ACV chief executive officer George Chamoun summarized the five-year journey the company has taken to get to Monday and its newest tool deployment.

ACV introduced ClearCar, which uses artificial intelligence and real-time market data to accurately price vehicles based on condition.

“Some of the things we do are overnight successes, and some things are many years in the development,” Chamoun told Auto Remarketing ahead of Monday’s industrywide product launch. “When you think about what we’re trying to achieve — ACV, the actual cash value — that has been a mission since shortly after I joined.”

ClearCar consists of ClearCar Price and ClearCar Capture.

ClearCar Price is a digital pricing engine, a price estimation tool that resides on a dealer’s website, providing consumers a precise value estimate for their vehicle.

ClearCar Capture is a complementary product that allows consumers to submit photos of their vehicles for further documentation of condition through an AI imaging and self-inspection tool. ClearCar Capture can digitally detect visible exterior damage and irregularities during the photo capture process, enabling dealers to update their condition-enhanced pricing estimates without an on-site inspection.

Through a news release, ACV highlighted experiences of dealers already using ClearCar.

“At Drivers Village, we use the ClearCar product to drive our acquisition of consumer vehicles,” said Firas Makhlouf, the group’s chief information officer and used-car director. “The results have made a huge impact on our business. The leads generated by ClearCar are highly qualified, and we have seen an 80% show ratio and about 45% buy ratio from those qualified leads.

“Since we implemented ClearCar, 75% of the vehicles we’re purchasing through leads produced from ClearCar are then retailed at one of our 17 dealerships. With this kind of ROI, it was an easy decision to put it on all 17 franchises’ websites,” Makhlouf continued in the news release.

Matthew Costanzo is director of marketing for the Lester Glenn Auto Group.

“ClearCar gives us the ability to streamline the very challenging appraisal-from-home process by putting our customers in the driver seat,” Costanzo said in the news release. “Allowing our customers to take a self-guided tour around their vehicle to capture all of the necessary angles that we need to see, as well as allowing the customer to submit the information directly to us using one platform is game-changing. Not to mention no application download and minimal effort on the customer’s part.

“As a result, we have been able to adjust our sight-unseen offers based on the damage that the AI scanning tool automatically recognizes, leading to protection of our bottom line and a far more transparent conversation with our customers,” Costanzo went on to say.

And John Gabriele is founder of AllCars, which is the digital car-buying division of Marina Auto Group.

“I am a traditional car dealer with close to 40 years of experience, but as the market evolved, I knew we needed to take a digital e-commerce approach to continue to grow and compete. We could not have built our digital buying business without ClearCar. Today, we are buying cars from consumers across the entire country. This year we are already up over 600% in car buying over all of last year,” Gabriele said in the news release.

“ClearCar offers a simple plug-and-play solution, which makes it easy for our customers to interact with us. They simply go to our site, provide some basic information on their car and then have the ability to share photos with ClearCar Capture. The AI component to this offering has been a game changer for us. We know exactly what we are buying and therefore can offer our customers transparent data-backed pricing based on the specific condition of their car,” Gabriele added.

During the conversation with Auto Remarketing, Chamoun pointed out that ACV has a team of more than 20 experts who worked on building ClearCar and “have tremendous expertise in machine learning and data science.”

Chamoun explained that brain trust leveraged the capabilities that came with a pair of acquisitions ACV has made. The company blended the AI capabilities from MONK with the dealer website infrastructure created by Drivably.

The MONK technology continued ACV’s path into imaging AI, enabling consumers to take photos of their vehicle through a guided digital experience.

ClearCar replaces the Drivably brand and integrates MONK into one integrated consumer tool, allowing dealers to offer one intuitive and seamless experience to their customers.

Furthermore, added to the mix is all of the inspection data ACV has been capturing, which Chamoun explained “allows us to have this deep curated data pool of. ‘Here’s a Jeep Wrangler with minor rust and here’s a Jeep Wrangler with major rust.’ ”

The result is ClearCar.

“We took the many years of building out what we think is the most elaborate technology platform to price a vehicle using machine learning and artificial intelligence, coupled with these small acquisitions, to now bring ClearCar to market. This has been many years in the making,” Chamoun told Auto Remarketing.

Chamoun acknowledged “it’s like asking which of your kids you like best” when prompted to rank the importance of this product launch in ACV’s history. But Chamoun did share this perspective.

“With this one, it should help our dealer partners compete,” Chamoun said. “Dealers need used cars. It’s really important. The ecosystem keeps changing. The new-car world has been disrupted. When you think about it from a needs perspective, we focus on what dealers need to compete in this new world we’re all in. For our dealer partners and commercial partners, ClearCar and what it does, it’s trying to help them solve what should be a No. 1 priority.

“At the end of the day, if you’re a dealer, you need great used cars. If you’re a commercial partner, whether you’re doing a trade-in or an upstream inspection, you need a way to quickly validate values of cars. This is a No. 1 priority for both our dealers and commercial partners,” Chamoun went on to say.