Send us the photos already sitting on your carsales listing and we build them into a vertical reel for your own Instagram, TikTok and Facebook channel, plus a landscape cut you can upload to the listing itself. Nobody has to walk the yard with a phone, and the finished files land in your inbox within 24 hours.
Every video product an Australian dealership can buy today ends up as a landscape asset sitting inside a listing page. That is a useful thing to own, and we make one for you as well. It is not, however, the piece that is missing, because the surface where your yard actually competes for attention is the vertical feed on the buyer's own phone, and no portal builds that for you.
IBISWorld counted 4,921 motor vehicle retailing businesses in Australia in 2025, up 1.2 per cent on the year before. The AADA, which speaks for the franchised new car and truck side only, puts that subset at more than 3,900 dealerships employing over 64,000 people.
The Global Digital Report published in February 2026 counts 21 million active social media users in Australia, which is 77.7 per cent of the population. Of those users, 80.6 per cent are on Facebook and 65.9 per cent use Instagram, and the daily time figures put TikTok at one hour fourteen minutes.
carsales reports that 38 per cent of enquiries on its site happen outside business hours. Your yard is shut at nine on a Tuesday night, but the phone in the buyer's hand is not, and a reel keeps working the whole time the gate is locked.
We have gone through what each Australian platform actually accepts rather than assuming the American answer applies here. Where we could not confirm something from the platform itself, we say so on this page instead of promising it to you and finding out later.
carsales does take video on a dealer listing, but it expects you to shoot it. The documented path is to capture the vehicle on a smartphone and upload the file through the AutoGate app or AutoGate Desktop, and carsales asks that the car is clean inside and out, that the location is well lit and free of distractions, and that the radio stays off so no copyrighted music ends up in the file. If you would rather not do that at all, carsales also sells Visual Media Services, where a photographer comes to the yard on a scheduled cycle. Our landscape cut drops into the same AutoGate slot without anyone filming anything.
Drive is worth watching because it lists dealer stock only and no private sellers, which means every used vehicle a reader sees there comes with consumer guarantees attached. Trade reporting put it above 55,000 dealer listings in November 2025, roughly double the year before, with Victoria alone climbing from about 4,500 listings to 16,000. We could not find any product documentation for a per-listing video slot on Drive, so we are not going to tell you there is one. If Drive matters to your yard, ask your account manager directly and we will supply whatever format comes back.
CarsGuide sits inside the Gumtree Group alongside Gumtree Australia and Autotrader Australia, and every listing feeds a Dealer Destination page where your branding and your full stock sit together. The video CarsGuide documents publicly is advertising placement and Showroom brand storytelling rather than a walkaround field on each vehicle, so treat it as a place for your yard's story rather than for one ute at a time. Appetite is clearly there, since CarsGuide reported video views more than 70 per cent higher in 2025 than in 2024.
Gumtree carries private sellers and dealers side by side, which is exactly why it is the hardest place to look professional. Your listing sits next to somebody's four phone photos taken at dusk, and the group reports more than 1.7 million live listings reaching over four million Australians each month. Trade coverage says video does appear on dealer listings there, though Gumtree publishes no product page setting out the limits, so we treat that as reported rather than confirmed.
This is the change that decides the whole argument. Meta closed the free dealer pipe into Marketplace: automated bulk inventory distribution was switched off and the ability to create free vehicle listings from a Facebook business Page was phased out, taking effect around 30 January 2023. What is left for a dealership is manual listing or paid Automotive Inventory Ads. That means your unpaid reach on Meta no longer runs through inventory at all, it runs through your own Page, your Reels and your stories, and the asset that surface wants is a vertical clip rather than a listing thumbnail. We also could not confirm from any Meta document whether a manual Marketplace vehicle listing currently accepts a video upload, so please check that in your own account before you build a workflow around it.
A portal earns its money when a shopper stays on the portal, so every video product it builds points back at a listing page, a dealer site embed or an email. That is a perfectly sensible business, and it is also the reason the vertical feed stays empty. Your Instagram and TikTok accounts are the one channel where you own the audience outright, and they are the one channel the portals have no reason to fill for you.
The same set of photos produces a 9:16 reel for Instagram, TikTok and your Facebook Page, and a landscape version sized for the listing slot. You upload once and you are covered on both sides, so there is no second job for whoever runs your marketing.
The photos your business manager already took for the listing are enough. There is no shoot to schedule around a wet Tuesday in Melbourne, no tripod in the yard, and no waiting for a photographer's next scheduled visit before a fresh trade-in can go up.
With 38 per cent of carsales enquiries landing outside business hours, the buyer doing the real research is on the couch at night. A reel is the thing that meets them there, and it keeps circulating long after the listing has dropped down the results page.
If you want the longer version of this argument, read our guide to the car walkaround video and the honest comparison in AI video versus a videographer.
