March 19, 2026 | Engineer used $25 AI tool to save $4,200 on car; Iran war threatens Japan’s supplies

Are you a dealer creating a workplace culture

your employees are proud to be part of?

Applications are now open for the 2026 Automotive News

best dealerships to work for program.

This isn't just an award,

it's a chance to get real insight

into what's working at your dealership

and where you can improve.

And we've expanded the categories this year,

recognizing everything from technician experience

and leadership development,

to AI enablement and employee retention.

The registration deadline is April 17th,

find out more and apply at AutoNews.com.

Welcome to Daily Drive for Thursday, March 19th, 2026.

I'm Kellan Walker in Las Vegas.

Today on the show,

the Iran War forces Toyota and Nissan to cut production.

Uber bets big on Rivian's RoboTaxes

and while others ditch planned EV models,

Mercedes AMG is unveiling three new ones.

Plus, we'll hear from a Boston software engineer

who built an AI agent that negotiated a car deal for him,

saving more than $4,000 on a new Hyundai Palisade.

What the AI agent did under my command

and my instruction was just email the quote back and forth.

Pick whoever had the lowest one

and go to the other person and say,

they're offering this, can you beat it?

Let's run through all the news you need to know

to keep up in the auto industry.

Toyota CEO Koji Sato is sounding the alarm

about Japan's auto supply chain.

Speaking as chairman of the

Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association,

Sato said that Iran war is threatening supplies

of aluminum and NAFTA,

a key chemical for plastics and rubber.

Japan sources about 70% of both materials

from the Middle East.

It exports roughly 800,000 vehicles a year to the region,

worth about $16 billion.

According to the Nikkei newspaper,

Nissan and Toyota are already trimming production in Japan

to account for possible shipping interruptions.

Uber is making a big bet on autonomous vehicles,

committing up to $1.25 billion to deploy

10,000 Rivian R2 RoboTaxi exclusively on its app.

The ride-hailing giant will invest $300 million upfront

with additional funding tied to hitting

autonomous driving milestones through 2031.

The partnership launches in San Francisco and Miami in 2028,

then expands across 25 cities in the US, Canada and Europe.

For Rivian, it's a major validation

for its self-driving ambitions as it prepares to install

in-house autonomy chips in the R2 starting next year.

And we've been talking a lot lately about canceled EVs,

but Mercedes AMG is charging forward in a big way.

The brand just unveiled three battery-powered GT models

to dealers, a coupe launching early next year,

followed by two crossovers.

Mercedes also revealed a G63 Cabriolet,

the first ever G-Wagon convertible for the US market,

arriving in 2028.

It will have a V8 and a powered fabric roof.

The rollout underscores Mercedes' growth strategy

with plans to hit 400,000 US sales annually

by decades in.

And those are today's headlines.

You can find more details on all those stories

at AutoNews.com.

This weekend, the WeatherTech Sports Car Championship

kicks off one of its signature events,

the 12 Hours of Sebring Endurance Race in Florida.

The International Motorsports Association

oversees the championship, which features brands ranging

from Ferrari to Porsche to Chevrolet to Lexus,

competing at races across North America.

Our own Jack Wallsworth caught up with IMSA president,

John Dunin, at Daytona International Speedway,

where the season opened with the Rolex 24

and record attendance.

John Dunin, welcome to Daily Drive.

Thanks for having me, Jack.

It's great to see you, and great to have you back

at M-SOL Undertake Sports Car Championship event,

especially this one.

Yeah, likewise.

Rolex 24.

Super cool being here.

So John, we're at the iconic Daytona International Speedway,

we're here for the Rolex 24 Hours Daytona.

How would you describe the atmosphere this year?

There's a lot of adjectives, electric, emotional,

passionate, to see what we've seen in terms of

the attendance at the Royal before the 24,

to see all the folks transition right into the Rolex 24

from the infield to trending ticket sales

to be an all-time record for this event,

to see the garage area filled with fans,

and that's one of the things we're super proud of

is an open general admission ticket as a garage pass

and a paddock pass, so we're really proud of that.

And then the thing that pushed it over the top for me

was the gridwalk yesterday, never in a million years

did I see something like that

in all these years in the sport.

And I think the last piece, which I learned late last night

was the activity on the midway for the automakers,

for Michelin, and for the other brands

that are activating there.

In one day yesterday, I had an automaker report to me

that they had the most fan engagement,

which means you provide your name, address,

and email to ask for more information.

They had one day had more engagements

than they had the entire Rolex last year.

And for me, that's a big barometer of attendance, one,

but the enthusiasm of the fans

for the 18 automakers that are racing here.

