We built a car dealership's inventory record for AI assistants first: VIN, trim, price, status, and when each was last confirmed. Then we looked at RVs, boats, side-by-sides, tractors and excavators. Almost every assumption broke.
A car has a VIN. A boat for sale is a hull with a 12-character HIN, each engine with its own serial, and a trailer with its own VIN. An excavator has an ISO 10261 PIN that, by the standard's own scope, doesn't identify its attachments. A single vin field doesn't survive any of them.
Tractors and excavators run on engine hours. Combines add separator hours. A twin-engine boat has two hour meters, and one number for both makes an assistant guess. On machines that report through manufacturer telematics, the hours can come from the machine itself under ISO 15143-3, which is a better source than anything typed into a listing.
Nobody asks for a stock number. They ask for a travel trailer that sleeps six under 6,000 pounds, a center console around 24 feet with 250 horsepower, a compact excavator with a thumb. InteractRV's assistant already reads “floorplans, tow ratings, features and options”.
“Compact” is a label, not a spec. Trade press reports that makers draw the line in different places, so the operating weight is what answers the question.
Cars are available, incoming, held or sold. Dealers in these trades also have consigned units they don't own, brokered boats, machines on rent until a date, rent-to-own, and units consigned to auction.
None of these is reliably carried by the feeds that copy a unit to hundreds of sites. Dealer Spike, for one, says it syndicates to “400+” classifieds and sites.
schema.org's Vehicle type has no engine-hours property and no boat, RV or machine type. Google's vehicle listings allow RVs, ATVs, UTVs and trailers, but exclude motorcycles, boats and farm vehicles. The structured-data path that works for car dealers is thinner here.
The buyer-facing AI in these trades is mostly being built by marketplaces, from their own copies of dealer inventory. The dealer software vendors' new AI looks inward, at the dealer's own staff: Lightspeed's command center for RV dealerships and VitalEdge's VitalityAI for heavy equipment dealers.
Our read: what's missing is the dealer's own record, one per unit, with a source and a time on every fact, that the marketplaces and the assistants can both rely on.
The five states: current, stale, conflicting, missing, unknown. A unit with an unknown fact is kept and the gap named, never dropped. Status is said only from a current reading. The only action is an inquiry a person answers.
One unit record with a profile per class, five pages written for five different buyers, and a check of what AI says against the dealer's own facts.