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Niels Cornette is the third generation behind Cornette Automotive, the Belgian family business his grandparents started in 1961. He took over in 2014 and built it into an independent multi-brand operation. When his independent lot passed 100 cars, over a million euros in inventory was still tracked like it was in his grandparents' day. Keys on hooks.

So he built the fix himself, on a 3D printer above his office. It's now LotFlow, a digital twin of the lot that follows every key and car from gate in to gate out, without giving your team extra work. It already runs a 500-car compound in The Hague.

Here's the uncomfortable part. Dealers track gross per unit and days to turn down to the decimal. The hours lost hunting for keys and cars appear nowhere. They aren't missing from the numbers. They're buried inside all of them.

One wholesaler was spending €7,000 a month on a single symptom.

Niels left GPS off the keys on purpose. The logic behind that call is worth stealing.

And when a vendor bills 25 days for a car that sat 21, who's right? Without data, whoever sent the invoice.

The lot is the last corner of the dealership still running on memory. This is what it's quietly costing, and what changes the moment you can see it.

Connect with Niels and LotFlow
lotflow.com
niels@lotflow.com
LinkedIn: Niels Cornette | LotFlow

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The car industry is being rebuilt from the ground up. Most dealers don't see it yet.

Margins are tightening. Chinese OEMs are landing in Europe with their own software stacks. Electric vehicles are reshaping the service revenue model dealers have relied on for decades. And somewhere in all of this, AI is quietly doing things that nobody is talking about publicly — yet.

Hélène Lanssens has spent over 20 years inside the machinery of automotive retail. She started her career as a dealer network trainer at Volkswagen France before moving through JATO Dynamics, where she mastered automotive data across 50+ markets, and Solera, where she led product strategy connecting repairers, adjusters, and insurers. That journey across OEMs, data intelligence, and aftersales gave her a panoramic view of the industry few people hold. Today she leads Partnerships and Product Marketing at Nextlane, one of Europe's largest automotive retail software groups.

In this conversation, we go deep.

• Why the dealers who survive the next five years will be the ones who treat data as infrastructure, not an afterthought
• Why the biggest risk with AI isn't adoption, it's stopping too early
• Why "we pick up the phone" is no longer the competitive advantage dealers think it is
• Why one-third of customer questions are already arriving when the showroom lights are off

We also get into the Nextlane open ecosystem model, the real story behind their platform connecting seven DMS systems across Europe through a single API layer, and what their new partnership with NOVACO actually unlocks for dealers on the ground.

This is not a conversation about what might happen someday. This is what is happening, explained by someone who has spent two decades building the systems behind it.

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Most dealers think the problem is the price. It's not.

Rolf Westgeest is the founder of EuroStocks.com and one of Europe's most experienced voices in automotive digital retail. He has spent 20 years inside the European automotive marketplace, building platforms, advising hundreds of dealerships, and watching millions of euros get quietly wasted on price cuts that never needed to happen.

His conclusion? The car was never the problem. The listing was.

In this episode, Rolf breaks down why dealers are losing deals before a single buyer ever sees their inventory, how classified portals actually rank and distribute vehicles, and what separates the dealerships quietly outperforming the market from those constantly chasing their tail on pricing.

He also gets into:

• Why 20% of EV listings are essentially invisible to buyers right now
• The cross-border trade opportunity most dealers are leaving on the table
• What AI is actually changing in automotive retail and what it isn't
• Why the first hour after a lead comes in decides everything
• How a €50 decision can outperform a €1,500 price cut

Rolf is also releasing a book on exactly this, and the ideas inside it are ones the industry hasn't put into a single place before.

If you work in automotive, manage inventory, run a dealership, or just want to understand how online car marketplaces actually work under the hood, this one will change how you think.