How AI wants used cars

Used Cars

Indexed against the used cars average of 25 brands (100 = the category), measured across 60 AI answers in the latest weekly run.

Driver by driver

Where the category actually separates. A wide spread means assistants describe these brands very differently on that driver; a narrow one means it is table stakes.

The shapes AI leaves these brands in

Three indices make a profile, and profiles fall into recognisable shapes. A brand that is magnetic but unbought has a different problem from a habit nobody loves — and a different thing to build next.

What assistants actually talk about

The sixteen dimensions underneath the drivers, scored 0–10 on how the answers describe each brand. Spread is the distance between the strongest and weakest brand: the widest are where a brand can still separate itself, the narrowest are the price of entry.

Does desire track being recommended?

Rank correlation between a brand's driver index and the share of answers naming it, across the 25 indexed brands in this category. A relationship inside one run's answers — descriptive, never causal, and easily moved by a single brand at this sample size.

Method & limitations

Every week, each category runs a fixed set of unbranded consumer prompts against ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. A separate model reads the answers and scores every brand named in them across 16 perception dimensions, 0–10. Those dimensions are grouped into the three Drivers of Desire from the Havas Science of Desire framework, and each brand's driver score is indexed against the average of every scored brand in its category — 100 is the category, 115 is fifteen per cent above it.

This measures how AI assistants describe brands in their answers. It is not a survey of people, and it is not an endorsement: the scores are a reading of machine-generated text at the time of the run, and relationships between drivers and how often a brand is named are correlational. A brand needs at least six scored dimensions in a run to be indexed, and a category needs at least four such brands to get a board. See the full methodology.

Other categories