CARS24’s Best Price - Scale-backed, Tech Driven

In the used car market, getting the “best price” is more art than science. Sellers often get opaque offers from local dealers, leaving them uncertain if they were underpaid. CARS24 flips that dynamic by promising a scale-backed, tech-driven best price, one powered by data, competition, and transparency. In this post, we’ll explore how CARS24 delivers on that promise, what structural advantages it wields, and why its model is hard for others to replicate.

Traditional Challenges with Getting the Best Price 

Before diving into methods, it’s helpful to understand the market problems:

• Lack of transparency: In traditional setups, dealers quote widely varying rates, often leaving sellers guessing
• Limited competition: Sellers typically interact with 1–2 local dealers, capping the upward pressure on price
• Asymmetric information: Dealers often know more about market trends, risk factors, and repair costs; sellers have to rely on negotiation
• Geographic constraints: Sellers in smaller cities have fewer buyers, limiting the pricing bandwidth they can access

CARS24’s model addresses all these issues by leveraging scale (network, data) + technology (AI-powered pricing engine for data and analytics, and real-time feedback loops). This is how it achieves its best price.

How Scale Enables Better Pricing

Scale is the underlying enabler; here are the levers:

Massive dealer network & nationwide reach

CARS24 invites 20,000+ verified dealers across India to bid on listed cars in real time. Because your car is exposed beyond your own city, demand is not limited by geography. Even if your local market is weak, a strong bid might come from another region. The broader the buyer pool, the higher the ceiling.

Volume of historical transactions

Their AI engine is trained on over 10 lakh+ historical car transactions (since 2015). With vast data, the system learns depreciation curves, brand resilience, variant trends, and locality adjustments, making its baseline estimates statistically robust.

Scale in operations & infrastructure

At scale, fixed costs (inspection teams, tech infrastructure, logistics) become more efficient per car. CARS24 has invested heavily in tech teams and digital infrastructure (data pipelines, cloud, AI tools). This infrastructure allows them to automate many tasks, reduce turnaround time, and absorb fluctuations in individual listings.

Feedback loops from bidding & market dynamics

Because listings generate real dealer bids, the process becomes self-correcting. If a car’s initial price is conservative, active bidding will push it up. If the system underestimates an in-demand variant, competition reveals that. This auction feedback is a key scale advantage; no small dealer network can replicate that depth of live market signal. 

How Technology Makes the Best Price Possible

Scale alone is necessary but not sufficient; technology is what operationalises it. Here are the tech elements CARS24 uses:

AI-Powered Valuation Engine

At the heart is a machine learning model that ingests:

• Car metadata: make, model, year, variant, fuel type, registration location
• Usage metrics: odometer/kilometres driven, ownership count
• Condition signals: inspection results, photos, service history
• Market signals: current demand, variant scarcity, regional price trends

This model outputs an initial indicative price before even going to auction. That gives sellers confidence and sets a floor.

Real-time Auction / Bidding Platform

Once a car is listed, dealers across regions compete in a live, transparent bidding process. The listing sees live updates, bid counts, and competing offers. Sellers can monitor and decide whether to accept at any point. 

This dynamic marketplace ensures that the “best price” is not static or precomputed; it evolves with actual demand.

Inspection & Quality Assurance Tools

CARS24 uses inspection apps, image processing, defect detection, and structured checklists to standardise car evaluations at scale. Their tech stack helps reduce human error or bias, ensuring listings reflect reality.

Data Infrastructure & Analytics
 

To support this, CARS24 has built unified data systems (leveraging cloud, scalable warehouses) to consolidate behaviour, transactions, bids, inspection logs, and feedback. That unified data backbone is critical; it allows real-time analytics, trending detection, anomaly alerts, and continuous model retraining.

The Combined Value Proposition: Best Price Guaranteed by Data + Competition

Putting it all together, CARS24’s Best Price rests on three pillars working in tandem:

1. Baseline fairness via AI: every car starts with a data-driven valuation
2. Real demand via live bids: auctions push price upward when warranted
3. Transparency & trust: sellers see all bids, have visibility, and know they aren’t being undercut by opaque deals

Because the system is built for scale, it can offer these advantages across 250+ cities, covering both metros and smaller markets. 

This model is very hard for small local dealers or fixed quote players to beat; they lack the data, reach, and dynamic feedback loops.