I bought a used car from Carvana before the pandemic, and this is pretty sad news to me because after that purchase I vowed that all my future cars would come from Carvana. The buying experience was simply excellent for me, and I couldn't be happier with the car I bought. I figured I probably could have gotten a comparable deal slightly cheaper somewhere else, but I would have wasted a ton of time, and still would have crossed my fingers that I wasn't buying a lemon - any slight premium I paid to Carvana I felt was totally worth it.
I hope they can fix their financial issues (sounds like they just "bought high and are selling low") and their operational issues (in some places word got out that it was cheaper to just "buy" a Carvana car and then return it < 7 days rather than getting a car rental), because, at least for me, their purchasing experience was great.
The good experience you had early on and the bad state of the company now are closely linked.
The story is always the same with this type of company: take a mature industry that is profitable on a unit basis because it’s boring and unpleasant, then build a narrative around some strategy to make it exciting (giant vending machines!) and get buy-in to spend huge amounts of money in pursuit of the narrative but eventually discover the only way to be profitable is to do what the mature industry players already discovered — but now you’ve got so much debt to service you have to cut even more corners and somehow manage to spend billions on becoming a worse version of what already existed and whatever goodwill you earned is burned.
There’s lots of room for businesses to improve on the boring legacy industries with low margins — like car buying and selling — but it requires careful iteration, it requires taking the established understanding and then building on it. Subsidising the cost of good-but-unprofitable service using investment dollars (Carvana was losing thousands per sale pre-pandemic) doesn’t build a sustainable business unless it’s part of a strategy.
I think you can generalize even further and say that this story applies to most companies flooded with investor capital. Take Uber for example. The VC subsidies convinced a significant portion of people to upend their lifestyles and attempt to make money in an ecosystem where prices were artificially juiced by VC money.
It's ironic that free market types are completely for subsidies when the private industry does it, although public and private subsidies both have issues.
At least government subsidies have a benevolent intent usually. VC subsidies are usually about hiding the true market value of a product to attract customers who otherwise wouldn't have shown interest until it's time to crank the money milker.
> The VC subsidies convinced a significant portion of people to upend their lifestyles and attempt to make money in an ecosystem where prices were artificially juiced by VC money.
People didn't seriously upend their lives to drive for Uber until they retire. The people who were hurt by Uber were people who bought taxi medallions and suddenly found themselves competing with unlicensed taxis.
But on that point, as much as it sucks for them, their monopoly status meant the service was overpriced and didn't innovate. Uber might have been underpriced when it was subsidized, but it's still cheaper than taxis and makes rid hailing easier. Don't forget that even after the reality of things set in, Uber is still a $50B company. There's a real business there.
> VC subsidies are usually about hiding the true market value of a product to attract customers
A more benevolent reading of this is that the VC money is used to make the product more affordable at small scale. Many times products become cheaper/affordable at larger scales. Young companies use the VC $$ help to get them across that inflection point.
This logic breaks down when the product cost doesn’t get lower with more scale. Customer service oriented companies usually fall in this category.
A less benevolent take is that VC money is primarily used to buy market share by selling below cost until other competitors exit and the company is left with a monopoly.
"It's ironic that free market types are completely for subsidies when the private industry does it, although public and private subsidies both have issues."
This analogy is strange. Free market types aren't against private investors throwing private money at bad investments nor would they want any regulations against it.
"At least government subsidies have a benevolent intent usually."
Government subsidies aren't known for wasteful spending? They don't hide the real value of a product (like healthcare)?
Whether an VC firm engages in subsidies for its clients or whether a government engages in subsidies for its electorate, money is being spent to distort market prices and that adds friction to accurate market pricing. It's weird to identify issues with the tactic and then arbitrarily say one entity doing it is bad when its OK if the other one does it.
If the government damages the economy with subsidies, those responsible might have more difficulty getting elected. If a VC firm dumps a juiced bag on S&P index fund buyers while causing a bunch of trouble for taxi companies and first time homebuyers, are any of their clients going to be pissed? My guess is they'll probably congratulate them on a job well done.
It's none of my business when rich people waste their money. It is my business when the robbers and murderers in the government waste my money on my behalf.
The government most of the time is acting on the behalf of the people who elected them. There are plenty of rich people who have stolen their riches. Neither is a perfect "voice of the people" or "true meritocracy"
They're free to do so, but isn't it cheating when it undercuts competitors while propping up unsustainable businesses in the long run? Subsidies that support predatory pricing don't sound fair.
Libertarianism treats the market as a game when it suits (i.e. when other people are "cheating") and as a natural law the rest of the time (i.e. when other people want to change the already-artificial rules of the game via politics).
Sorry, I thought you were implicitly calling it as a game (which is IMO the correct and true view), since cheating can only happen in a game where there are established rules.
There really should be a law against this. It's jarring to the economy to confuse people with artificial prices when your sole goal is to snap a customer base into some long term reliability on a platform or product that isn't necessarily any different after the subsidy runs dry and it needs to become self-sustainable.
when you skew the incentives in the economy such that people focus on developing skills that are based on artificially juiced things that aren't actually that valuable (see Axie Infinity) it's bad for folks' livelihoods long term
I'm not really sure I agree with your argument. It seems quite clear that what has really contributed to Carvana tanking over the past year was they vastly mispriced their product. What happened to Carvana is essentially exactly what happened to other companies that misjudged the effect of the pandemic, e.g. Zillow with their bad experiment with house flipping (paid too much for houses) and Bright Health (vastly underpriced their insurance due to impact of COVID).
But I want to emphasize, I would have gone to Carvana even if it were considerably more. The trusted, online-only buying experience is just something I'm totally willing to pay for, especially given how extremely awful the normal used-car buying experience is.
Depending on exactly when you bought your car from Carvana, Carvana likely lost between $2,000 and $5,000 on your purchase. Carvana has never made money on selling cars. If you're willing to pay $5,000 more for a used car because you'd like good service, then there are a great deal of options available to you. The simplest option is to go to a reputable dealership that focuses on customer service (which have existed and continue to exist!) or you could find a legacy player that is moving into the space. Elsewhere in this thread, someone mentioned that they recently had a great experience with CarMax.
At its core, my argument is that there is a sweet spot in which you can get great service from these "boring industry + technology + money" companies but that's because they're actively pursuing good customer service at any cost with no consideration for making money. As soon as the company (or its investors) realise this behaviour is unsustainable, they forget all about their narrative and go all in on making money -- which is when the quality of the service slips.
