What’s it like buying from Carvana as the company crumbles? | Project Mk7 GTI

erikvandermey said:

Sold my Fiesta ST to Carvana last spring, was super easy and they handed me a check on the spot (also paid me about $4k over blue book price). Figured I'd never get that kind of money out of an 8 year old car with 80k miles (only tracked twice).

Yeah I had great success with three transactions with them, the last one being in August of 2021 when I could kind of see the lug nuts coming loose from the business model but the wheels not quite coming off yet. I figured that was my last shot at getting obscenely overpaid for a used car, and it look slike I was right.

I didn't have any of Tom's issues when I bought my Honda Fit through Carvana in 2020. Well, except for one: Carvana seems to have sold my information and now I get calls every day from marketers wanting to extend my warranty. 

In reply to JG Pasterjak :

Out of curiosity, I just ran our minivan through Carvana site for an offer.

Offer of $11,499

Same vehicle (at same age and miles) retailing for $20,990

The crazy trade-in-days might be over at Carvana

I posted here years ago when Carvana first hit that Carvana is not in the car business, they are in the finance business, cars just happens to be the medium.  It's like Zales Jewelers, they are selling credit, not selling jewelry. The price of the car was 100% irrelevant for them, they figured someone would always buy the payment. That's a tough spot to be in when rates triple and the payment starts to matter.

Am I the only one who got derailed by suddenly calling a 5-door hatch a sedan and a 3-door hatch a coupe?

We had a less than stellar experience with Vroom. Carvana didn't have the vehicle we wanted close enough to make it work. The redeeming part of the transaction was the major overpayment on our Promaster (nobody had vans anywhere) which paid off the remaining loan amount and got us into a nice 2017 BMW i3 to replace the smart fortwo. Odd pickup and dropoff. They wouldn't bring the car to the house, and we had to wait more than a week for a different transport to pick up the van. Which happened late on a Friday night with a Russian dude with heavy accent, a Tundra, and a barely large enough open trailer to carry the Promaster. Bye bye Sergie!

Jesse Ransom said:

Am I the only one who got derailed by suddenly calling a 5-door hatch a sedan and a 3-door hatch a coupe?

Right? I used the terminology I found in the VW community, and it's weird. 

I knew it would be tough to scale this business nationwide since each state's automotive laws are so different from each other but they had no choice since their business model required them to be moving vehicles between as many states as possible as soon as possible. Other national chains got to slowly scale and learn each state's laws one or two at a time and didn't have to think about how each state's laws interacted with every other state's. And if say, AutoNation found it too hard to move cars from say Minnesota to Texas they just didn't do it and no one was the wiser. The cars just stayed there or went to easy states. Like I said, I knew it would be tough but not as insanely difficult as it has proven to be.

Sarah Young said:

I didn't have any of Tom's issues when I bought my Honda Fit through Carvana in 2020. Well, except for one: Carvana seems to have sold my information and now I get calls every day from marketers wanting to extend my warranty. 

Don't feel special. I think we all get those, although they tapered off after I started letting every call that wasn't in my contacts go to voicemail. 

Sarah Young said:

I didn't have any of Tom's issues when I bought my Honda Fit through Carvana in 2020. Well, except for one: Carvana seems to have sold my information and now I get calls every day from marketers wanting to extend my warranty. 

Less likely it was Carvana, more likely it's how easy it is to mine your state's vehicle registration database. 90% of my purchases are private  party and I still get the warranty spam.

In reply to John Welsh :

I traded my Caravan in for 23k in April, first time I've ever made money when the transaction was a trade in. 

Do we think carvana will file bankruptcy and come out of this or disappear? If they go away I will be watching closely for the liquidation and its affects on used car prices.

Me and my buddies have been putting together lists of cars and assets a little out of our reach and keep talking about if this economic downturn gets bad it could be our last chance to get into certain markets, before they take back off again. I was a little to young and poor in 2008 to capitalize but some friends got into real estate or certain cars that they probably would have never been able if it wasnt for the 50-80% discounts. I know my pops has been watching the C2 market after getting rid of a nassau blue 327 convertible when he had kids and when he looked back at them later in life they had exploded in value, says it might be his last chance to get into one.

Robbie (Forum Supporter) said:

Are they going to put all those rollbacks up for sale soon?

Ramp truck!

That is literally the only thing I ever really wanted to buy from them. Sadly couldn't find one for sale, so I built my own:

te72 said:

Robbie (Forum Supporter) said:

Are they going to put all those rollbacks up for sale soon?

Ramp truck!

That is literally the only thing I ever really wanted to buy from them. Sadly couldn't find one for sale, so I built my own:

 

That is both a cool set up and a REALLY deep garage!!

Jesse Ransom said:

Am I the only one who got derailed by suddenly calling a 5-door hatch a sedan and a 3-door hatch a coupe?

Nope .

In reply to Opti :

I doubt it'll move the used car market.  Hertz and the other rental car places liquidated way more cars than Carvana has and it didn't impact values at all

Tom Suddard said:
 

Buying a car used to be easy: You’d hand over cash, then someone would give you keys and title.

...after spending a few hours of misery dealing with idiot salespeople and their ilk. 

Good lord....the used car market is insane. What you paid for your 5-year-old GTI is what I paid for my 2018 GTI (SE, 6MT, LST, other goodies) BRAND NEW (minus taxes). 

In reply to dyintorace :

Thank you! We are blessed in a lot of ways. I'm not terrible with welding thicker metal like this, and having an engineer friend to point out the shortcoming in my design for the ramps, as well as the garage we get to work in. It's 30 feet wide on the front end, but only something like 17 feet wide on the back half, because apparently someone thought a kitchen needed to be included on the house. =P

Roughly 50 feet deep, and the only thing I'd change in that regard is I wish we had put a roll up door on that back wall...

irish44j (Forum Supporter) said:

Good lord....the used car market is insane. What you paid for your 5-year-old GTI is what I paid for my 2018 GTI (SE, 6MT, LST, other goodies) BRAND NEW (minus taxes). 

Yep. And that's why it's been so long since you've seen a modern car added to the project fleet. We finally realized that there are still lots of modern cars at every track day and autocross and gave up on waiting for "normal" prices.

Granted, we paid extra for a nice example--at 19,000 miles this thing is basically new. I was more surprised to see cars with 80,000 miles and real issues selling for $22,000. Insanity. 

In reply to Tom Suddard :

Last February I sold my 19 Golf R for what I paid for it.  Although that was probably the height of the madness.

Sarah Young said:

I didn't have any of Tom's issues when I bought my Honda Fit through Carvana in 2020. Well, except for one: Carvana seems to have sold my information and now I get calls every day from marketers wanting to extend my warranty. 

Nah, they probably got it from the DMV, State Registry, whatever you have.  When I was in the business, I got accused of this on a fairly regular basis, never did it once.  

Hmmm, this feels promising.

In reply to Tom Suddard :

You know what would make that more promising? Tracking information. Assuming they didn't provide this, which would seem to fit the situation in general presented here, I can see why they're floundering. Telling you "within 5-7 business days" is somehow actually worse than the utility company telling you "between noon and five" isn't it?