I was over there yesterday afternoon

and I was taken back by how large the cross were.

Incredible, yeah.

So obviously this is a very long race.

How do you watch it?

Do you go for different spots?

You try to say it for the whole thing?

What's your game?

Yeah, I mean, of course, the race day morning

and all the pre-race is a busy time for us.

Once the race gets going, it settles in a little bit.

We have such strong attendance from our distinct partners

and other new potential partners

that are looking at IMSA as a marketing platform

or potentially a technology development platform.

So a lot of meetings and then spent overnight.

I don't go to sleep.

I spent overnight in race control,

especially given the fog and the visibility issues we had.

But I like to have my finger on the pulse of the race itself,

but we got an amazing group of professionals here at IMSA

that run race control and pit lane

and marketing and partnership and PR

and all those things.

So stayed up with them.

And we had a lot of collaboration up top

and race control about the best things to do

to get the racing back going when we had the fog.

So inside some announcements earlier in the weekend,

that Friday, that's the partnership with NASA.

Did you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, I mean, for me, I remember sitting in front of the TV

or having the TV rolled into my grade school

when rockin' launches were gonna happen.

And for our sanctioning body, IMSA,

to have a partnership with NASA

because they believe that our environment

creates the strain and the stress and the endurance

on product and thermal properties

and lightweight materials that are exhibited here,

sensors that are used real time here to collect data

and they wanna come study this environment.

And in the same manner, they've got some really cool stuff

and they wanna give us the chance to do the same.

So that kind of collaboration similar to what we have

with the EPA, the DOE, SAE over the years.

This one takes it to the next level.

In addition, this space over five decades

has been a test bed or a laboratory for automakers,

tire companies, lubricant companies.

And we felt like the time is right

given the technological advancements

of not just the GTP cars, but even the GT cars

to allow and provide a formalized platform

for tech companies to come in here.

We've just launched our Lenovo AMD Technical Center

or Engineering Trailer.

And you go in there and you watch what's happening in there

and the amount of raw data that's coming off of those cars

through probably 150 sensors real time.

We have a very data rich environment here

that we can leverage to allow software companies

who are on our panel like Microsoft, AWS, NASA,

we already talked about and there's many more

that could use that data to prove out

a new piece of software of their own,

develop maybe a new product that isn't necessarily

just for racing, it could be for business

and show a client how they could gain

a competitive advantage by this.

So for me, it's what IMSA needs to be.

It's where IMSA is headed and we're thrilled.

BDO, an existing partner, is gonna help us

by being that digital transformation partner

and launching that along the way.

So Michelin Sustainability and Racing Award

gets awarded today and then who knows down the road

if there's a technology award based on learnings

from the racetrack.

That was John Dunin, president of IMSA

speaking with automotive news reporter Jack Wallsworth.

You can hear the rest of Jack's conversation with John

on the upcoming bonus episode of Daily Drive,

available Sunday morning wherever you get your podcast.

Coming up next, how one software engineer

used an AI agent to negotiate with dealerships

and saved more than $4,000.

That's next on Daily Drive.

NVIDIA is betting on cars.

And this week, I got a closer look

at the company's strategy.

On this week's episode of the Automotive News Shift podcast,

I'm joined by Ali Khani,

NVIDIA's vice president of automotive.

We talk inside of a moving NVIDIA-powered level two vehicle

about the company's automotive goals

and how its chips are managing the complex tasks required

for automated driving.

The industry is at an inflection point.

Every car will wanna be autonomous.

Plus, I'll recap NVIDIA's GTC in San Jose,

including why CEO Jensen Huang says autonomous driving tech

is a solved problem.

It's definitely a solved problem.

The rest of this is visionary reclamation.

I'm Molly Boygon, join me on Shift,

available this Sunday, wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back to Daily Drive.

I'm Kellan Walker.

Imagine buying a car without ever stepping foot

in a dealership showroom

and having an AI agent do all the negotiating for you.

AJ Steivenberg is a software engineer

with Datadog in Boston.

When he and his wife decided they needed a Hyundai Palisade,

he built an AI agent using an open source tool

called Open Claw.

Automotive news retail tech reporter Mark Homer

spoke with AJ about how he did it

and what it means for the future of car buying.

Tell me to the point then where you decided

to build an AI agent.

What made you get there?

And then what did you do to build it in layman's terms?

Yeah, so let's define AI agent

and kind of AI tools really quickly.

You've probably, I think your listeners and readers

will be familiar with the chat GPT

or some of the other kind of products

that you can use online, the chat bots.

