Ross Conlon sits in the driving seat for Motion
During the first half of 2025, growth in used vehicle registrations comfortably outpaced growth in sales of new vehicles at 8 per cent compared to 2 per cent.
Of the 149,000 used vehicles registered from January to June, many buyers would have searched on classifieds sites such as Cars Ireland and Carzone.
Perhaps they even checked the vehicle’s history using Cartell.
All three sites are run by Motion and led by chief executive Ross Conlon, who was appointed shortly after Irish Independent parent company Mediahuis Ireland (then Independent News & Media) took over Cars Ireland in 2016.
Cars Ireland bought Cartell in 2020 before acquiring Carzone from Britain’s Auto Trader in 2022 for €30m.
Conlon estimates that more than 50 per cent of used car sales in Ireland originate on Motion websites, with competition primarily coming from DoneDeal and, more recently, Facebook Marketplace.
Speaking quietly but matter-offactly, he describes Motion as “the backbone of the whole industry”.
Most car dealers in Ireland pay a subscription to trade on Cars Ireland, having been funnelled online by the perfect storm of Brexit, Covid and high inflation in recent years.
“When Covid happened, we were one company. We quickly bought Cartell, we saw massive growth, and then just as Covid finished, we bought Carzone. But in that period, it all went online,” Conlon explains.
“It all went to data, and what I mean by that is you could get very detailed information on the car you’re about to buy through history checks or through lots of ways. So the risk profile for buying a used car has massively changed.
“The other thing that’s changed, obviously, is that new cars got really expensive. I know myself personally that the car I bought in 2020, I bought the same car in 2022 and the same car in 2024, except it’s 20 per cent more expensive. So a lot of people have moved towards used.”
Conlon drives a Peugeot SUV “hybrid thingy”, but he also cycles a lot from Blackrock where he lives with his wife and three children.
As one of the few Dublin natives at Motion, he is a target for office slagging. Prior to joining Cars Ireland, Conlon was chief executive of payments company Zamano.
He describes himself as “a jack of all trades” when it comes to coding and technology, with transferable skills that allowed him to take quick decisions when he joined. Initially, he focused on gaining access to dealer data to innovate dealer-side features.
External factors have played in Motion’s favour, but Conlon had a long-term strategy to build an “unrivalled” ecosystem, sell services to “the old industry” and grow market share as technology disrupted the sector.
In addition to Cars Ireland and Carzone, Motion’s tech stack powers around 80 per cent of the dealer websites in Ireland, making it a “Shopify for dealers” in Conlon’s words.
Carzone is the more premium of the two sites in that it has the higher average selling price and “every single premium dealer in the country” uses it.
Cars Ireland, meanwhile, has around 90 per cent of premium dealers, but also hosts private sellers at the lower end of the market.
Their different audiences are why Conlon decided to keep the Cars Ireland and Carzone brands separate following the combination.
They are both used habitually by motorists, who spend an average of eight minutes on site per browsing session, a statistic Conlon’s somewhat dumbfounded by.
“It’s almost like Instagram, they just scroll.”
Although underused by consumers, only a quarter of whom perform vehicle history checks before buying, Cartell may be the most far-reaching part of Motion’s business.
Even Conlon didn’t appreciate its versatility prior to purchase. Consumers and business users pay a fee to history-check vehicles by inputting the registration, but its application programming interface (API) undergirds many online services.
The API is used by Aviva Insurance for background checks on insurance claims and by banks to value their car loan books. It is the basis of both Parking Tag, the app widely used by motorists to pay for parking, and the popular parts website Mick’s Garage.
The Motion offices are steeped in motoring. There are sofas fashioned to look like cars and conference rooms are named after Formula 1 circuits, there’s one for Mondello Park too.
The wall behind Conlon is decorated to look like a blueprint for a car. It’s all very fresh and cohesive and doesn’t betray anything of the major transition Motion has gone through over the past five years.
The group made a profit of €2.18m from turnover of €14.3m in 2023.
Carzone accounted for more than half of that profit (€1.25m) and €6.4m in revenue as well as redundancy costs of €190,000 following its absorption.
“We went for the full integration,” says Conlon says.
“It’s one tech stack and it’s fully one item across three brands. Like, you could have perhaps done it slower, so it was an intense two years.
“We spent two years in the roots of the business and now we’re through that and we’re looking at what’s more visible to users.
“There were some redundancies, but we didn’t buy this company to cut costs. Like, we really want to grow it. Since 2016, we have 10x’d our revenue. Our margins — some of it’s the two acquisitions we’ve done — have grown by double digits.”
Not wanting the distraction of selling off a relatively small piece of its business (Carzone), Auto Trader took more convincing despite the deal representing “the highest multiple Mediahuis ever paid for something” across its whole portfolio, Conlon says.
Conlon was surprised because the more publishing-focused INM “would not have looked at [the deal] in the same way,” whereas Belgian-Dutch group Mediahuis “understands the value of marketplace businesses” like Carzone and has bought similar companies across Europe.
Was it worth the price, though? “Yeah, it absolutely was,” Conlon says without hesitation.
He anticipates that Motion’s margin will be just shy of 30 per cent this year following profit growth north of 20 per cent in the 2024 financial year, for which full accounts have yet to be released at time of writing.
“Our trajectory is pretty good, and we have a pretty good roadmap, but we need to execute on it because we’re still a long way from our payback. In reality, it’s not hope that’s going to get us there, it’s high-quality execution that leads us to top-line growth.”
Of the 149,000 used vehicles registered from January to June, many buyers would have searched on classifieds sites such as Cars Ireland and Carzone. Pic: Getty
Motion now employs 80 people, up from 67 in 2023, including 30 in its engineering team. The group used to outsource development, but has brought everything in house.
“You’d think you could buy a lot of this off the shelf. But for the quality that we need and that dealers demand now and the small detail about the Irish market, you really have to develop it yourself,” Conlon says, referencing VRT as one such small detail.
Motion is now preparing to release new versions of the Cars Ireland and Carzone apps, having already seen uplift in traffic (15-20 per cent) and leads (9.7 per cent) this year as the group embarks on a €1-2m marketing campaign.
However, Conlon is still playing a long game.
Asked where he thinks Motion is behind the competition, he lays out a multi-year development pipeline to integrate AI and add more user-focused features — for instance, displaying the cost of vehicles minus the price of the browser’s current car.
Photo: Ross Conlon, chief executive of Motion in the company’s offices
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