The amount you pay to Carvana (more or less than you'd pay elsewhere) doesn't have a relationship to the quality of service you will receive, because it's not a "normal" business.
There can be positive consumer outcomes from companies that approach business like Carvana: in the short term, customers get investor-subsidised products, and in the long term, other players in the industry get to learn from consumer reception (e.g: CarMax probably learned about demand for higher quality service from what Carvana demonstrated early on) but Carvana specifically is doomed to failure because it isn't a sustainable company that made a bad decision during the pandemic... it's been unsustainable its entire life.
Why do you think the unit economics of Carvana have to be worse than a traditional dealer? Maybe they have to do more shipping of vehicles around, but they are less reliant on storefronts/sales staff. It seems likely to me that they overspent on marketing/gimmicks/badly timed top-of-market inventory, but that doesn’t mean that the business model fundamentally can’t work.
A higher cost higher quality service can succeed, but that's not the Carvana business model. The Carvana "business model" was "sell as many cars as possible and work out the economics later" and it's now "try to lose less money by any means necessary" (including by sacrificing quality of service).
I am not theorising about their costs, rather, I am referencing their own financials. Per their financials, they must achieve >$4,500 in gross profit per car sold in order to break even on a sale because the cost of providing their service is around $4,500 per car. As far as I know, they have never achieved this and they have only come close during periods where the second hand car market was at its most ridiculous supply-chain induced peaks.
You could start an online second hand car dealership today, with the same online purchasing that Carvana offer, and a better quality of service, and build a great business with great unit economics... if that was your strategy from the first day. Many such companies exist! There are lots of upmarket car dealerships that'll give you excellent service -- and it'll cost you less than $5k over market.
Carvana can't just undo a decade of bad mistakes, they can't just switch from "losing money" to "making money" because every foundational decision about the business was made in the context of "who cares about money, we want growth". You should not think of a company as an implementation of a business model, a company is so much more. Carvana has something like 20,000 employees: at that scale, radical change is basically impossible.
People keep complaining about how flying has become so much more unpleasant.
But other than a small minority, the customers almost always pick lower prices over any improvements in service.
And the same is probably true for buying a used car. Folks may talk about how the experience is poor, but at the end of the day price is what will drive their purchase. So whoever gives the lowest price, which often translates to a worse experience, will succeed in the marketplace.
> Subsidising the cost of good-but-unprofitable service using investment dollars (Carvana was losing thousands per sale pre-pandemic) doesn’t build a sustainable business unless it’s part of a strategy.
Unfortunately that summarizes a fairly large fraction of the presentations aimed at VCs.
I was pattern matching Carvana to a company called Sidecar[0] this summer when I heard my friend say he bought a car for something like $5k less than any dealership in town was offering it for.
Sidecar was the "3rd company" that did ride-sharing in my city in 2014-2015, after Lyft and Uber. Somehow they were selling rides from any point in the city to any other point in the city for $1. I suppose it was getting subsidized by VC money; and I took probably $500 worth of rides for a year or so until it shut down.
I think you could generalize much further and just say this is what happens to companies that don’t understand the basic principle of CAC to LTV ratio. If it’s negative, when the funny money stops, it’s gonna be a rough ride.
Yeah, exactly. "I loved Carvana because I bought a great car from them at a better price than the legacy players!" and "I loved Carvana because they bought my used car at a really good price!"
Guess what? Buying cars for too much money and selling them for too little money means they go out of business.
> "I loved Carvana because I bought a great car from them at a better price than the legacy players!"
That's literally the opposite of what the GP said:
> The buying experience was simply excellent for me, and I couldn't be happier with the car I bought. I figured I probably could have gotten a comparable deal slightly cheaper somewhere else, but I would have wasted a ton of time
I mean this politely, but did you really read what you were replying to?
> That's literally the opposite of what the GP said:
Its not, though. Its true the upthread poster focussed on “buying experience” not “price”, but the adverse parts of the typical used car buying experience are a highly evolved optimization for drawing people in with advertised prices while optimizing actual prices without driving buyers off. Carvana’s better buying experience is neither “opposite of” nor even orthogonal to their failure to optimize price, its a direct consequence of them deciding they didn’t need to.
That's... not what anyone is saying. I bought an Audi from Carvana. It was more expensive than anyone else (~2-4% more). The price they paid for my trade-in wasn't as good as some competitors. I did not interact, in any way, with one of their vending machines. I'd still do it again.
It was a totally hands off experience; I will pay extra to not be talked to by someone. The checkout wizard was nearly as easy as buying something on Amazon. Which car? Enter your bank account number and social security. Agree to this loan rate. Sign over power of attorney so they can get your first year of registration and plates taken care of. They drive up to my apartment building; drop it off; "take it for a spin, I'll wait"; come back 30 minutes later; looks awesome; done.
I've taken that car to the local Audi dealer for service. They upsell you on everything. They pressure you. "Hey, while you're waiting, why not take this new 2022 A4 for a spin, no problem man my treat." "Yeah your car is in great shape; we could give you $15,000 for it right now, that'd take care of your down payment on this new one, its nice isn't it, don't worry about the monthly we can discuss that later" Just stop talking to me. I will pay so much more to not be talked to (and, really, compared to most dealers nowadays; its hard to say if Carvana is even "more expensive").
I feel extremely, EXTREMELY, confident in saying that this attitude has sold Teslas to three people in my bubble. You can start the process to buy a Tesla with Apple Pay. Seriously. Their new delivery process involves ZERO people; you drive to the store, the app tells you the ID of the car which corresponds to a piece of paper hanging in the windshield, you walk around the parking lot looking for it, if there are issues then people get involved; otherwise you drive away. That's it. I am buying a Tesla right now, even though I rather like the Mach E, because they make it so dangerously easy, and I have no clue how to buy a Ford. What's their delivery estimation? Is the price quoted on the site what I'll actually pay? Do I call someone? God, I gotta actually talk to someone? I gotta drive to the dealer? In person? Screw that, Tesla makes it easier, they get my $60,000.
Carvana made mistakes. But their model wasn't some VC abbaration like so many SV companies. They actually struck on something new, in an industry that needed that innovation, and that discovery has since (or maybe, in parallel) been applied by other companies in the industry. They screwed up, but I'll miss them.
This is what I was saying before on here (and getting downvoted). Carvana's value add was selling used cars to people who don't like the experience of buying used cars. It's a good idea and someone else can take their place.
