on ModelArts — the AI platform of Huawei — UCARS AI Valuation Tool uses big data to create an algorithm that estimates the value of a car with Huawei’s cloud computing, increasing the accuracy for each valuation on the platform every time a consumer uses it.

Gideon Lam, who sold two cars on UCARS, shared that he experienced a seamless process, with UCARS coordinating “all the neces[sities]”, including preparatory work which can be quite extensive.

Another seller, Michael Chong, echoes the sentiment, adding that the entire process felt “smooth and transparent” on both ends.

The platform currently has thousands of new and used vehicles on its marketplace. Since its inception in May 2019, UCARS has sold over S$1.29 billion worth of cars.

The future of automotive innovation

On top of the AI Valuation Tool, UCARS is also designing an AI-powered car search tool, Car Image Search Engine, for consumers to recognise the make and model of a car through images. Users can also use images to find a specific vehicle they’re looking for.

This is achieved via machine learning and machine vision, which automatically inspects and analyses an uploaded image.

With Huawei Cloud, UCARS hopes to further integrate better infrastructure and cloud security into the platform.

Huawei Spark 2020

UCARS was one of the five finalists in Huawei Spark 2020, a hybrid accelerator programme launched by Huawei for deep tech startups.

Initially kicked off in Singapore as a startup competition, Huawei Spark has seen participants from 558 startups in 78 countries. 15 startups also receive support from Huawei Cloud to accelerate their journey.

Find out more here.

Top image via UCARS.

This article sponsored by Huawei taught this writer more about tech.