TrueCar mobile usage cresting 50%; CEO Scott Painter sees shift to mobile car-buying as Millennials’ impact grows
Scott Painter, chief executive officer and founder of TrueCar, Inc. (NASDAQ: TRUE), the negotiation-free car buying and selling platform, presented a vision for the future of car buying to the auto industry today at the 2015 Automotive News World Congress.
Painter said TrueCar intends to establish groundbreaking partnerships with automakers to target incentives more efficiently. The company is also readying an updated mobile app to improve the car buying experience and to better integrate automakers, dealers and consumers.
“What if automakers could, in real-time, help dealers sell their cars and become a part of the customer conversation?” said Painter. “What if automakers could connect to millennials at the moment of truth – as they actually walk the lot, interact with them in the only conversation they are willing to have, through their mobile device?”
To establish closer relationships with automakers, TrueCar is working with them to target their incentive dollars to customers in real time, and provide access to consumers on sales platforms that are four to 10 times as responsive.
TrueCar gathers unique insights about its users and understands consumer actions through predictive analytics and data security. TrueCar has already become the most accurate predictor of sales by make, model and geographic region.
“Accountability in advertising is a revelation,” said Painter. “Paying for sales, not leads, not subscriptions, not impressions, but actual performance is what separates TrueCar and we’d like to provide that same promise to automakers.”
Approximately 4 percent of all new vehicle transactions in the U.S. originate on the TrueCar platform. In fact, TrueCar Certified Dealers sold over 600,000 vehicles in 2014, a network that will grow to 10,000 dealers in the next several weeks.
Looking ahead, TrueCar will focus on millennials and the increasingly mobile-oriented society with a new mobile platform built specifically for a generation of modern consumers that grew up on data transparency and technology.
“Not only will we reach the purely mobile generation, we will also deliver automakers a new platform on which to position their brands, their vehicles and their conversations with these buyers,” Painter said.
