What 1900s Futurists Got Right About Your Dealership

The year was 1899, and French artist Jean-Marc Côté, along with several other Parisian illustrators, was asked to dream up the world 100 years into the future. Together, their visions, which included sky-high cities, flying cars, and robot servants, were turned into picture cards capturing the marvels of the year 2000. Influenced by the likes of Jules Verne, the father of science fiction, the artists imagined a world where automation did it all: cleaned homes, gave haircuts, applied makeup, and served patients in hospitals. Nothing seemed too small or too large for a machine to handle.

Ironically, the cards were never released to the public (the company went under before distribution), but they found new life when sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov featured them in his 1986 book, Futuredays. They prominently featured automation in the form of personal automatons (think robots). What’s wild is how eerily accurate some of those old illustrations feel now. Fast-forward a century, and automation has indeed embedded itself in our lives, making everything from grocery shopping to playlist building easier.

Modern-day culture is still entranced by the idea of streamlining, well, everything, which led me to reflect on how automation is changing our industry.

AI-Powered Virtual Assistants

While the 19th-century illustrations didn’t show humans consulting their robot butlers for marketing strategies, they did envision a world where machines handled the tasks we’d rather not. Today’s AI assistants are doing just that. These virtual helpers respond to customer inquiries 24/7, book service appointments, and answer inventory questions without skipping a beat.

This isn’t just convenience; it’s capacity. By taking repetitive, routine tasks off your staff’s plate, you’re opening the door for your team to focus on more strategic, human-first interactions.

Customer Engagement

The robots in those picture cards may have doubled as nannies and stylists, but modern automation knows your customers better than any hairdresser. Today, we have access to tools that analyze customer behavior in real time, helping you craft smarter engagement strategies. Through email, text, and even direct mail, automation nurtures shoppers from curiosity to close.

The result? Your team isn’t chasing cold leads — they’re connecting with the most engaged buyers at the perfect time. That kind of timing isn’t science fiction; it’s science plus data.

Inventory Management

In the 1900s imagination, you might’ve seen a robot milking cows or tilling fields. In today’s dealership world, automation is managing your inventory with surgical precision.

You can trust your products to do the heavy lifting by analyzing market data to recommend which vehicles to stock, what price points will move them fastest, and how external trends might impact your time-to-sale. What used to take hours of gut-check guesswork is now handled in moments with insights to back it all up.

Process Optimization

It’s not just your customers or your lot that benefit from automation — it’s your internal operations, too. AI can score leads, prioritize them based on buying signals, and even help you predict customer behavior before your first conversation. That kind of foresight used to belong in the pages of a sci-fi novel. Now? It’s just smart business.

Did those turn-of-the-century picture cards spark the technology we use today? Maybe not directly. But they did something just as important: they gave us permission to imagine. And imagination is the first step toward innovation. The future isn’t built on guesses. It’s built on bold ideas, the right tools, and the willingness to let technology turn potential into performance.

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