Carvana is quietly testing whether its click-to-buy formula can upend how Americans purchase brand-new cars—and longtime dealers for Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge, and Ram aren't thrilled. Writing at the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Otts reports that the used-car heavyweight has bought seven Stellantis dealerships nationwide, turning a once-sleepy store in Casa Grande, Ariz., into the top-selling Stellantis outlet in the country. Many of its buyers never set foot on the lot, instead ordering online and paying delivery fees north of $1,000 to skip the haggling. "I'm sure I could've gone into a dealership, got some more gray hairs, and negotiated it down to whatever Carvana had it at or lower, but I'm not going to do that to save $1,000 or even a few thousand dollars," says Joshua Higginbotham of Kansas City, who paid $1,290 to have a new Jeep shipped from Arizona.
The experiment is rattling the dealer network Stellantis has relied on for decades. Rival dealers say they're in "an uproar" over Carvana's rapid rise and its willingness to ship new vehicles far beyond a store's immediate market, even as Stellantis has moved to cap how fast any one dealer group can grow. With Amazon dabbling in online new-car sales and EV-makers like Tesla already selling direct, the Journal frames Carvana's move as another test of whether the bricks-and-mortar dealership era is fading. Read the full piece in the Wall Street Journal.
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