To be clear, we've also written extensively

about AI agents and agenting AI.

Okay, it's perfect.

So yeah, we've established the premise

that these large language models being called

in kind of a loop or a pattern can actually use tools

like your browser or your email

or these other things like your messaging.

So I had read about Clawbot,

which has now been renamed to Open Claw.

And I was familiar with the capabilities

and I thought it would be kind of useful.

I'd actually on my own been trying to email

a couple of dealerships and I just found

a lot of dealerships don't wanna interact with email.

They really want you to come in.

There's a lot of friction there

and I generally wanted to cast a very wide net,

but I didn't want to go and find all these people

to email myself.

And that was when I was like, okay,

this is a great use case to try out Open Claw on.

And for readers, just to be clear,

this is an open source.

Correct.

Tool that you can customize.

Yeah, yeah.

The code base itself is fully open

so you can read all of it.

You can install it on any machine you want.

For the most part, I had it running on an old laptop.

And what it allows you to do is you connect it

to one of these large language model provider

with like an API key.

And then this is gonna be available.

What is an API key for Layman?

I mean, my understanding is it's basically

something to connect to other software.

Yeah, it authenticates you.

So the idea is you go to an Anthropic

or you go to like an Open AI's website,

you give them your credit card information

and then if you want to use their platform,

not necessarily through the browser,

but through like an AI tool like Open Claw,

they give you a secret, like it's like a password.

You know, they give you a long string of letters

and numbers that you can kind of paste in.

And then it links together.

Correct.

And that's what you did?

Yep.

Did you want this or customize it for yourself?

Sort of, you have to enable it.

And what I mean by that is you need to give it access

to the tools that you would use to take these actions.

So for me, that was basically my messaging application.

So like I messaged on an Apple phone,

along with like Gmail.

And then I also gave it access to a web browser.

So it's able to go to various car dealership websites

and find like the contact form and ask them about,

you know, the Hyundai Palisade that we were looking for.

So when did you create this tool?

And when were you ready to start using it?

I mean, installing it and getting ready to use it

only took a few hours.

I have a fair amount of experience

I've been in the industry for a while.

So it's not an easy thing to just get set up on your own

and you sort of have to have a little bit

of a development background to be able to get started.

But with that, it only took me a couple of hours

before I was able to kind of set it off on its adventure.

And was this in the summertime still or the fall?

No, this was like a few weeks ago.

A few weeks ago.

Yeah, yeah.

So it would have been mid January or late January.

So then once you had it,

how did you use it to search for a car?

So I gave it a prompt.

There is a couple of Reddit is a website

that I'm sure your readers are familiar with.

And there are active subreddits or forums for many vehicles.

One of them was the Hyundai Palisade.

So the first thing I asked it for was,

find me what a decent or fair and then a good

and a great price is for this car that I want

in my area in Massachusetts.

Like what are people saying?

What are people paying?

Because the price can vary kind of all over the country.

So I did that and it was able to go on Reddit

and kind of look through the topics and the posts.

People have been sharing their quotes

that they have received from dealers.

And they're asking the same question anyone would ask

is like, am I getting fleeced?

Like, am I getting ripped off here?

And the AI agent is able to kind of go through

or read those, pull them together.

And then it kind of kicked out a spreadsheet for me.

And that gave me like a target number.

That gave me an idea of what I wanted to work with.

Now, so you're saying it used Reddit postings.

Did it use-

Yeah, and I told it to.

You told it to.

Did you tell it to use any vehicle listing sites?

No, for the most part,

I had used the tool called visor.vin

and I had already sort of scoped out what the prices are.

If you haven't used visor.vin,

it's just another aggregation site,

like the ones you had said earlier.

So I had a rough idea of what dealers

were listing on their websites,

but there's a difference between what a dealer lists

on their website and what people are paying out the door

at the dealership.

And that's what I was trying to get at.

So, yeah.

So it gave, did it give you a list?

Did you have a top five?

Did it narrow to one place?

No, it actually didn't even narrow down by dealerships yet.

So that's the second part of the story.

There, some other open source developer made a tool

that allows you to like track Hyundai inventory.

This I think is very specific to Hyundai.

I don't know if other dealerships have it,

but I, at this point,

my wife had picked out a color combination she liked

for interior and exterior and a trim she wanted.

So I had a very specific search criteria.

And this was, you already had the model in mind then.

Yeah.

At this point I had picked out,

I knew we wanted the Hyundai Palisade,

I knew we wanted the calligraphy trim

and I knew we wanted it in like a blue exterior

with a brown interior.

