AUTO1 Brand Guidelines: A 2012 Berlin Start, wirkaufendeinauto.de, AUTO1.com & Autohero

Two founders and a buying site.

AUTO1 Group is a Berlin-based used-car company that buys cars from private sellers, trades them to dealers and sells them to consumers online. German Wikipedia says it was founded in Berlin in July 2012 by Christian Bertermann and Hakan Koç, and the company gives the same founders and year. German Wikipedia adds that Bertermann had previously worked at Groupon and Koç at Rocket Internet; the company says Bertermann was head of product at CityDeal and later a product vice-president at Groupon after Groupon bought CityDeal, and that he has been chief executive since the founding.

The company is a European stock corporation, AUTO1 Group SE. German Wikipedia says its registered seat is in Munich and its administrative headquarters in Berlin, in the Kreuzberg district. It listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange on 4 February 2021, according to German Wikipedia, and has been a member of the MDAX index, with interruptions, since June 2021. Its largest shareholders at the end of 2025 included SoftBank and its two founders, German Wikipedia says.

The company’s own timeline sets out how the business grew. The private-seller buying service wirkaufendeinauto.de (“we buy your car”) launched with the company in 2012; the dealer wholesale platform AUTO1.com followed in 2013; a remarketing service for partners came in 2015; and the company says it began growing its retail brand Autohero in 2020, while German Wikipedia dates the founding of autohero.com to 2016. In 2018 AUTO1 set up a financing joint venture, Auto1 FinTech, with Allianz and Deutsche Bank, German Wikipedia says, and the company says it launched merchant financing for its dealer partners in 2023. By its own count it passed 3 million cars traded in 2022 and 5 million in 2025.

Three brands, one stock of cars.

AUTO1’s brand architecture gives each side of a car deal its own name. The buying brand wirkaufendeinauto.de takes its name from a plain German sentence, and its sister brands translate that sentence into each market’s language: vendezvotrevoiture.fr in France and Belgium, wijkopenautos.nl in the Netherlands and Belgium, noicompriamoauto.it in Italy, compramostucoche.es in Spain, and others in Austria, Sweden and Portugal, all linked from the group’s website. The names are web addresses as much as brands, so the address itself tells a seller what the service does. A seller enters vehicle details online and books an appointment; after an inspection the customer receives a purchase offer, German Wikipedia says.

The trade side is AUTO1.com, which the company calls Europe’s largest wholesale platform for used cars and says is used by more than 60,000 professional partners in over 30 countries. The retail side is Autohero, which sells inspected and reconditioned cars online. The company says Autohero cars are inspected in its own production centres and that buyers can use financing, delivery, trade-in and a 21-day money-back guarantee.

The retail brand is marketed country by country. Engage, the Italian marketing trade title, reported on 29 June 2026 that Autohero had named the comedian and content creator Frank Matano as its brand ambassador for Italy, in a campaign across television, digital platforms and social channels with an ironic, light tone. The article listed the services the campaign promotes: quick financing, a one-year warranty on every vehicle, returns within 21 days, and inspected, reconditioned cars bought fully online with home delivery.

The Italian operation shows how the three brands sit together in one country. Quattroruote reported in June 2025 that AUTO1 operates in Italy through noicompriamoauto.it, Autohero and auto1.com, with an Italian headquarters in Milan and a reconditioning centre near Pavia, and that the group had announced 2,000 new hires across Europe, 300 of them in Italy. The magazine said the new posts were meant to strengthen noicompriamoauto.it and its counterparts in other countries, after 60 new branches opened in the first months of 2025, and to add logistics and after-sales capacity at the centres where Autohero reconditions its cars.

Lanes, bids and valuations.

Vehicle remarketing firms sell cars that have already had a first life: lease returns, fleet cars, rental cars and, at the salvage end, vehicles written off by insurers. The companies in this group present much of their business through listings, photographs and data. VPauto, the French auction house, says it opened 3D photo studios in 2014 and shows each vehicle with close-up photographs and a defect record marked on a body diagram; IAA said in 2012 that its redesigned bidding tool let buyers view ten photographs of each vehicle at once.

Bidding and valuation tools sit at the centre of these brands. VPauto’s LIVE platform films the sale and takes online bids in real time while a licensed auctioneer runs the room, the company says. In August 2023 RB Global said its IAA business had released a vehicle score built from four corner photographs, a valuation model and a sales decision dashboard for sellers. IAA’s releases give those tools trademarked names, as they would products.

Consumer-facing names are newer. British Car Auctions’ parent launched cinch, an online used-car marketplace for private buyers, in July 2019, and English Wikipedia says cinch has held naming rights to the Scottish Premiership since the 2021–22 season. VPauto has staged themed sales, including an auction of electric vehicles only at Caudan in March 2026, reported by Bevolt.

Corporate pages tell a story of owners and sites. RB Global presents IAA as one of its brands and says IAA joined it in 2023; Constellation Automotive Group, renamed in 2020, owns BCA; and VPauto lists eight sale sites across France. This guide draws on those owner pages, site lists and dated press reports, and marks what rests on a company’s own word.

A numeral in the name.

On scale, the figures are the company’s own. It says it sold more than 842,200 cars in 2025, has traded about 6.5 million cars since 2012, operates in more than 30 markets, and had about 8,600 employees and more than 725 drop-off locations, 153 pick-up locations and more than 170 logistics centres at the end of 2025. Quattroruote gave a figure of about 6,300 employees across Europe in June 2025. German Wikipedia records the company’s description of itself as Europe’s largest used-car dealer.

The group writes its name as AUTO1 Group, with the numeral attached, and German Wikipedia notes a house style that sets the name in capitals with a vertical bar before “GROUP.” Its corporate website loads the Lato and Open Sans typefaces. Readers should keep the group site, auto1-group.com, separate from the dealer marketplace at auto1.com and the consumer shop at autohero.com; in Germany the company is most often met as wirkaufendeinauto.de, which German Wikipedia names as its most familiar platform there.

For a design guide, AUTO1 shows a group that keeps a corporate name for investors and dealers while speaking to consumers through descriptive, translated web addresses and a separate retail brand. Compare Carvana, an online used-car retailer in the U.S., and cinch, a British online car seller. For this guide we use a deep teal and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep AUTO1’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.