From: Paul Barrett To: jeffrey E. <[email protected]> CC: Richard Kahn Subject: FW: (BN) Car Shopping Online Hits Critical Mass as Carvana Comes to NYC Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2018 13:29:02 +0000 By Kyle Stock (Bloomberg) — As much as anyone, New Yorkers understand the urgent need for a corned-beef on rye, a bottle of tequila or even a six-pack of dress socks. In this day and age, virtually anything a city dweller could want can be summoned to the door, post haste. Including a used, royal blue Jaguar F-Type. As of Thursday, Carvana has that one covered. The five- year-old online marketplace just started selling and delivering cars in the Big Apple, the 78th U.S. city in its budding digital dealership. The first machines to ship will be packaged on delivery trucks in oversized takeout bags, which makes for great marketing (just picture all the soup-dumplings that could fit in one of those.) "We're presenting a new way to do something—the second- biggest purchase in a person's life," said Carvana co-founder Ryan Keeton. "It's just like Amazon—the best experience, the best product, the best price." The New York expansion won't upend the world of Manhattan car-buyers or even Carvana investors, but it does represent a tipping point in the $1 trillion business of buying and selling cars in America. Armed with internet reviews and pricing minutiae, consumers are finally opting en masse to negotiate and buy their rides online, without ever kicking a tire or taking a test drive. Carvana, which went public in May 2017, claims to be the fastest-growing car dealer in the country, period. In the second quarter of this year, it was selling about 250 vehicles a day and posting a profit of close to $2,200 per vehicle. It has about 11,000 machines listed on its platform and roughly one in five of its customers begin and close their car purchase on a smartphone. The startup offers pretty much everything a traditional car dealer does, including financi