That was what my wife and I agreed on.

So at that point it was a matter of finding inventory.

And there were a couple of online tools to do that.

And the best one that I found,

I think I linked to in the blog post.

I don't remember it off the top of my head.

It simply is like a very simple Excel spreadsheet style list.

And it gives you a couple of filters to pick.

And then you're able to select, you know,

the color and the trim and all these things

and give you like a zip code radius.

So that's an easy tool for an AI agent to use.

So I handed it off to the AI agent to Open Claw.

And I said, find me all of the vins

and the colors in this color combination

within 50 miles of the Boston area.

And it went out and just did that and it pulled back a list.

And then I said, okay, now that you have this list,

go to those dealerships and contact them

and ask them with the lowest out the door prices.

And that's where the magic of, you know,

the AI agent really took over.

Because for me that would have been,

I would have had to go to each dealer's website,

find the vinn, you know, paste the vinn in,

click contact me, like, you know, ask them

about this vehicle, fill out the form,

and then, you know, wait for the email.

And the robot is able to, like the AI agent

is able to use the browser,

go through and do that all on its own.

Hmm.

And how long did that process take then to narrow?

You know, when you said the parameters,

find me this model with this combination within 50 miles,

how long did it take to come up with something

and how many options came up?

It took maybe an hour and a half,

maybe somewhere in there.

Okay.

Not very long.

And it had emailed a number of dealerships.

I think at first there was like five

that had the exact color that I wanted.

And then one of them, it turned out,

they didn't have it yet.

It was in shipping or in transit

and they were expecting it in like a month,

which, you know, kind of was like, okay, nice,

but maybe not.

And there were a couple of other dealerships,

you know, either didn't respond

or weren't interested in negotiating.

And, you know, eventually what happened was

there was two left that were interested.

And what the AI agent did under my command

and my instruction was just email the quote back and forth,

pick whoever had the lowest one and go to the other person

and say, they're offering this, can you beat it?

And it basically did that two or three times.

And then one person came back and said,

if you commit tonight, I'll give you $4,200 off.

And then the other person didn't reply.

So I just said, yes.

And that's how you did it.

Yep.

You know that there's at least one startup out there

that is doing this, but there are fees involved

and you did it on your own time.

And I'm guessing for very little of any money invested.

Yeah.

It cost about 25 bucks in API tokens when I added it up.

So it wasn't that spendy.

I'm aware that there are brokers that do this.

Then I'm aware that there's, you know,

I'm sure that there's many software startups

that are trying to do this too.

They very much are.

And it's fascinating to me that you've even bypassed them

and did it on your own.

So I mean, that's unusual to say the least.

Yeah.

I mean, it's a rapidly changing time in software, right?

Like by train, I'm also a software developer.

And you know, the number one news article you see out there

now is like AI is going to eliminate

all software engineering jobs.

So there's some consternation in my industry as well

about what this kind of technology means

and what it can bring.

What's the message here?

I mean, in terms of what we look at,

what I mean is our vehicle listings companies

or even startups that come up with the technology

to do what you just did for monthly fees.

You know, what's the message?

Are these becoming irrelevant?

Or is there room for these companies in the future?

I think there's incredible room for these types of companies.

I don't, you know, what I did was I strung together

a number of tools to kind of make this work.

It's certainly not like I couldn't hand this over

to my dad today and say, go, you know, go buy a car

with this tool that would not be feasible.

It's certainly 100 times easier than it was three years ago.

I maybe a thousand times easier than it was

two or three years ago.

So with that in mind, you know,

it's definitely more difficult to differentiate.

But a business that's starting today

that if you are going to negotiate, you know, car deals,

you have a lot of options that I don't have, right?

I'm buying one car.

I'm buying, you know, one vehicle,

maybe for the next five or six years.

So if you're going to do a startup that does this,

I'm sure there's options for you to negotiate in volume

or have some ability to be a repeat business

where you're more valuable to a dealership

or a network of dealers than I would be.

But you have, and I appreciate that you see room

for these companies, you know, as they adapt to the technology,

but you bypassed all of them.

I did, yeah.

There's something, I've heard the term,

I don't like the term, but vibe coding.

Yeah, oh yeah.

Is that what this could become?

That it would be easy enough to use a tool

to do what you just did,

even if you don't know the programming.

Yeah, this didn't require very much

actual programming on my part.

It required a little bit of research,

but I wouldn't say it required,

like I didn't write any line of code for this.

And even if I did, the AI agent itself can write the code now.

And a lot of my day-to-day now is instructing AI agents

to write code that a year ago or two years ago

I would have had to write by hand.