The used top three for the first half of 2025 tells you most of what you need to know about the Australian market, and it looks nothing like the American one. Two of the three best-selling used models are dual-cab utes, which means the cuts, the framing and the pacing have to flatter a tray and a tow bar rather than a sedan boot.
The Ranger was the top-selling used model in Australia over the first half of 2025 with 43,030 units. When a dual cab is the single most traded vehicle in the country, the video has to hold on the tray, the bar work and the tub rather than cutting away from them.
The other half of the ute duopoly came in second over the same period. A tradie comparing two HiLux listings on a Sunday night is looking at kilometres, service history and what has been bolted on, so those are the frames that need to be on screen the longest.
Third on the list, and the P-plater's first car more often than any other model. Toyota holds more than 15 per cent of the total used market, so a Corolla listing is competing against a wall of near-identical Corollas and needs something other than price to stand apart.
Beyond those three, the demand pattern still runs towards utes and rugged SUVs. Isuzu recorded 46,645 used-vehicle sales with double-digit growth on the back of that appetite, and Mazda sits as the second-placed used brand nationally, which is why a D-Max or a CX-5 tends to move through a yard quickly enough to be worth a video on the day it lands. Whether the vehicle is a near new demo, an ex-demo or a straight trade-in, the process on our side is identical, because we are working from the photos rather than from the car.
This is the part most video vendors leave out. The moment a price or an odometer reading appears on screen, the clip stops being decoration and becomes a piece of regulated motor dealer advertising, and what is required alongside that number depends on which state your licence is in.
NSW Fair Trading requires an advertisement for a second-hand vehicle to carry the registration number, or the stock number if the vehicle is unregistered, wherever a price is specified. Any odometer reading shown must be correct, dealer charges and statutory charges must be listed separately, and a dealer may not group statutory charges under a catch-all label such as on-road costs. If the vehicle is damaged, the damage disclosure statement has to appear in prominent text of the same size.
Where the words drive away are used, the buyer must not be expected to pay anything further. That makes the on-screen price overlay a compliance surface rather than a design flourish, which is why our template is built to carry a rego or stock number in the same frame as the number itself instead of forcing you to choose between a clean shot and a compliant one.
Misleading or deceptive conduct provisions apply to what the video shows, so colour, condition and feature claims are a real exposure. We animate your own photographs and we do not invent panels, hide damage or clean up paintwork that is not clean in the images you sent. If a defect is visible in your photos, it stays visible in the video.
Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory each set their own advertising requirements, and we have not worked through them line by line. Tell us which state you are licensed in and we will check that state's rules against the template before we promise you a compliant overlay. Nothing here is legal advice, and your own adviser has the final word.
Drop in the five to ten images already attached to the listing, roughly half exterior and half interior, or just paste the link to the ad. The upload takes about two minutes and there is no brief to write.
The AI chooses the cuts, the music and the captions, lays in your price and your kilometres and adds your logo, and both the vertical and the landscape version are finished within 24 hours. If one shot is off, you re-roll that segment yourself.
The reel goes to Instagram, TikTok and your Facebook Page, the landscape file goes up through AutoGate, and the same clip goes straight into the WhatsApp thread with the buyer who enquired last night.
Every figure below is in US dollars, because that is the currency we invoice in. We do not quote an Australian dollar price we would have to keep re-cutting as the rate moves.
One vehicle, one vertical reel and one landscape cut. This is the sensible way to test the idea on a single listing before you put it near the whole yard.
Ten vehicles in one bundle and a lower rate per vehicle. This suits a yard that puts a handful of fresh trade-ins and demos up every week.
Twenty-five finished videos in one go, at the lowest price per car we offer. Enough for a busy dealership to keep every new arrival on video.
We invoice from Germany in US dollars and we can issue the invoice against your ABN with fourteen or thirty day terms, paid by bank transfer, rather than asking you to keep a card on file. For a GST-registered business, a supply of this kind from a non-resident supplier is generally handled under the reverse charge, meaning you self-assess the GST in your BAS and claim it back as an input tax credit in the same period where the acquisition is for a creditable purpose. That is our reading of the general position and not tax advice, so please have your accountant confirm it against your own circumstances before you rely on it. For the broader breakdown of what a dealership video normally costs, see our page on dealership video cost.
If yours is not here, email hello@aicarvideo.com and we will come back to you. We work European hours, so a message sent at the end of your day is usually answered before you open the next morning.
What done-for-you vehicle video looks like when software does the editing instead of a crew.
Read it FormatWhy the walkaround is the format buyers ask for, and how to get one without filming it.
Read it PricingThe honest breakdown across freelancers, agencies and a flat per-vehicle rate.
Read itSend the photos from a single listing and we will build the reel and the landscape cut within 24 hours at no cost. If it is right for your yard we can talk about the rest of the stock, and if it is not, you have spent nothing and you still keep the video.
