Verified vehicle data could help Korea build a stronger circular automotive economy by giving insurers, recyclers, manufacturers and exporters a trusted factual reference. AMASS CEO Won Jae Park argues that Korea’s highly digitised vehicle infrastructure, combined with greater traceability and transparency, could unlock recycled parts, improve exports and strengthen collaboration across the sector.
Won Jae Park, CEO of AMASS, discusses how verified vehicle data can help bridge the competing interests of insurers, recyclers, manufacturers and exporters. AMASS uses verified vehicle data to connect automotive industry stakeholders. Park explores Korea’s rapidly evolving recycling and used-vehicle export markets, the challenge of building trust around data, and why the country’s digital infrastructure could give it a significant advantage in developing a more circular automotive economy.
Keeping Vehicle Data Neutral Across Competing Interests
The way we’ve designed the business allows us to remain neutral between insurers, recyclers, dismantlers, manufacturers and exporters. When these groups collide, they’re usually fighting over two different things at once: facts and money. What the vehicle actually is, which parts fit it, and where a part came from, those are facts. What it should cost and who captures the margin, that’s money.
AMASS only ever touches the first category. We verify; we never price, arbitrate or recommend a winner. When an insurer and a dismantler disagree over a recycled part, we don’t tell them what’s fair; we make sure they’re at least arguing about the same, verified part. The commercial negotiation stays entirely theirs. What we remove is the factual dispute underneath it, which in practice is where most of the heat comes from.
The second safeguard is that our revenue doesn’t depend on any one side winning.
Insurers, dismantlers, manufacturers and exporters all pay us for the same thing, verified data, so tilting toward any one group would degrade the product for everyone else. Neutrality isn’t a policy we impose on ourselves; it’s the only configuration in which this business works. The moment a data provider starts favouring one customer group, its data stops being trusted as a reference. And trust in the reference is the entire product.
Building Trust to Unlock Vehicle Data
Reluctance among insurance companies and vehicle manufacturers to share data is the default, and it’s rarely about the commercial value of the data itself; it’s about the fear of losing control. In practice, though, I believe that fear is largely unfounded.
That’s why we deliberately start small, with a proof of concept. We almost always begin with a narrowly scoped PoC tied to a measurable outcome the data owner cares about, reduced claims leakage for an insurer or higher parts-matching accuracy for a manufacturer partner. Through that process, they see, in their own numbers, that the data they shared has had no effect on their control, works against none of their interests, and actually creates a different kind of value. Once that’s been proven, expansion conversations become easy.
As for how long it takes, honestly, it’s very hard to pin down a typical timeline. But in practice, one to two years is the reality. Insurers and manufacturers make decisions very carefully, and very slowly.
Bringing Transparency to Korea’s Vehicle Export Chain
The biggest challenge is opacity. A vehicle leaving Korea typically passes through several intermediaries before reaching its final buyer, and at each step, information degrades: the true specification, accident history, and condition of the car become harder to verify, while margins stack up. Buyers overseas often purchase on photos and trust, and disputes are common because there’s no shared, verifiable record of what the vehicle actually is.
The structural fix is the same one we apply domestically: VIN-level verification. If an overseas buyer can confirm, before payment, the factory specification of the exact unit, not the model, the unit, a large share of the friction disappears. We’re also seeing demand for real-time status data on vehicles entering the deregistration and export pipeline, so that sourcing decisions can be made on verified data rather than broker networks. Digitising that first mile is where the industry’s transparency problem gets solved.
Regulation and Traceability in Korea’s Export Market
The market has outgrown its regulatory framework. Korean used-vehicle exports exceeded 600,000 units, roughly KRW 6 trillion, in 2023 per Korea International Trade Association statistics, yet the export business itself has operated with very low entry and reporting requirements. A live legislative debate now surrounds an amendment to the Motor Vehicle Management Act that would move exporters to a registration system, driven largely by lawmakers from Incheon, where most export volume concentrates.
Appetite for change is real but uneven. Larger players and industry associations generally support formalisation, because transparency and reliable statistics benefit them. Smaller brokers worry about compliance costs, and the government has signalled a phased approach for that reason. My view is that regulation should focus on traceability, knowing which vehicle left, in what condition, to whom, rather than on restricting who can participate. Get the data infrastructure right, and market structure improves on its own.
Finding Common Ground Between Manufacturers, Insurers and Recyclers
Harmony, in our experience, doesn’t come from getting everyone in a room to agree on priorities; it comes from finding the one transaction where their interests already overlap, and making that transaction work flawlessly. For insurers and recyclers, that’s the certified recycled part in a repair claim: the insurer’s loss ratio improves, the recycler gets a premium sales channel, and the vehicle owner gets a faster repair. We build outward from those overlap points rather than trying to reconcile whole agendas.
As for a concession that surprised me, one recent case stands out. A vehicle manufacturer wanted to purchase a specific material from dismantlers. But dismantlers are under no obligation to sell that material to them, and no particular reason to either. What the manufacturer ultimately agreed to was a bigger concession than I expected: they provide dismantlers, free of charge, with a solution for managing all the materials that come out of the vehicle recycling process, and in return they secure data only on the specific materials they’re interested in. No exclusivity, no guaranteed supply. Their sole objective is to use that data to make competitive purchase offers to the dismantlers. The dismantlers gain a solution for managing a wide range of materials; the manufacturer gains visibility. Both sides walk away with something, but it required the stronger party to accept that data access, not purchasing rights, was all they could ask for.
Where Korea’s Recycling Market Lags — and Leads
The genuinely unique challenge, in my view, is a paradox in where our vehicles go. The cars flowing toward Korean dismantling yards are remarkably young, which means their business value as parts donors is very high. But because whole-vehicle export offers much faster cash turnover, most of those vehicles leave the country intact instead of being dismantled. Used-car exporters have effectively become competing buyers for the very cars that would otherwise supply the parts market, shrinking dismantlers’ supply and pushing up their acquisition costs. So the world’s highest-quality donor vehicles are passing straight through the domestic parts market.
And the demand side is just as weak. In the US, recycled parts account for a very large share of repair parts; estimates run well past a third, and even Japan sits in the mid-teens. In Korea, usage remains marginal: the repair culture, and insurance repairs in particular, still default to new OEM parts. So we have the best inputs and almost no market built on top of them. That gap, growing a domestic parts market worthy of the vehicles we scrap, is, to me, Korea’s real task. It’s also the single biggest opportunity in this sector.
Where Korea is genuinely ahead is the rails underneath. Every vehicle’s life, from first registration to deregistration, sits in a single national registry; there’s no equivalent of the fragmented, state-by-state title systems you see in the US. Dismantlers operate under a legally mandated recycling ratio of 95 percent by vehicle weight, which the US has no federal equivalent of. And the insurance claims environment is digitised end-to -end on standardised systems. In other words, the data infrastructure for a circular parts economy already exists here; what’s been missing is the market on top of it. That’s exactly why I believe Korea can move faster than anyone once it turns: the rails are already built.
Further Reading on Auto Recycling World
-
URG: Data, AI, and Trust Will Define Recycled Parts Growth
-
The Intelligent Yard: Why the Auto Recycling Industry’s Next Chapter Runs Through AI
-
Automakers and Recyclers Make the Case for Closer Ties on the Road to Circularity
-
LKQ Europe Sets Out Roadmap to Safeguard Cost-effective, Sustainable Vehicle Repair