The problem with Carvana was that by offering auto loans to buyers as well as taking out loans to buy cars from sellers, they became excessively levered in a time of rising interest rates and falling demand for used cars. On the upswing they massively invested, thinking this was business success and not shocking leverage, and the downswing wiped them out.
Whoever the carvana replacement is going to be, they should subcontract out the business of offering auto loans and they should borrow less to fund acquisition of cars, because the auto business is cyclical and they need to be able to survive the downturns, which requires less rapid growth during the boom. But the overall business model can be fixed, even if Carvana can't.
And going into a dealer with cash and buying a car at list price and taking the offer for a trade-in--all with minimal haggle--really isn't a terrible experience in general. I bought a new car over the summer which wasn't immediately available but otherwise was a pretty straightforward transaction.
The pain is that people get pulled into negotiations that mix in a bunch of different things (purchase price, trade-in, financing, add-ons) and it's all a bit more than they can comfortably afford.
That's still a lot of work. If I have cash for MSRP why do I have to deal with "minimal haggle"? Can I not just buy the asset? There is definitely an audience of people who know what they want and how much they want to spend and Carvana is able to meet it. I think there's definitely more demand for effortless purchases than just CarMax.
I bought an electric car recently and only put up with the minimal haggle of an MSRP cash deal because I was on a sabbatical and had more time than usual. But my partner and I were ready to go for Carvana before my sabbatical or if we couldn't find a dealer willing to stay low-bullshit with us. I ended up calling 6 dealerships and asking my partner to clear her evening just for the one dealership that offered us a low-bullshit deal.
If you want to walk up to a dealer and announce that you have cash and want to pay full sticker, they will be happy to roll out a red carpet for you. But you still can't just "buy the asset." Local governments require all kinds of documentation and registration "bullshit" that it sounds like you are blaming the dealer for.
In fairness, most car dealers are also setup for people who expect to be able to haggle, probably need financing, want to drive a car off the lot, etc. So the whole system just isn't set up for someone to basically go online, place an order, and wait to get told a delivery date.
There is a bit of a paperwork dance--also insurance--but, as you say, that's hard to eliminate totally.
>If I have cash for MSRP why do I have to deal with "minimal haggle"?
Because I want to save money? It literally took about 5 minutes to ask them to add the ~$1500 price of some factory-installed options to my trade-in price and they had a deal.
It wasn't completely frictionless but far and away the main hassle was just car availability. Had I been willing to take a similar vehicle they had on the lot it would have been quicker.
Sure, I don't doubt that there's a market for people who want to save money. I'm saying there's probably enough demand for a low hassle car purchase at higher price points that CarMax won't be the only player in town. If my area can have 10 auto dealerships of a single manufacturer, I hesitate to think that only CarMax is able to absorb the demand of low-hassle purchase.
I can't speak for how Carvana operates today, but when I bought my car years ago the loan was subcontracted through some unrelated financial provider (Go Financial, now Bridgecrest). I remember being kind of annoyed at this; that I wasn't just signing in to Carvana's website to pay. But, its fine.
I think Carvana did make mistakes; but I also think the industry as a whole is very deeply suffering right now. And we only hear about Carvana because they're a VC SV darling.
>Whoever the carvana replacement is going to be, they should subcontract out the business of offering auto loans and they should borrow less to fund acquisition of cars, because the auto business is cyclical and they need to be able to survive the downturns
Alternatively, could they hedge their exposure somehow?
> I feel extremely, EXTREMELY, confident in saying that this attitude has sold Teslas to three people in my bubble. You can start the process to buy a Tesla with Apple Pay. Seriously. Their new delivery process involves ZERO people;
My Tesla was ordered online (Apple Pay) and dropped off at my driveway. The only human interaction was the friendly Tesla delivery associate that had a couple papers for me to sign.
Audi, Volvo and Mercedes all had people trying to sell us last years model, adding packages we didn’t want or completely out of inventory on the vehicle we did want.
It’d be great if the Carvana sales model could be adjusted to market pricing, so the customer experience is the same but would be a profitable business.
I think this is only a fair comparison if you disclose the waiting time between ordering the Tesla vs delivery.
The Audi, Volvo and Mercedes dealers may have been directing you at sub-optimal cars, but they were available to drive off the lot that day. If you're willing to wait 3 months, you can certainly order the latest Audi or Mercedes model with the exact specs and options you want. You can even pick it up at the factory in Germany and take it for a spin on the Autobahn.
> My Tesla was ordered online (Apple Pay) and dropped off at my driveway. The only human interaction was the friendly Tesla delivery associate that had a couple papers for me to sign.
Did you get to inspect the vehicle before you signed the papers? Have heard numerous stories about that, where people either don't get a chance to do so, or when they do find concerns, are pressured by the delivery associate to accept it, "and we'll fix things at the Service Center".
Similarly, my Audi dealer has never tried to run the numbers on trading my car in when I've been in for a service visit, and the only vehicles they've tried to put me in is a loaner vehicle if the service time will be 2 hours or more (and unlike Tesla, they -always- have a loaner for you, even if it's one from the lot).
No? But then again, I've always done my pre-Internet computer parts shopping at obscure specialist shops that are tucked away in semi-derelict shopping malls and are run by misanthropic neckbeards.
I loved Carvana because I bought a car from them for about the same price I’d pay at a dealership but it was all online and I didn’t have to feel like I was getting swindled at any point.
The experience of buying a car at a dealership is a fucking nightmare. It’s awful. It’s the worst customer experience you can have in the United States.
There’s been some serious issues with the used car market fluctuating over COVID but it’s very reductive to now say “oh they were bad the whole time just another unprofitable unicorn”
For what it's worth, I felt the same way about Carmax, last year. Bought online, they drove the car out to me, and when a better trim of the same car popped up on their site 2 weeks later, I just traded it sticker-for-sticker no questions asked.
I'm sure I didn't get close to the best price, but I got better than dealership sticker for the make/model/year, and I lost zero time to the transaction.
Just one car auction company (a subsidiary of Cox) controls 80-90% of the market. If a dealer avoids junk, ungraded cars, then the quality is very standardized. As a result of a completely centralized pseudo-monopoly, actual acquisition cost is set to an extreme degree (car auction price ranges are so tight that top and bottom bids are usually within a hundred dollars of each other from very cheap to very expensive vehicles). In turn, this means that local pricing is going to be based on other stuff like time on lot (more time = more payments and interest), lot space cost, sales cost, etc)
Places like Carmax buy a car, mark it up $2k, and sell it making most of their money on financing and warranty/service stuff. They mark vehicles down something like $500 each month for two months then put it right back on the auction if it doesn't sell (so you'll generally get better deals from vehicles that have been on-lot a while). This is why they refuse to negotiate price.
