Eleven Years In, a Second Life

People who meet me often want to talk about the latest BMW or Audi. About thirty seconds into the conversation they realize I am not much of a car enthusiast, and then comes the puzzled look. How does someone like that end up running Cars24?

I fell in love with what the internet could change. I believed it would change how everything was bought and sold, and I could not see why used cars should be the exception. Buying a car was a major decision, yet people had so little certainty about what they were getting. I thought we could make that better.

Eleven years later, a great many people have bought and sold cars with us, and I am proud of what our team has built. Yet car ownership in India is still low. I know people who need a car but would rather wait for a new one than take the risk they see in buying used. Until then, they continue on two-wheelers or public transport, even though a car would suit their needs better. It bothers me that after eleven years we have not yet made the decision easy enough for them.

I understand their hesitation. My father bought his first car at 45, after years on a scooter, and I still remember how hard that decision was for him. A car is one of the largest purchases most families will ever make. They need answers to some basic questions. What condition is it really in, and what has it been through? Is the price fair? Can I afford it, and will someone lend me the money on fair terms? What happens when something goes wrong? Will the papers be clean and the transfer complete, so that the car is truly mine? A lower price alone cannot answer those questions. The buyer needs certainty about what they are buying and who will take responsibility if something goes wrong.

That is where our purpose comes from. Better drives, better lives. Nobody should be afraid to buy a used car, and nobody should be made to feel they are not good enough to own one.

To give someone that certainty, we have to get the inspection, the refurbishment, the loan, the paperwork and the transfer right, along with the decisions between those steps. Some of that work is physical, and every step has exceptions. The internet let us bring the buyer, the car and the information together in one place, which was real progress. But coordinating all of that human judgment, across every unusual case, remained slow and imperfect.

This is what has begun to change. AI can help make sense of the photographs, conversations and documents this work runs on. It can look at an inspection image and prompt the next question, read a file and flag what is missing, follow a conversation and connect what a customer needs to what has to happen next. It does not lift the bonnet or sign the transfer, and the responsibility for getting things right stays with people. But it can help them act on that information more quickly. We are beginning to see that in the work: between April and June 2026, AI assisted about 80 percent of our inspections, and the average inspection came down from 45 minutes to 26. There is still much more to solve across the rest of the journey.

After eleven years, I understand much more of what makes this problem hard, and I still have the energy to keep working on it. I feel lucky that AI has arrived at this point in my life. I believe it has made me ten times more productive, and many of the builders at Cars24 feel the same about their own work. The possibility of turning that into progress across the company has given me a renewed purpose. I have started to think of it as a second life.

I believe buying a used car will become easier than buying a new one, in India and beyond. Choosing used should feel like a wise decision, one people can make with confidence. I think about the people I know who need a car but are still waiting because they are afraid to buy used. How quickly we make progress matters to them.

We have spent eleven years getting this far. With that experience behind us and so much more now possible, I find myself asking: can we do the next ten years of work in one?