So that is changing really quickly.

But I don't know if I'd say that there's, you know,

like no room for innovation here,

because you still, like I said,

I didn't use this AI agent at all

for any of the vehicle discovery process

or finding what's out there

or comparing, you know, two types of vehicles

or any of that kind of stuff.

I sort of tried.

I don't think there was a ton of value there.

Like I think I'd asked it to compare the Palisade

to the Toyota Highlander.

And these AI models,

they don't have a lot of strong opinions.

You can very easily push it one way or the other

and it reflects back what you tell it.

So that's why I like hearing from creators.

And that's why I like hearing, you know,

like watching a YouTube video

from somebody who had the car for three weeks

and drove it around and said,

this thing, I don't really like this as much.

I think one car dealership podcast

did say they kind of criticized the hybrid drivetrain.

And they're like, oh, it's a little jumpy, you know,

when it switches from electric to gas, it's like a little,

you know, and those are the types of things

that the AI model would never say.

They're very agreeable.

They're very personable.

So I don't think it removes that.

They're like impressionable children.

It sounds like at least up to stage.

And that's changing really quickly.

Yeah, since even this effort,

like this thing came out that I've worked on,

I think both AI labs like OpenAI Anthropic

are kind of the emergent foundational frontier AI labs today

have released new models.

Oh, really?

So this changes, yeah, this is changing every month,

including like what capabilities are out there.

So if I were trying to work in the space,

if I was trying to be in automotive sales

or in automotive technology,

I would just try and keep up with the developments,

don't form too many strong opinions.

The AI agents were not capable of doing this six months ago.

This just would be a laughing matter

on social media or wherever they are.

And I realize you're a software programmer

and you write code and all that other stuff,

but do you see a point where with agents

being able to code themselves,

are we reaching a point where anybody could do what you did

and create an agent on their own to buy a car?

Yeah, I think to some extent we are.

Yes, I'd say that by,

I wanna like couch that a little bit.

I do think we're approaching the point

where anyone can build an AI agent

that would negotiate for a car

better than that person would be able to do.

But I also think there is still a lot of room between that

and what you could do with more information.

Information in any kind of negotiation

or any kind of market is,

the more information you have, the better.

And when you start,

if you were gonna maybe build an app that did this,

you have information about what customers are looking for

and what part of the country, right?

What are people interested in?

What kind of vehicles,

kind of demographic are the people

who are looking for these cars in?

And you're able to do that

and take information asymmetry and use it to your advantage

in a way that someone who's like writing an AI agent

wouldn't be able to do

if they were just doing it for themself.

But it does certainly lower the bar such that

if you were relying on the fact

that nobody could do this before

and you have the technology,

now I don't think that's the case anymore.

So you have to be better.

That was AJ Steivenberg

speaking with Automotive News Retail Tech reporter,

Mark Holmer.

You can read Mark's full story

about AJ's car buying experience at autonews.com.

That's Daily Drive for today.

I'm Kellan Walker.

Thanks to our own Jack Wallsworth,

Hans Grimo and Irvash Kakaria

for their reporting for today's podcast.

You can get the latest news on digital retail tools,

supply chain disruptions,

and everything happening in the auto industry

at autonews.com.

Come back tomorrow for a conversation with Micah Morton,

service manager at Healthman Fiat,

Alfa Romeo, and Maserati of Sugarland

about recruiting younger technicians

and why dealerships need to step up

their service marketing game.

We do direct mail emails, texts, phone calls.

We have a BDC that does a really good job

in contacting customers and reaching out to customers.

We'd love to hear from you.

Let us know what you think of the show

and the topics we covered today.

Send us an email at dailydrive at autonews.com

or leave us a voicemail at 313-444-2774.

And if you enjoyed the podcast,

remember to like, leave a review,

and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

March 19, 2026 | Engineer used $25 AI tool to save $4,200 on car; Iran war threatens Japan’s supplies

About this episode

Toyota

Nissan

Uber

Rivian

Mercedes-AMG

AI agent negotiating car deals

auto supply chain

Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association

aluminum

autonomous vehicles

autonomous driving

Mercedes-Benz G63 Cabriolet

V8

powered fabric roof

WeatherTech SportsCar Championship

12 Hours of Sebring

International Motorsports Association

Ferrari

Porsche

Chevrolet

Lexus

marketing platform

technology development platform

race control

pit lane

NASA

thermal properties

lightweight materials

sensors

EPA

SAE

DOE

Request an Explanation

Want to learn more?

Help improve this episode

More from Automotive News Daily Drive