You may get a slightly better price than the dealership, but not by much when you consider every single factor.
If you want the best possible deal, know the car you're looking for and offer a fixed finder's fee to a mom and pop used dealership to buy it for you. A lot of these smaller dealers will give you a good, fixed rate because it's guaranteed money to them without that normal overhead. It may not be strictly allowed (due to NDAs and such), but some may even allow you to help pick out the vehicle to bid on.
Like I said, I'm well aware that I'm not getting the absolute best price at Carmax; that's part of the premise. What I am getting is a month to drive the car and swap it for any other car, or a refund. That's hugely valuable.
I have bought almost all of my cars from CarMax in the last decade. Even going into their dealerships in person is not a typical experience. There is no negotiation on price and the only "upsell" was their extended warranty. They are also hemorrhaging money currently and hopefully don't go the way of carvana.
I bought through carmax and I call it dealership lite. They tried to finance me even though I already had financing (and I said no) and pushed the extended warranty pretty hard. It is like $5k for 150k miles. I've heard you should buy it if you go for a BMW, jaguar or other higher maintenance car.
I wonder if it's possible for these concepts to really go big.
The problem is, there's a lot more lemons on the market then there's great deals. Nobody wants the car that doesn't start twice a week or that's been in an accident and has its chassis skewed.
These sites start out by promoting seller karma or something but even the best sellers have lemons to get rid of. At the start they probably just sell them elsewhere to keep their rating high. Eventually as these sites get so big you can't avoid them, the quality will inevitably drop because they capture too big of a market which just includes a lot of crap.
At the same time investors will want to see that exponentially skyrocketing line continuing so they'll be pushing to cut corners left right and center just as things get difficult.
I don't know Carvana as I don't drive much anymore but I assume the same story supplies here at least in some ways.
Aka the AirBNB problem. In a nutshell, that you can't have a high quality growth company forever in an industry with a fixed supply of high quality items.
Initially, you grow like crazy and with great user reviews, as you're able to pick and choose the highest quality items.
Unfortunately, at some point you exhaust the supply at a given quality level, but your valuation mandates continued growth.
So you lower your quality requirements to obtain more supply, which only buys you a bit more time until you hit the next supply limit.
The only winning move seems to be stay private and accept there's a near-term cap on your revenue growth, after which you will grow much more slowly (at the natural supply expansion rate).
> The only winning move seems to be stay private and accept there's a near-term cap on your revenue growth, after which you will grow much more slowly (at the natural supply expansion rate).
Or go multi-brand, and introduce cheaper brands for the lower quality properties, to maintain the goodwill for the higher quality brands. Many hotels do this with many different brands under the same organization that segment their customers on price and quality expectations.
I always thought that Uber/AirBnB etc should be more aggressive in creating more brand separation between their cheaper options and their higher quality options.
I recently stayed in a hotel that was an example of how extreme the brand split of various hotels was. It was one building with three different brands operating out of it. One check in counter, one guest lounge, one gym, etc. Three different elevator groups though; one for each brand. Ultimately all the rooms were practically the same, but the trim was a little different between the brands.
But hey, if you feel that attached to a Hampton Inn as opposed to a Home2 or a Hilton Garden Inn I guess it makes sense. It's all the same to me though and seems like just a waste of paperwork and administrative tasks to continue the facade of three brands in the same building.
I just saw that for the first time with a Residence Inn I booked where they said to check-in at the adjoining Moxy. In that case though the rooms probably are different.
Uber is the same way. At first it was novel and driver pay was heavily subsidized so you had high quality drivers with nice cars. Over time the price for riders increased, driver pay decreased, and driver quality also decreased.
I bought one from them about 3 months ago and it was excellent.
I couldn’t get a local dealership to give me the sticker price of a car on their website without showing up in person. I expected all the extra fees they throw in to be hidden but all they would post was MSRP and to call for the price. I call and they pretend to not know the car I am talking about and need to go there to see the specific car. This was multiple dealers.
Carvana though showed me the price, shipping if any, taxes, tag, title before I even tried to buy it.
This is the problem when SV startup approaches hit the world of physical products. This isn't software. To sell a car, you first have to buy one. You cannot create them out of bits and sell more at nearly zero marginal cost. Your inventory has a carrying cost. You're playing in a market. Carvana got caught buying high and having to sell low. Was there any securities trading firm or auto retailer experience on their management team or board?
...and this translated into very poor quality vehicles because they couldn't afford proper inspections and repairs (don't have to fix what you don't find! Let the customer sort it out! And be incredibly annoying to contact, so they maybe just go away...ie the Google model of customer service!) and their on-the-road staff were horribly trained. There are multiple videos out there of Carvana staff dropping people's "new" cars off the backs of the flatbed trucks.
I remember seeing the ads for them hiring delivery drivers and it amounted to "have a pulse? friendly? We'll train you to drive a large commercial vehicle and load/unload cars, wooo!"
Not sure why you were downvoted. They got their Raleigh (Wake County) license revoked for a while for selling cars with Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia titles IN North Carolina. Cars weren't passing basic safety inspection and sometimes they didn't even provide the title after months!
Transferring an out of state title in NC hits you with a road tax up to a defined upper limit ($400 I believe is the absolute highest) based on car value and state you transfer from, so they likely did this to avoid paying that sales tax themselves before selling the car. It's shady as hell.
1. What makes you think car dealerships run on thin margins?
I don't know what typical margins are, but the owners seem to do pretty well. This may be despite low margins. But I'm reluctant to accept your claim without proof.
2. What qualifies as low margin? 1%? 10%?
3. It is entirely possible to make billions on low margins.
A dealer that makes $1000 per car can make $1 billion profit by selling 1 million cars. If the average car sells for $15k, a $1k profit would be a < 7% margin. See question 2 about low margins.
A little mom-and-pop lot in a very small town can sell 5-10 cars per month. It doesn't seem unreasonable for a huge national online dealership to sell 1 million cars.
4. What timeframe are we talking? Five years?
Carmax financials say they do more than $5 billion in a single quarter.
Used car auction prices are basically fixed. 80-90% of all cars are bought in auctions run by just one company (Cox). Sale prices low/high is usually in a range of about $100.
