Carvana And Vroom Are Still Tiny Compared To Dealerships
I had hoped that the billion-dollar startups of online car sales like Carvana and Vroom would utterly quash megamall car dealerships forever. In fact, the big brick-and-mortar dealers seem to be surviving just fine.
This popped up on my radar from a somewhat troubling Automotive News headline declaring that startups were displacing small car dealerships, taking out the little guys while the most bloated big lots weathered the storm. “Smallest dealers pressed as online startups reshape used market,” Automotive News declares, citing a JP Morgan analyst:
“A lot of smaller independent used retailers, or independent franchise dealers, they are the ones that are likely to suffer the most because they don’t have the capital or the relationships or the bandwidth to invest in the move towards digital,” said Rajat Gupta, auto retail analyst with J.P. Morgan.
Certainly, this sounds like a potential problem for independent dealers in the