71–80 of 229 posts
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Why'd you go for the Taco over a Tundra?
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.
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 ha…
The problem with Carvana's valuation is that car dealerships run on thin margins. It's very hard to make billions out of that.
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!"
If I remember correctly they were banned from car sales in multiple states, in some cases states banning them multiple times: https://www.google.com/search?q=carvana+banned+in+what+state...
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 reasona…
Doesn’t help they seem to have played so fast and loose they lost the legal ability to register vehicles in the name of their buyers: https://www.motor1.com/news/621947/carvana-title-registratio...
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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 ha…
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 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 ha…
Look up Joshua Fluke on YouTube, on one of his last videos he talks in details about the legal issues that Carvana has had.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why'd you go for the Taco over a Tundra?
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.
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.
Oh the irony.
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There was a whole lot of fraud going on between Carvana (public) and DriveTime (private). It'll come out in due course.
Can you explain the nature of the fraud and how it benefited each company?
Give it a year or two, it’ll all come out.
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 Carvan…
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…
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.