As supply costs are so thoroughly controlled, the biggest way to increase margins is increasing prices either directly or through service contracts and/or financing. There is a slight economy of scale to owning fleets of car transports and the like, but the actual competitive advantage of those things over smaller dealerships is pretty minimal and I don't doubt is completely cancelled out by the extra administration overhead smaller dealerships don't have.
Carmax used to mark up cars $2000 over auction price. That isn't pure profit though. They have to pay to transport the cars from the auction to their dealership. They have to pay for the building/lot and administration. They have to pay for any necessary repairs. They have to pay interest on the vehicles as they are leveraged on the vehicles they buy (one reason they resell so fast, but may lose money that must also be made up elsewhere). Most significantly, they have to pay the sales team.
By the time you're done, they probably make more like $100 or less per vehicle directly and the rest indirectly through warranties, service deals, and loans.
not the parent, but they probably meant "compared to typical vc-funded startup expected margins". most faangs don't need to ship tons of steel to anybody and their margins are around 25%.
can you disrupt used cars given all the logistics of the physical world? maybe, I don't know, but people here report both carmax and carvana having severe business issues, why?
Don't disagree with the sentiment that selling physical products is a lot more intensive than a SaaS app, but to this point, "people here report both carmax and carvana having severe business issues" is definitely due to the whiplash in the used car business due to COVID. That is, both new and used car prices skyrocketed due to supply chain issues, so CarMax and Carvana had to pay a ton for their inventory. Now car prices are "normalizing", so both of these companies have high priced inventory that they now need to sell in a low(er) priced market.
> The buying experience was simply excellent for me
No doubt, because a company that operates at a loss on VC money and passes the savings on to the consumer, can easily provide a great experience/price.
Take advante of those companies while they exist, but be clear that they can't continue for very long. Either VC money runs out and they disappear or they go public and must start making a profit by increasing prices and slashing service.
The same way that your local real estate development firms own your town's politics.
They care more about government then literally anyone else in the area, and nobody else has as strong a financial incentive to politically push back on what they want.
The GM streetcar conspiracy basically gave dealerships to already politically connected individuals in return for killing off streetcars - the payoff being that the busses that replaced (poorly, hence encouraging private car ownership) would be bought via the dealerships. Car dealership owners are often car dealership owners because of adjacency to power, not the reverse.
The problem seems to be that they sold too many cars with a negative margin. I've heard stories of people selling their cars sight unseen to Carvana for above market value and it seems they were left holding too many cars as the second hand car market normalized and prices decreased. Like a lot of VC funded companies, they were blinded to market realities by the cash each funding round produced. If they'd had to purchase cars with profits of past sales and their stock as collateral, they might have seen the reality sooner.
The new car market is also probably contributing. I just bought a house and sold my hybrid for a Tacoma. I walked into a dealership lot to buy a '20 with 40k miles on it. I left with a brand new Tacoma with zero miles and a better package for $10k less. I was able to do this because the dealership needs to move inventory to get new cars from Toyota and hybrids are very in demand.
A lot of people want a pickup but don't need a full size truck. Tacoma fills this niche - probably more people that have big pickups would have all their needs met with a tacoma sized one. Though it feels like all trucks have scaled up massively over the past 20 years and a 2020 tacoma is probably as big as a 2000 F150.
I have an old (2006) taco at the moment and have had it over a decade now. It's been perfect. I don't want a larger tundra, I have no need for it. In fact I wish Toyota made a smaller truck. I still need all 4 doors and 5 seats but less width and less length. Perhaps the width of a rav 4, and a even shorter 4ft bed (instead of 5 on taco and 6 on tundra). Essentially like the very old 1990s Ford rangers were, but made by the best quality car manufacturer, Toyota. I don't need to pull or hold multi thousand pounds loads, but I like my fishing poles, muddy boots or filthy buckets to be outside in the bed of the truck. Actually while I'm wishing upon a star, could it also be washed inside and out with a water hose? Can it have almost zero tech, no fucking screens!! so it will last as long as this taco has? (My fan setting physical dial recently broke and fell off, but it still works because I can spin the pin that it attached too with my thumb and finger). Also can I stop dropping my keys between the seat and the center console!?!
The Hyundai Santa Cruz is pretty similar to a Strada. From what I can remember, they aren't selling particularly well, but it's been a while since I looked. The Ford Maverick on the other hand is going like hotcakes. A bit bigger, but not outrageously so.
Most Tacomas seem to sell with a 5’ bed these days, but otherwise yes, trucks are larger than ever.
Personally, I found it easier to move 2x4s or anything longer than approx. 5 feet (fishing poles) in my Prius because the Tacoma I had, had such a short bed. Otherwise I was sticking crap through the Tacoma window which was super jank.
Similarly, I had a compact sedan which could easily hold 2x10s angled from trunk to front passenger windshield area. My Tacoma had a 6' bed but I still either has to put lumber of the roof rack (of my truck cap) or just angle it out over the tailgate if going a short distance.
But I didn't buy it for hauling lumber, it was way more practical imo than an suv for camping and moving furniture and basically moving anything that isn't really long and thin. And full size pickup trucks are no better.
But yes, ironically, if the main thing you move is small quantities of 8' lumber, a sedan is better
I had an access cab w/ the standard bed (6'). Ended up putting long things in the bed, then up over the cab, then strapped down.
IMHO, with a Taco, you really need to pick an option.
Option 1: I carry people more than things, in the city. Double cab + 5ft bed (aka the common one)
Option 2: I carry things more than people, in the city. Access cab + 6ft bed
Option 3: I carry things and people, and am willing to access the turning radius and parking compromises. Double cab + 6ft bed
Honestly, for urban trucks I always liked the Honda Ridgeline (Gen 1, not sure if they still do) openable divider style. Because most long stuff isn't wide... just long. So it's fine putting it up over the center console.
I’m going to go with minivan and a trailer hitch most likely as that hits so many sweet spots (and with the seats down or out you can get a sheet of plywood in some).
...at roughly the same price as a full size truck which is pretty much a non-starter for anyone who cares.
The Colorado actually fills that niche at an acceptable price poiont.
The Tacoma costs what a fullsize truck does and you buy one if you don't want a half ton for image reasons but also won't buy domestic because that's what upper middle class people have been trained not to do.
>probably more people that have big pickups would have all their needs met with a tacoma sized one.
