The mechanic inspects every vehicle himself.

mobile.de turns every dealer into a listing. Four photos, a mileage figure, a price. That the owner of this lot is a motor mechanic who personally signed off on every vehicle before it went up — that substance does not survive the portal filter. It becomes free-text sales prose that everyone writes and no one reads.

The effect: the dealer pays portal fees, optimises listings for the portal's search, and the buyer never reaches the actual workshop. When buyers search, they search for "Mercedes Sprinter Leipzig". They find the portal. They don't find the lot.

On top of that comes the regulatory density no portal handles for you: § 5 DDG (imprint, replacing § 5 TMG since May 2024, fines up to €50,000), PAngV (per-vehicle final-price clarity, with margin-scheme disclosure per LG/OLG Hamburg rulings), GDPR (click-to-load Google Maps following the LG München ruling, self-hosted fonts, Plausible instead of GA4), Widerrufsbelehrung (right of withdrawal) for distance sales on export. A workshop site that doesn't solve this cleanly invites cease-and-desist letters.

Finally: the buyers aren't all German. A growing share are Ukrainian and Russian-speaking families across the DACH region, plus export clients in Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania. A monolingual website loses them on the second results page.

Inventory is synced from mobile.de once a day (username/password authentication, documented pagination fix, parser rewrite after the W0 diagnosis). The vehicle detail pages run on the dealer's own domain as primary CTA — with Vehicle schema, MOT-status badge, visible margin-scheme disclosure. The mobile.de listing remains as a secondary link, for buyers who prefer the familiarity of the portal.

Four languages, localised by audience: DE for local tradespeople and hauliers, EN for the export section, RU and UK for the Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking diaspora across the EU. The translations are not 1:1 mirrors — the export section is calibrated to different buyer expectations (haulage vocabulary, EU customs clarity) than the German consumer side.

Brand tone doesn't come from a marketing template. It is extracted from a corpus of 41 reviews customers themselves left on mobile.de. The words that genuinely recur — "ehrlich", "transparent", "geprüft", "Fachwissen" — are the words on the website. Not "premium", not "exclusive", not "dream-vehicle". What the customers say, the site says.

Legal floor from day one: § 5 DDG-compliant imprint (not the old § 5 TMG template that generators still emit), PAngV-compliant final prices with per-vehicle margin-scheme disclosure in full text, click-to-load Google Maps with ConsentBanner, self-hosted DM Sans + Inter + JetBrains Mono, withdrawal-right notice for distance sales. No US-CDN fonts, no auto-loading maps, no cookie-banner theatre.