It's a totally different business model to this but http://www.webuyanycar.com/ is a pretty big deal here in the UK. You get a valuation, take your car to them, they buy it. To my surprise it worked pretty well too and I got almost as much for my car as I'd have realistically got waiting for months on a classifieds site or whatever. I imagine the way the British used car market works has a big impact on the idea actually working though.
Yes, CarMax is sort of the model that we looked at. They are the only player in town that had the scale necessary to apply modern business management principals to their business. But they're margins are paper thin. Too much overhead.
I'm actually very impressed by it. They found a market that is highly fragmented and tried to consolidate. The interesting thing is that they it took them forever to make a profit (and tons of funding). It's great to see, but in my (biased) opinion, they didn't go far enough.
The downside, in California, is that the DMV still considers you to be the owner even after you sell your car to them. Some woman got a ticket because of this, although it was eventually dropped.
In California, CarMax and other dealers don’t need to register a purchased vehicle in the company name. So even with her release of liability, the DMV considered the former owner to the registered owner of the ticketed vehicle.
I don't think that makes any sense, that article says
"Fastrak admitted that it was a mistake to transfer the ticket back to the former owner."
I am pretty confident that California law is advanced enough to handle the case of selling a car to someone. Carmax doesn't have anything new in that realm.
