Why I Just Bought a Used Car Online — and Why You Should Too

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The author’s new(ish) 2014 Hyundai Elantra, complete with a bow. (Photo: Dan Tynan/Yahoo Tech)

Like a lot of sane people, I hate buying cars. I hate shopping for them. I hate dickering on price. I hate the test drives during which the salesperson prattles on about the car’s wonderful features while nervously eyeing the speedometer. I hate signing my name 172 times on endless pieces of paper. And I hate the fact that, no matter how good a deal it was, I still feel like I got screwed.

And yet I found myself this winter having to buy yet another car. But this time I vowed it would be different. This time I was going to skip the dealers and the classifieds and go straight to the Internet.

There are now a handful of sites that buy cars from private parties, inspect them, fix them if needed, resell them at prices they claim are less than you’d pay elsewhere, and deliver them straight to your door. I looked at three of them — Beepi, Carvana, and Vroom — and ended up buying a car from one of them. (There are also smaller more regional sites I didn’t look at, like Shift and Carlypso.)

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Like the other sites, Beepi lets you filter search criteria to find exactly the ride you desire. (Beepi.com)

And you know what? Though not entirely without its hassles, this was still the best car-buying experience I’ve ever had. These sites claim that this is the future of car sales; they might be right.

Buy here now

First, let’s be clear. I am not a novice car buyer. Over the years I have purchased nine cars, from beaters to shiny new ones. I thought I knew all the tricks.

I’ve gone shopping in early fall when dealers were desperate to move cars off the lot to make room for the new models, and near the end of the month when salesfolks were eager to make their quotas. I’ve been willing to forgo features or settle for a color that was not my favorite. I’ve walked in with quotes from other dealers. I’ve insisted on paying no more than $300 over the (still-inflated) dealer invoice. If the dealer didn’t budge on price, I had my “I’m walking out and taking my money with me” routine down to a fine art.

And yet each time, by the end of the process, after we’d agreed on a price and financing deal and signed a gazillion papers, I was worn to a nub. Invariably I’d end up agreeing to pay for an extended warranty or some kind of dubious protective coating just to get the hell out of there.

I could sense the sales dudes snickering at me as I left. I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was go home and lie in the fetal position for two hours.

This is the best part of buying a car online: You have none of that BS. Well, almost none of it.

A four-door to your door

One of the best things about these sites is there’s no need to set foot on a dealer’s lot or hunt down a private seller; they deliver the car to you, usually for free. (Exactly where each site delivers will vary.) You then get seven to 10 days to change your mind. If you decide the car isn’t for you, it’s picked up.

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Carvana: Big selection, limited delivery options. (Carvana.com)

However, this put Carvana immediately out of the running. While it offered the biggest selection of the three (more than 2,100 models), it offers free delivery in only a handful of cities in the southeastern U.S. (Atlanta, Nashville, Charlotte, N.C., and parts of Texas). Delivering a car to California would add $1,450 to the sticker and the same amount if I decided to return it. No, thank you.

That left me with Beepi (horrible name) or Vroom (cool name). Beepi offers free delivery to most of the western U.S., Florida, and the Northeast; Vroom covers the lower 48 states. Aside from that, and a few other small differences, these two sites are virtually identical.

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A man can dream, can’t he? (Vroom.com)

Now I had to decide what kind of car I wanted. I could drop $125K on a 2012 Aston Martin V12 Vantage, which would fit nicely into my ongoing midlife crisis, though not my budget. Or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, I could spend $8K on a Smart (aka Clown) car and endure endless teasing from my teenagers.

I decided on a hatchback less than four years old, with no more than 30,000 miles, costing somewhere between $12K and $18K. Using the handy filters on Vroom and Beepi, I could narrow my selection to cars that fit those criteria almost exactly. (Try doing that kind of filtering on Craigslist ads or, worse, on a car lot.)

I settled on a Hyundai Elantra GT, model years 2012 to 2015. It hit all my basic criteria and got good ratings from Edmunds and Consumer Reports. So then I just waited for one to show up on one of these sites. It happened faster than you might think: Beepi won the race.

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When I was shopping, Vroom featured lots of Nissan Leafs, Mini Coopers, and Smart cars. Your mileage may vary. (Vroom.com)

Once you find the car you want, it’s a matter of clicking the Buy button and deciding whether you’re going to pay cash on delivery or finance it. If the latter, you fill out a fairly brief form, then both sites shop your information to a handful of banks to find one willing to float you a loan.

Once my loan was approved, I had to upload photos of my driver’s license and insurance card and tell Beepi where to deliver the car; the site took care of registering it, securing the title transfer, and obtaining the loan documents.

The final decision: what color bow I wanted Beepi to put on the car when it arrived. (I picked gold.)

Stalled in traffic

OK, it wasn’t quite that simple. Various personal calamities kept this process from being as smooth as it should have been.

For example, in the middle of all this, my wallet was stolen, including all my credit cards. While I was waiting for my replacement cards to arrive, the car I wanted got snapped up by someone else. (Beepi lets you put a $500 deposit on a car to hold it but only if you have a credit card.)

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This 2011 Mercedes S-Class sedan was tempting but a bit too rich for my blood. (Beepi.com)

I eventually found another Elantra almost identical to the first one and reserved it. But because my cards had been stolen, there was a fraud alert on my account. This thoroughly flummoxed the people at Beepi, who saw the alert and refused to process my loan. I had to explain to them what a fraud alert was and what needed to happen next. A few minutes later, an employee of the bank called to ask me a bunch of questions to verify my identity. (One week later, another employee called me again and asked me the same questions.)

Also, for reasons too boring to get into, I needed a co-signer. But my co-signer had to be present when the car was delivered — something Beepi neglected to tell me. (Fortunately, I called to ask before the car showed up.) And there was no way to read or sign the loan documents ahead of time, which I found vaguely disquieting.

I ended up calling Beepi maybe a dozen times with various niggling questions over a period of three weeks; the folks there were always extremely friendly and responsive, though they didn’t always have the answers I sought.

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The price on Beepi was better than most I found when researching my options, including Kelly Blue Book. (KBB.com)

Was buying a car this way cheaper? Mostly yes. The nonnegotiable Beepi price was $16,400, plus taxes and fees. A search on Edmunds.com quoted me a price of around $22,000 (as if). Kelly Blue Book estimated a private party sale price of $17,264. I contacted some local dealers whose prices were in the same general neighborhood as Beepi, but it would have required me to go in to a showroom to get slimed.

I did find a nearly identical model for sale on Craigslist for $500 less. But it was an hour’s drive from my house, and the car probably had not received a 150-point inspection and did not come with a 10-day money-back guarantee or three months’ worth of additional warranty from the seller — things all three of these online car sites offer. That more than made up for the extra five C-notes.

Drive, he said

About 18 days after I clicked the Buy button, a flatbed truck showed up at my house with my Elantra on the back. The driver, a courteous young man named Robert, showed up with a passel of documents. I still had to sign my name 172 times, but there was no after-sale pressure, no arm twisting to buy additional service plans or undercoating. I didn’t feel the need to curl up and take a nap afterward.

I wanted to climb behind the wheel and hit the accelerator. Because, for the first time in my life, I’d just bought a car without driving it first.

And it felt great.

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