The modern car showroom is designed to make complexity disappear. Paint gleams under careful light. A screen offers trim packages. A salesperson finds the right key. Yet behind that calm surface, a test drive can still set off a relay of phone calls, paper consent forms, vehicle checks, approvals and handwritten notes. The customer sees a car. Bosuk Han saw a system that had never quite become a system.
He had learned to look for those hidden mechanics at BMW Korea. Working in retail and stock management, Han built dealer-support processes and a reporting rhythm that moved from daily sales to weekly pace, biweekly pricing and monthly profitability. The work was less cinematic than the cars. It was also more revealing. Every missing field or late update made the business harder to read. Once the information moved cleanly, managers could see where sales stood and decide what to do next.
Han's public motto begins with “Putting theory into practice.” It fits a founder who trained as a mechanical engineer, first at Hanyang University and then at the University of Michigan. In Ann Arbor, his work included optimization, fluid mechanics, mathematics and statistics. He led a student project on sustainable bus design and contributed to research on injection pumps. The objects changed when he entered automotive retail, but the instinct held: define the flow, find the constraint, make the movement visible.
The clipboard was the clue
EPIKAR was founded in Seoul in 2016 around a plain question. Why should a dealership remain complicated and inefficient when its processes could be designed more deliberately? Han had watched an old industry accumulate customs. Each one could appear harmless on its own. A call to confirm a test drive. A spreadsheet for fleet availability. A key handed from one person to another. Together, the rituals created delay, duplicate work and customer moments that depended too much on memory.
“Digitizing dealership operations can save both time and money.”Bosuk Han, speaking in San Jose in 2023
The company's early roadmap followed the journey through the dealership. Its BMW Test-Drive Solution let customers book, dealers approve and staff assign vehicles through a mobile workflow. Consent could move off paper. The dashboard showed which cars were reserved, in use or piling on mileage. A digital access feature reduced the need to pass around physical keys. None of these moves tried to reinvent the automobile. They improved the chain of events around it.
Then came the workshop. A service center is a choreography of arriving cars, service advisers, technicians, work bays, parking spaces and promised completion times. EPIKAR's Intelligent Workshop System uses vehicle recognition and digital tracking to follow a car from entry to exit. Staff can see where it is, how long it has waited and which stage comes next. By 2023, the system had expanded across BMW Korea's after-sales network after several years of use in a smaller group of centers.
An engineer in the retail aisle
Han's career has an unusual continuity. His graduate research asked how physical systems behaved. His BMW work asked how sales systems behaved. At EPIKAR, the two views meet in software that watches physical objects move through commercial space. A vehicle enters a gate. A camera reads its plate. A dashboard records its location. The customer-facing benefit may be a clearer answer about completion time, but the machinery underneath is a map of the operation.
He has also treated vehicle data as a technical responsibility, not only a commercial asset. In 2019, Han and two EPIKAR colleagues published a conference paper proposing a permissioned blockchain platform for collecting and redistributing vehicle information. The paper focused on confidentiality, integrity, access and the privacy questions that arrive when a connected car becomes a data producer. It is a useful counterweight to the cheerful language of frictionless retail. Better flow still needs boundaries.
Han's 2012 engineering paper studied an injection pump. His 2019 computing paper studied secure vehicle-data flow. EPIKAR studies the operational flow around the vehicle itself.
The company did not stay inside software screens. In 2018 it launched a premium MINI subscription service, one early attempt to package access to a car differently. In 2019, that program received recognition as a BMW global sales success case. EPIKAR also built a digital learning platform, online service booking and dealership kiosks. The catalog can look broad, but the connecting idea is narrow: every interaction around the car should create usable context for the next one.
From Seoul, with a second home in California
By spring 2023, Han was traveling overseas almost every week. Korea had given EPIKAR a concentrated market and a demanding reference customer. The United States offered the opposite structure: many dealership groups, uneven technology stacks and a local operator behind every purchasing decision. Han described fragmented markets in the United States and Southeast Asia as a promising fit. In San Jose, he stated the plan simply: develop the American market in parallel with Korea.
The move was more than a sales itinerary. EPIKAR created an American corporate entity and later completed a restructuring that placed its headquarters in the United States. Han's location shifted to the San Jose area while the Seoul operation kept building. This was a founder choosing proximity to the market he wanted to understand, even as the company's densest proof remained an ocean away.
“I want to develop the U.S. market in parallel with Korea.”Bosuk Han on EPIKAR's two-market plan
In late 2025, the thesis reached a concrete checkpoint. EPIKAR announced a commercial agreement with Auto Gallery Automotive Group, a used-car dealer group operating across Georgia, Florida and Alabama. The product at the center was PIKAR Genie, an AI sales consultant designed to answer questions, check inventory, arrange test drives and support a buyer across online and in-store channels. For staff, the promise was fewer repetitive tasks and a more consistent handoff when a human took over.
The sequence matters. EPIKAR did not begin with a chatbot and search for a place to install it. It spent years building the plumbing of reservations, vehicles, customer records and dealer operations. An AI assistant becomes more useful when it can act on that underlying system. It can check the car that is actually available, reserve a real slot and carry the conversation forward. The intelligence sits on top of workflow, not beside it.
What the showroom is for
There is a warmer side to Han's systems thinking. When EPIKAR moved into a five-story building in Seoul in 2023, he set aside the ground floor for automobile exhibitions, book events, photography and art. The plan included a media wall for product demonstrations, plus a rooftop garden above. He wanted a space that represented the company's view of change and gave a B2B software business a way to meet consumers.
That choice reveals the tension inside automotive retail. Buying a car is an operational process, but it is not only an operational process. People want the paperwork to disappear. They also want a machine, a story, a sense of possibility. A better dealership cannot be merely efficient. It has to create room for attention once the administrative noise is gone.
Han has described himself as a lifelong automotive enthusiast, yet his company concentrates on everything surrounding the object of that enthusiasm. The reservation. The key. The work bay. The answer to a late-night inventory question. It is a practical form of devotion: respect the car by improving the experience that frames it.
His recent public appearances place that work inside a wider automotive technology circle. At the 2026 AutoTech Investments gathering around NADA in Las Vegas, Han joined founders, investors, dealer advisers and executives working on inspection, customer communication, vehicle logistics and retail analytics. The setting matters because dealership software is rarely a solitary stack. It must exchange information with inventory tools, marketing systems, finance processes and the many vendors already in the building. Expansion therefore depends on relationships as much as code. A Korean deployment can prove that the workflow runs; an American room full of operators can reveal where it collides with local practice. Han's welcome remarks at an international business gathering in Seoul the previous year pointed in the same direction. EPIKAR is presenting itself as a bridge: Korean operating experience carried into global dealer networks, then adapted through partners who know the ground.
EPIKAR's larger ambition is to connect the entire vehicle lifecycle, from discovery and purchase through delivery, service and eventual resale. The American expansion will test whether its Korean lessons travel. Dealer groups have their own habits, vendors and economics. Software must fit the staff who use it at 9 a.m. on a crowded Saturday, not just the diagram that sold it.
Han's advantage is that his story started in those details. He was the person assembling the sales report, mapping data between dealer and automaker, and watching small gaps distort a larger picture. Ten years into EPIKAR, the scale has changed. The question has not. Can the whole journey become visible enough to run better, while still feeling human to the person buying the car?