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by twalla 1499 days ago
A friend of mine was in the market for new(used) car and was shopping offers for his old car and Carvana was the highest by a significant margin while Carmax effectively told him "thanks but we've got used vehicles coming out our ears". This was also shortly after the whole Zillow/Opendoor debacle - we started talking about how ridiculous it was that they were offering so much for a depreciating asset, plus covering storage and transporation costs and all the other attendant overhead. He opened a short position and I think closed it after he made about 4x or 5x his initial investment (I think they were at like 70 dollars per share at the time).
1 comments

Carvanas pricing was ridiculous. They would offer top dollar. Alue without ever really seeing the car. I think it was very heavily algorithm driven, and wasn't being watched enough by human eyes to looks for anomalies, or just to look at a car and realize that maybe they are offering too much. They have made some sellers very happy with the money they were offering for used cars, but I really think they have been overpaying for a good chunk of thier inventory.