WeBuyCars plans to begin offering its proprietary vehicle inspection platform, Inspectify, to the broader used-car market within the next six to 12 months, opening what the JSE-listed vehicle dealer sees as a new revenue line beyond its core buying and selling business.
“We will probably still wait another six months to a year before we start monetising this and offering it outside of the WeBuyCars network,” CEO Faan van der Walt told TechCentral after the release of the company’s interim results on Monday. “Entities have already reached out to us.”
Inspectify was developed in-house after WeBuyCars spent several years relying on third-party providers, including Dekra, to inspect the vehicles in its inventory. Van der Walt said the shift was driven by growing consumer appetite for condition reports that go beyond the highly technical output of a standard roadworthy assessment.
“Consumers wanted more than just a very technical vehicle report,” he said. “They might say your brakes are at X%, or your wheel alignment means this – things the average consumer doesn’t understand.”
The platform uses AI to translate technical inspection findings into plain language and is being expanded to include total cost of ownership modelling covering maintenance, fuel consumption and depreciation. Van der Walt said the next phase will help first-time buyers – a significant slice of WeBuyCars’ market – make better-informed decisions and avoid post-purchase regret.
To address the obvious credibility concern of inspecting its own stock – effectively marking its own exam – WeBuyCars subjects Inspectify reports to continuous independent auditing on a random-sample basis across its branches. Van der Walt said the discipline has resulted in fewer customer complaints about vehicle condition.
Strategic asset
WeBuyCars chief digital officer Wynand Beukes, speaking on a media call on Monday, said bringing inspections in-house gave the group ownership of “the platform, the journey and the data”, with the resulting inspection data positioned as a strategic asset.
Van der Walt said the group uses that data to run what he called a “loss probability matrix”, which flags vehicles likely to incur losses based on common, model-specific faults at various stages of a vehicle’s lifespan. The data also informs repair costing, so an Inspectify report does not merely tell a buyer that a Corolla needs new ball joints, for example, but specifies the rand cost of fixing them.
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WeBuyCars is also developing a vehicle-scanning system – referred to internally as the “WeEye” – that uses advanced cameras to capture thousands of images of a car from every angle, including underneath. AI models trained on the resulting dataset identify scratches, dents and previous paintwork. The technology will form part of the Inspectify offering in future, Van der Walt said.
Behind the platform sits an in-house IT team of about 100 people, spanning full-stack and front-end development, technical support, and testing. WeBuyCars has also taken a minority stake in software development firm Agile Bridge.
“This was done strategically with the intent to have a talent pipeline,” Van der Walt said, adding that WeBuyCars deliberately mixes its own developers with Agile Bridge’s on shared teams rather than handing projects off.
He said AI tools – naming Anthropic’s Claude specifically – have begun to reshape how the company thinks about engineering headcount. “When we lose a senior resource, we think twice before replacing them, because the AI capabilities have just been phenomenal.”
Inspectify is one of two flagship in-house digital products WeBuyCars has built. The other, WeFin, is a vehicle finance platform fully integrated with the group’s stock management system. Beukes said on the media call that controlling both finance and inspections in-house allowed WeBuyCars to capture margin and customer-journey data that would otherwise sit with third parties.
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WeBuyCars reported a 7.8% rise in revenue to R14.2-billion for the six months to 31 March. Headline earnings were down 1.6% to R500.1-million as aggressive pricing from Asian vehicle brands and a buoyant new-vehicle market squeezed used-car margins.
WeBuyCars is also investing ahead of the curve, specifically the cost of opening three new vehicle “supermarkets” — in Montana, Lansdowne and Witbank. Headline earnings per share slipped 1.7% to 119.7c, even as buying volumes rose 3.2% to 95 328 units and selling volumes climbed 2.3% to 93 519 units.
WeBuyCars’ shares were trading 6.3% higher at R37.28 at 1.45pm on Monday. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
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