Vroom, Carvana, Shift thrive during pandemic | Hacker News Reader

Vroom, Carvana, Shift thrive during pandemic

bloomberg.com

33 pointsprostoalex16 comments

I would have no problem selling to Carvana, but buying is tied to their financing.

Carvana offered me 4.15% on a 15k note for a 2021 truck. My local dealer, same truck style, 1.99% same term. No way. They’ll take cash, but make that work with your credit union.

I shopped at Vroom but decided against buying from them because of all the awful reviews and horror stories about customers, six months later, still waiting on title paperwork to get registration and plates.

All of these online vendors seem to ignore a scale problem…and not one of computing. There are thousands of dealers, all very capable of providing the bodies necessary to do the parts that rented CPUs at AWS or GCP can never do…paperwork .

Carvana is a multi-generational loan scam spanning 3 Ernest Garcias and at least four companies.

[1] https://medium.com/swlh/reminder-carvana-sells-debt-not-cars...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/carvanas-success-rides-on-used-...

I sold my M3 to shift for a profit and the process was insanely easy. They didn’t even care about some cosmetic issues. The guys told me they just drop the car off at DCH and they resell them. That’s a pretty great business model for them to flip a car in a matter of an hour.

Sold a 4-year old car to CarMax for $22k, (bought at MSRP @$27k in 2017). Didn't need another car immediately, so I was comfortable placing an order for a new car at MSRP (with ~3 months needed for delivery). As unfavorable as the housing market is for wfh-ers looking to upgrade, the car market is a different story.

Was suprised to see Carmax omitted from the title, though it was mentioned in the article.

Was the price of the new car so elevated as to negate the great price that you got from CarMax?

disclamer: work for carvana... the cool things is that fueled by all this growth, in spite of carvana being a large-ish company there's still so much tech innovation and greenfield projects in this space which makes it quite fun to be part of this used-car-frenzy!!

The used car market has exploded (as the article calls out) which has heavily contributed to this.

That being said the experience aspect is awesome and I’ve had 3 friends use Carvana to buy their pandemic vehicles with no complaints and nothing but good things to say about the service.

I’ve been sort of wondering if I should sell my year old Model 3 and buy a new one because of this: between price increases, delivery times and the used car market, it almost seems financially irresponsible to hold on to it.

I sold mine for the same reason.

That's what I did when prices started to get nuts earlier this summer. I got offers from Carmax, Carvana, and Vroom. One was >$1k higher than the others for whatever reason and since we didn't need to be paying insurance, taxes, and maintenance on two cars while working from home we got rid of one of them.

The car sold for $3k less than we paid for it 5 years ago and with twice the mileage now. My plan was to buy again when prices calmed down but at this point I have no idea when that will be.

Is the price you could sell it for used the same as you could buy a new one, or am I misunderstanding?

It’s pretty close to the price I paid for it, if not better. I haven’t run the numbers yet, but a midnight silver LR AWD is going for like $50k on caravana right now: so the total depreciation cost would be <$10k or negative.

Don't forget sales tax. You lose a lot on that when switching cars quickly.

I think it’s a good time to go for it if you can be car independent for a bit.

The real test will be whether they are able to continue to make money once the car market gets back to "normal" (whatever that will mean)

Any explanation as to why VRM is performing so poorly?

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