People buy full size trucks because if they did their "once a month max usage" routine with a smaller truck you would be chastising them for "being unsafe" instead.
Not GP, but the Tundra is enormous compared to a Tacoma for someone coming from a car and not used to a full-size. I was also considering a Tundra since the model refresh, but even compared to our current truck (Land Cruiser) the Tundra felt noticeably larger and less maneuverable.
That overcompensating giant flat angry looking grill (I'm not being hyperbolic, that's literally why they style them that way: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-11/the-dange... ) and far too large/heavy body is why your truck has poor gas mileage, not because it has a "thirsty" V8.
2007 Toyota Highlander hybrid MPG: ~28mpg. Same vintage year prius mileage: a bit shy of twice that.
2nd gen Tundra weighs a LOT more than Highlander and has low final drive gearing for towing. The 4.7L and 5.7L V-8's are thirsty no matter the platform. Also, that model Tundra doesn't have a giant grill. Further, much of the weight in the Tundra comes from the giant components they bolt onto it to make it suitable for towing. For instance, a 2007 Tundra will pull 7000lbs more than a 2007 Highlander Hybrid.
I have no idea why you are comparing a small hybrid SUV to a full-size truck...of course the HYBRID suv is going to get more MPG.
I didn't need the size a Tundra has but I do need to be able to haul a trailer or things in the bed. The Taco 4x4 off-road also comes with a nifty electrical system which I plan to use at multi-day festivals.
I sold two cars to Carvana in the last year and in both cases the offers from Carvana (which included them picking up the car from my driveway) were multiple thousands of dollars better than Carmax or dealerships.
Could I have made more selling privately? I don't know, but I can tell you that Carvana paid very handsomely to do all the work involved with buying your car.
The success of Carmax has long been that they are just better on the buy side than anyone else. They are just a large used car dealer with excellent auction buying strategy. It makes sense to buy from Carmax but it doesn't make a ton of sense to sell there. You know they are trying to squeeze you on that side of the deal.
Carmax never loses money. Carvana has never earned a profit. It's sort of a big difference!
Its funny because my experience has been the exact opposite. I have sold three cars to them in the past 2 years (long story) and all of them were several thousand above what other dealers in the area or carvana/shift/vroom were willing to pay. Every time I got one of their offers I was like, "Huh. Ok".
However in buying cars from them, everything seems a overpriced compared to the local market.
My understanding of it is that they make money by doing used car arbitrage. They knew they could make money on the cars I sold them by shipping them across the country. And I think people are willing to pay a little more to buy a car from them because of all of the guarantees and how painless it is.
Carvana definitely lost money when I sold to them. The car had a lot of minor problems that needed to be addressed if they ever wanted to sell it. When it came to reporting the quality, there were only 3 options. I chose the middle option even though it needed thousands of dollars worth of repairs. The person who picked up my car basically told me that they have no incentive to care so long as if you're obviously being dishonest.
Maybe there is a role for humans in the used car business for the foreseeable future, just because any automated method for assessing used car value runs into the "winner's curse" problem? (Essentially the only people who sell their cars to the automated system are the ones where the automated system offers them the best price, because there's a problem with the car that the automated system isn't picking up on.)
Even dealers don't exactly do a deep inspection or they weren't last summer. Even with some very visible problems the trade-in was more than I expected. (And in the same neighborhood as Carmax.)
> The problem seems to be that they sold too many cars with a negative margin. I've heard stories of people selling their cars sight unseen to Carvana for above market value and it seems they were left holding too many cars as the second hand car market normalized and prices decreased.
How did a bunch of paid professionals in their leadership not see this coming/account for this happening?
I'm not surprised. I've heard multiple stories from multiple people about Carvana just forgot to collect money from them. They bought a used car, the car showed up, and Carvana just never took the money from them beyond the deposit.
This is not only bad for Carvana and their cash flow, but bad for the buyer too, who just has to keep the money sitting there forever in case Carvana fixes the glitch and tries to transfer the money.
I guess at least if they go bankrupt they can finally assume no one is coming for the cash...
Yeah, bankruptcy basically does not let anyone off the hook who owes the bankrupt company or person a debt. But collection is overseen by a court which definitely can mean that efforts to collect debt owed to the bankrupt party can intensify and are unlikely to end until money is collected.
Over a decade ago, when I first left home, I bought a bunch of home appliances on finance. They never collected any payments, and a few years later, they went bankrupt. Nobody ever came after me and nothing ever appeared on my credit report.
> I guess at least if they go bankrupt they can finally assume no one is coming for the cash...
My expectation would be that the liquidator is immediately going to start chasing those people, hard. Carvana may not be competent to organise collecting monies owed, but the folks managing bankruptcy? Hell no.
Bankruptcy companies are like Star Wars backwater scrapyards. Might not seem sexy or high profile but man do they know how to strip a company down quickly and effectively.
If anything, they'll err in the other direction when chasing unpaid money: people won't be getting a free car because the recordkeeping and collections were a mess, people are going to be fighting with debt collectors over having paid their bills, but Carvana being a mess means that the debt collector will have no evidence of that.
Even if you don’t get it in writing you can ALWAYS contest and demand proof from whoever the liquidator sold to - I personally would consider it pretty unethical to try to get out of a valid debt that you intentionally took on but it’s a tactic that is known to work and screw the usurers anyway.
You don't necessarily always need a title, just write a Bill of Sale to the buyer. This is fairly common particularly with older cars or cars that have been converted to racecars (but still quite street-legal).
When I went to buy my car from Carvana, the guy that helped me said that the cost of used cars was incredible. People were buying cars, then trading them in a month or two later for a profit. He suggested I come back in a month or two to do the same to get a newer model.
I'm not sure what the folks at Carvana were thinking, but it seems like even with a wild used car market and high inflation, this shouldn't reasonably be possible. Or at least, their sales associates shouldn't be pushing it.
Myself and many members of my family made some great easy sales to Carvana (they drive a truck to you!) and car dealers (they had to pay more than Carvana to get a car) way above market price several times during lockdown. I would like to thank the early investors in Carvana for these great deals and only wish it could have continued longer.
>Who invested in Carvana? Carvana has 3 investors including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Ally Financial, and Citi.
What's funny is seeing the correction in action on cars.com / autotrader.com. You can see the price history, and dealers even just 6 months ago were asking outrageous prices and have since slashed their asking prices because they can't move the things, because new cars are cheaper or not much more expensive, have a warranty, and better financing.
