By: Earl Brown, Autofusion (2023)
Autofusion, Inc. is celebrating our 25th year! 2 ½ decades spent designing innovative technology and marketing solutions for Automotive dealers and OEMs like you. We would like to thank our dedicated staff, our loyal clients, and all of our friends, family, and partners in the automotive and technological fields. Without your lasting trust and support, this milestone would not have been possible.
In 1998, Autofusion was born when co-founders Roy Van Beaumont, with a background in programming and technology, and Ahmed Ghouri, M.D., who was an avid automotive and technology enthusiast (and a Honda gearhead), started thinking about how technology could improve the retail automotive industry and prepare it for the future. Together, they envisioned a fully modernized digital car shopping experience for consumers (as well as an end-to-end digital marketing pipeline for dealers) across the country.
Roy and Ahmed recruited and hired Autofusion’s first software development team. In the early years, the dev team consisted of University of California San Diego (UCSD) graduates: Carl Maeda, Andy Chian, and David Chen, all of whom started as software developers, and all of whom are still with Autofusion today, now serving as our Chief Executive Officer, Chief Technology Officer, and Director of Software (respectively).
Early on, Autofusion’s focus was on further developing and growing it’s consumer-facing shopping portal, called CarPrices.com, which was a dot com model that pioneered a lot of digital automotive firsts (such as email marketing, affiliate programs, consumer auto auctions, and more).
During an R&D brainstorming session, our executive and dev teams were struck by how dysfunctional many dealer’s websites were. Everywhere our team looked, they found serious design/UX issues, and SEO practices that often did more harm than good. Many new car dealership’s still didn’t even have a website, and most that did had single-page sites that were not attractive to shoppers (and thus barely functioned as a marketing device).
Autofusion decided to use it’s programming and SEO expertise (developed during the CarPrices.com era) to pivot to working directly with retail dealerships to help build solutions that were suited to their individual needs, as well as to the evolving needs of automotive consumers. The goal was to bring the local and regional digital marketing focus back onto dealerships (as opposed to large national platforms, and OEM sites).
Autofusion embraced the idea that each car dealership in America was a unique individual brand, in a unique market, with unique needs. This view came to define us as a company in the 2 ½ decades since. It’s a view that permeates absolutely everything we do in the Automotive space; that though it may be similar to other dealerships, your dealership is unlike any other.
Over the years, we have partnered with some of the most diverse and successful dealers, groups, and OEM’s in the Automotive Industry. We have built thousands of Award-Winning dealer websites, designed highly effective marketing campaigns, and innovated forward-thinking software solutions that solved real-world issues for dealers like you (such as our Custom Order, Factory Reserve, and TalkExpress solutions).
After so many years of difficult challenges, consumer shifts, and major industry struggles, we have persevered- because of our extraordinary people, and a problem-solving mindset. This notion is best exemplified by the fact that if you ask the average Autofusion employee for their thoughts about our 25 year anniversary- you’ll hear a lot of sentiment reflecting the fact that we are only just getting started. Thank you to everyone who’s had, or will have, a hand in our success. Cheers to the next 25, we can’t wait to see where the road takes us!
If your dealership would benefit from a more effective and advanced digital marketing, website, or software solution, please reach out to our sales team for a consultation, sales@autofusion.com or 800-410-7354.
