Texas Border Business
By Roberto Hugo González / Texas Border Business
The traditional automobile dealership may eventually close its showroom doors at night without actually shutting down its business.
Yossi J. Levi, founder and CEO of Car Dealership Guy, predicts the first major dealership operating nearly 24 hours a day will emerge by 2029 as artificial intelligence handles customer and administrative functions after employees leave.
It is the ninth and final prediction in a group Levi published Sept. 29 examining where he believes automotive retail is headed during the next 24 months.
Levi’s prediction does not necessarily envision salespeople, managers, technicians, and other dealership employees physically working throughout the night.
Instead, Car Dealership Guy describes a model in which AI agents continue portions of dealership operations with minimal staffing after normal business hours.
Those functions could include sales interactions, service scheduling, financing processes, customer support, and back-office work. Under that model, the physical showroom could close while digital dealership operations continue.
The prediction represents the combined effect of several changes Levi expects artificial intelligence to bring to automotive retail.
Among his other forecasts, Levi predicts AI will eliminate more than half of dealership Business Development Center jobs, allow a 20-person dealership to sell 200 vehicles monthly, make AI-to-AI automobile purchasing standard, and double technician productivity without longer working hours.
Each prediction remains unproven. Levi acknowledged how quickly large language models are developing when presenting the forecasts and suggested that even his 24-month timeline could prove generous for some of them.
His experience includes both dealership operations and digital automotive retail. Levi began working in his family’s used-car dealership in Philadelphia at 14 and later founded Gettacar, an online automotive retailer. He launched the anonymous Car Dealership Guy account in 2021 before publicly identifying himself in 2024.
The nearly 24-hour dealership prediction may be among the easiest of the nine to observe if it happens.
A dealership would need to demonstrate that meaningful business operations continue throughout most of the day and night even when conventional customer-facing facilities are closed.
Whether consumers will embrace that model and whether dealers can successfully automate enough processes to make it practical remain unanswered questions.
For now, Levi has put a timeline on the idea.
By 2029, the industry will have an opportunity to determine how closely reality matches his nine predictions.
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