My girlfriend had a -similar- issue with Shift. She was their first sale in Washington when they expanded up here, and for whatever reason, titling and registration was screwed up repeatedly.
What was interesting was that when the temporary tabs expired, rather than extending them, they put her -in a rental- for two -months- and paid those two months payments, -and- gave her $300 for her trouble.
One of Carvanas major problems is titleing and registering cars doesn't scale. It is in most stares a manual, paperwork driven process. Example, Ohio has 88 County Clerks of Courts Title. Source, family member who worked there.
Easy to blame that it's a manual paperwork driven process, but I'm glad that transferring a legal title isn't a one click process. These are not software EULAs and title related fraud is still a big risk even with all the safeguards.
National chains like CarMax handle this paperwork just fine and Carvana should've invested more in the back office staff rather than overpaying for used Jettas, you know to move fast and break things.
More like, move slow and jump titles. When they finally did send registration paperwork to our DMV, the state had it turned around in two days. Pretty quick!
The problem is with buying cars site unseen. I follow some car groups that revolve around tuning BMW engines for lots of power. It became a meme to post before and after pictures of heavily modified, drag strip/race prepped cars and then on the back of Carvana trucks some months later.
I feel really sorry for people who bought some of those 340s and M3s.
It’s just too easy to unload junk cars on companies like Carvana. Dealerships have the tools to sniff this stuff out during trades.
Even dealers weren't digging deeply during peak shortages. I probably overpaid for the new car I had to wait for last summer. (Minimal negotiating leverage.) But I got what seemed like a surprisingly high trade in as well.
But part of that was there was probably a period where you had buyers who were desperate for vehicles, any vehicle, that would get them to work or the store.
I don't actually think buying cars sight unseen is the main obstacle here, because what you're describing (folks taking advantage of the system) represents a tiny percentage of transactions.
I think the biggest issue is that you've taken a business which has notoriously low margins (used cars) and you're operating on the lowest margin end on both sides. On the sell side you're buying cars that would otherwise be sold private party - i.e. from the most price-conscious sellers. On the buy side you're competing against dealerships on price but also offering a more premium/white-glove experience which eats into your margins.
The problem is that like with OpenDoor, asymmetrical information favors the seller.
If I know I can get a better deal, I’m not going to use Carvana or OpenDoor. If I know there is something wrong with my car/house I’m going with Carvana/OpenDoor.
But everyone knows they can get a better deal than Carvana/Carmax/etc. - they're selling to Carvana because it's convenient.
In theory, Akerlof's lemon theory could lead to a situation in which Carvana has to underpay to account for all the lemons they're buying to the point that sellers aren't willing to take the hit. In practice, I think this just isn't a big deal - they aren't buying enough lemons to move their offer prices much, and the convenience factor is worth quite a lot of money to sellers. If this was truly a major issue I think we'd see it with CarMax who are wildly successful.
Which usually works against a consumer when dealing with businesses. But, in the case of used cars, there are definitely cases where a seller knows that some major system of their car is basically being held together by duct tape--which gets them a good purchase price and may well screw the ultimate buyer of the vehicle.
Yeah, there's a lot of people here mocking Carvana, but the user experience is fucking phenomenal. (Yes, aside from the "user experience" of selling your car for more than it's worth).
Buying from dealerships is not something I ever want to do again.
My understanding (from a poorly remembered Planet Money episode) is that this isn't a technical issue, it's a regulatory one. I'm not from the US and my memory is hazy so I don't know the details.
Have you tried carmax? They don't allow sales people out on the lot. All the cars are unlocked, so you can get inside, and you can get all the info about the car from their app. I bought my last 2 cars from carmax, and was a totally painless experience.
You pay a non insignificant amount more for this experience. Not that it isn't worth it to some people, you don't get a horrible price you're just guaranteed not a low price. True about the entire haggle free market though.
I likely don’t have the skills / patience necessary to get a better deal from a dealership anyway so just buying a car in my price range without the games works pretty well.
I pay not to have to deal with bullshit in a lot of areas of my life. Buying a car is the definition of “dealing with bullshit”. We have bought three of our last four cars from there and it always felt like a good experience.
We bought our son a 2010 Jeep Liberty from there in 2020. It constantly had little problems that they would fix without a hassle for the first few months.
Out of the blue, they called me and offered to reimburse me for one months payment on top of offering reimbursement on a car rental - they didn’t have to do either.
We ended up turning down the car rental since I was working remotely by then and I just let him use my car.
This. Car dealerships are some of the most unpleasant places I’ve ever been inside. Pushy, manipulative, sleazy… it drove us to buy our last vehicle on Kijiji
In a way, the hard to negotiate market makes things easier. It took me about 6 weeks to get a car that was "in transit" which actually meant it was "in the manufacturing pipeline." But, other than that, I spent maybe a few hours at the dealer on a couple visits, negotiated down some factory installed options by getting them added to a trade-in, mostly fended off some upsells... No it's not just click and buy on a website but for a big purchase, hard to call it horrible.
I've bought a few cars from dealers in recent years and honestly the experience was ok to fine. In every case I knew which vehicle I wanted to buy before contacting the dealer, so perhaps that makes a difference. Through the whole process where they try to make you buy warranties and so on, I just say "I feel lucky", and chuckle a bit. If they ask about another warranty, I repeat "I feel really lucky", again jovially. Nobody has tried to ask a third time.
There's also the fact that nobody ever brags about turning down all the dealer options like warranties and wheel protection and then actually gets bad curb rash or a $3500 bill for a timing belt replacement.
I think it should be very apparent to just about anyone that there aren’t enough programmers in the world to develop enough capable algorithms to buy and sell used cars or homes efficiently or profitably.
There are way too many nuances involved in such transactions that used car dealerships and the traditional real estate transaction model is never going away.
If there were any indication of it going the other way, used car dealerships would have gone out of business long ago. After all, you have been able to buy a used car privately through tons of websites or listing services without a middle man taking a profit for years. But the risk of doing so is too great.
I've only ever bought used cars through private sales, never had an issue. I always get my mechanic to check them out before going ahead with a purchase though, that has absolutely saved me thousands before.
I wouldn’t believe that. It’s a financial scheme where they were somehow able to get massive collateralized loans to buy lots of inventory whose value is very volatile.
It is reminiscent of an attempt to corner silver or something. I’m sure the insiders cashed out.
