What KAR AI does, in one paragraph

Buying a car is a research problem disguised as a shopping problem. Done properly it takes weeks: comparing trims across brands, chasing listings that go stale while you read them, digging fuel, insurance, servicing and depreciation out of separate places, then weighing it all against a budget, a driveway and a family. Most people can't sustain that, so they shortcut it — a brand they trust, a dealer they liked, a car a friend recommended — and find out afterwards what it actually costs.

KAR AI turns those weeks into about two minutes.

You answer a short brief: budget, body type, how many kilometres you drive a year, how many seats you need, what you refuse to live with. KAR narrows to the models that can genuinely meet it, then goes and gets the numbers — live listings in your market, safety test results, real-world consumption rather than brochure figures, and what the car will cost you across the years you keep it. What comes back is up to five cars, each with a role: best match, best value, best reliability. Each shows its trim, its price range, its five-year ownership cost and the specific reason it made your list.

That last part is the difference. A recommendation you can't interrogate is just an opinion. Every KAR pick arrives with its working shown, so you can disagree with it, check it, and defend it to whoever you're buying the car with.

And nobody can pay their way into one. No brand, no dealer, no manufacturer can appear in a KAR recommendation or move up in one by paying us. It's the whole product.

Tanner Wolff is taking that to the United States

Today we're glad to say Tanner Wolff has joined KAR AI as a founding member, leading our US expansion.

It isn't a translation job. Almost every input KAR relies on changes at the Atlantic. European listings come from marketplaces that don't operate in America. Euro NCAP has no jurisdiction there — the equivalents are NHTSA and IIHS, scored differently and published on different schedules. Fuel is priced by the gallon and taxed nothing like it is in Europe. Insurance is quoted by state and by driving record. Depreciation curves differ model by model, and a car that holds its value in Athens may not in Ohio. Registration, inspection and road tax rules vary fifty ways.

Rebuilding the research layer for all of that, and keeping the output as defensible as it is today, is Tanner's brief. It's a real one.

Who he is

Tanner is an aspiring Formula 1 aerodynamicist, with a background in engineering and design, and he composes and acts alongside it. He's also a high school student in the United States, and a founding member of KAR AI from here forward.

The engineering instinct is what made this an easy decision. Aerodynamics is a discipline built on refusing to trust intuition when the numbers say otherwise — you test, you measure, you accept the result. That is the same instinct KAR runs on. A recommendation is only worth something if the depreciation figure, the consumption figure and the safety score behind it survive being checked. Someone who wants to spend their career in a wind tunnel understands why we won't let a brand buy its way past that.

If his being in school reads as unusual, it isn't unusual here. I started KAR at 16 and I'm 17 now — a fact GOCAR.gr, Greece's leading automotive magazine, put on its front page. What we look for in the people building this is whether they can hold a standard under pressure, not what year they were born.

Why now

KAR AI has matched more than 100 drivers, delivered over 200 recommendations and covers 40+ brands. That's a real start, and a start is all it is.

Growing an independent research product is harder than growing a comparison site, because the easy money is exactly the money we've ruled out. That constraint shapes how we're funded, how fast we move and who we bring in — and it applies just as much to a new market as an established one. An American KAR AI that takes dealer money would not be KAR AI.

What's next

US listing coverage. NHTSA and IIHS data wired into the same checks Euro NCAP feeds today. Ownership-cost modelling built on American fuel, insurance and depreciation. And the same standard we set on day one: two minutes in, and a shortlist you can defend out.

Welcome, Tanner!

Want to see how it works? Run a free brief — about two minutes of questions, no dealer contact, no card required.