Drivetime is a privately held subprime used dealer group that lists their inventory on Carvana, which is a public spinoff of Drivetime. The CEO of Carvana is the son of the Drivetime owner. Plenty of room to launder profits via wholesale prices.
In October 1990, García, then a Tucson-based real estate developer pleaded guilty to a felony bank fraud charge for his role as a straw borrower in the collapse of Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan Association.[4][5] Garcia "fraudulently obtained a $30-million line of credit in a series of transactions that also helped Lincoln hide its ownership in risky desert Arizona land from regulators."[4] Garcia spent three years on probation, and he and his firm filed for bankruptcy.[5]
In 1991, García bought Ugly Duckling, a bankrupt rent-a-car franchise, for under $1 million and merged it with his own fledgling finance company, and turned it into a company selling and financing used cars for sub-prime buyers with poor credit history.[5] Garcia took the company public on the NASDAQ exchange in 1996, trading under the ticker "UGLY".[6] In 1999, Garcia was involved in six lawsuits alleging he had "abused his position to profit" from a real estate deal where he ultimately acquired 17 company properties at a 10% discount.[5] In 2002, Garcia and the former Ugly Duckling CEO, Gregory Sullivan, took the company private and renamed it DriveTime.[7]
How about allowing smaller used car dealers to sell carvana inventory. Lot space is expensive but a lot of people shop online or on magazines before going in person anyways. It will be a good lure, just have the dealer make them wait until he gets the car from carvana while they checkout existing inventory. Carvana breaks even -ish and dealers make money on the financing side (they never make money on actual sale of the car only on interest anywayd).
I never looked into carvana but there are many small dealers that don't need you to have a good credit or even a job to get a car. They could use carvanna as cloud service, vehicle-as-a-service VaaS if you will lol.
I can't imagine buying a car at carvanna, I don't care much about test driving or getting pressured to buy by a used car salesman but the quality and pricing is too high and you can't bargain with carvanna but I can tell some no name used car lot salesman how I will be back and how much I need it, how I will bring people to him,etc... and get some flexibility.
I suppose it is the same people that get their cars repaired at name brand shops and at dealers that buy this way. I need a guy that only accepts cash for whatever reason and build rapport with that person so he won't mess it up to charge more. i do that because they usually "find" parts somehow (usually just salvage) and avoid expensive parts or b.s. charges because if who their customer base is.
I am used to this stuff then there are people trying to pass laws to limit cash usage! What a world.
I worked in this space at the turn of the century (Cobalt Group, now part of ADP). Dealers would grant access to their (usually) ADP backends that we'd scrape for inventory and then aggregate on websites (usually their own and maybe a larger hub). Today I'd say something like FB marketplace or Craigslist does that work. Smaller dealers post their inventory to Craigslist every day (or every week) and then Craigslist is the search engine. Unfortunately, at this price point, there's not enough margin for things like delivering cars, transferring across lots, etc.
There's a lot of appeal to a car vending machine if done right. Like, if I could plug in that I want a Prius Alpha dropped off at my door for no more than X dollars, and someone would hook me up with a well-vetted second-hand Alpha, I would totally be very happy with that instead of guessing and wrangling.
The problem is that involves a lot of stuff that self-styled hyperscalers are garbage at: quality checks, human interaction, and such.
Remember when Zillow tried getting into the buying/flipping business? This is that, but worse because Carvana didn’t star with a profitable car-appraisal and listing service first, and have no main business left.
Or maybe this is better actually, since it’s much clearer for investors: With Zillow, as an investor maybe I didn’t want to be in the home buying business at all. And now Zillow is burning my money by getting into it. If I had wanted to get into the home buying/flipping business I could have just bought Homevana stock. Carvana is clearly doing one thing. And if you want to do that thing you buy their stock.
> as Carvana was able to undercut its brick-and-mortar competition with vehicle prices.
that I’m not sure how to make sense of it.
Right before Covid I was shopping for a used car, and I remember their prices being outrageously higher than dealerships. I’m talking saving a few thousands dollars just by taking the dealer’s initial price without negotiating.
Similar scenario just a couple of months ago, I was looking to sell and again reading how well they pay I got a quote… and it was less than half of the first number a dealer threw out (this was a really old and cheap car tbf, I don’t expect it to be that bad for more expensive ones).
Either way, I always wondered how they possibly stayed in business, since it seemed weird that so many people would pay so much for the privilege of being ripped off a lot by some far away corporation, instead of having a person in front of you ripping you off a little.
I deeply hate the dealership experience, but the bad feeling/buyer’s remorse wears off in a couple of days and I’d rather enjoy the extra money in my pocket.
It’s very illuminating to me seeing the comments in this thread shedding some light into what people liked about Carvana and how they were being too generous with returns and losing money at scale. That makes some sense at least. But whenever articles talk about their good prices, it feels like a buried ad.
They spent 18 months building one near my house, only to finish it as the company really started to go into the dumpster.
It's near the offramp for the dealer's row in my town, so I suspect that the Cadillac, BMW, or Mercedes dealership will buy it for pennies on the dollar as an advertising billboard.
Good riddance. Their shady, shady, practices took full advantage of the trust customers need to have in a full service used car dealer. The execs should face legal penalties
Not going to defend Carvana... but most people trust used car dealers about as far as they can throw a full size pickup.
Most of the problems with Carvana are the same problems you get at any used car dealer, just magnified by scale. All of the title/registration problems. Financing. Availability. Communication. No better or worse than any random dealer.
My first car ever (25+ years ago) I received the wrong plate from the dealer. My dad and I noticed it and ran back to the dealer a day or two later. Good thing they didn't give away the plate they were supposed to give us.
That’s a relatively minor one compared to what I’ve heard tell of - imagine buying a new car to only realize they gave you one that didn’t match VINs with all your paperwork - because they had two on the lot and you don’t notice u til you go to sel it years later.
The header image there with the tall rack of cars certainly makes "Carvana crashes hard" and "has come crashing down" more vigorous and vicious. Props to the author.
I can see how people that sold a car to Carvana for a great price are happy, but I imagine there are lot of people that ended up with a bad overpriced vehicle from Carvana as well.
There's porn sites that use all kinds of random keywords. This isn't a new thing, and it'd be appreciated if you could clearly mark links like this one as NSFW.
I hope they can fix their financial issues (sounds like they just "bought high and are selling low") and their operational issues (in some places word got out that it was cheaper to just "buy" a Carvana car and then return it < 7 days rather than getting a car rental), because, at least for me, their purchasing experience was great.