Jan 24
Selling our family car with Carvana
In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised that I was sad to sell our family car. The 2015 Chevrolet Volt has given us few problems and helped us to be a little bit more gentle to the Earth.
The car has been by far the most reliable and just the plain-best family vehicle we have had. As promised by electrical vehicles, the maintenance was minimal.
The whole family liked the car, even though it was nothing fancy. It did what General Motors said it would, and that’s what we needed.
Carvana made parting with the car today a piece of cake. Corey from the company even took some snapshots of our family for posterity after we did the paperwork.
Our initial interactions with Carvana and the actual sale were as easy as the company promises. Answer a few questions online and provide some basic information about your vehicle, and you instantly get a price estimate.
It was a breeze today for the car to be picked up by Corey from Carvana. He arrived a few minutes early, following a telephone-call confirmation from a colleague. Within 15 minutes, he was driving off with what was no longer our car.
I had my doubts that Carvana would make good on its offer to purchase our car for $17,000. It had plenty of dents from city driving and parking. The inside was not particularly clean.
But there were no problems today. Once we signed over the title and affixed our signatures to some paperwork, Corey said that he transferred the promised amount to our bank account.
Getting such a high price for a car that we only paid $2,000 more for in 2016 was why I picked Carvana as the platform to sell our E. V. through. We purchased it through Paulo at Centro Motors with 5000 miles on it, for the price of $19,000.
Of course, the great supply chain meltdown occasioned by the pandemic meant that used cars now maintain most of their original value. Just a couple of years ago, I was offered only about $3000 for the car from a nearby Chevrolet dealer. Even Paulo wasn’t able to get close to the offering price from Carvana, and he recommended that we take their offer.
Because the car needed an oil change among other minor maintenance and repairs, I took the car twice over as many weeks to Paulo. For about $400, he fixed everything, and I didn’t have to wait long. The cost was many hundreds of dollars less than I would pay anywhere else. They also ran a diagnostic report on the car, which Carvana wanted in order to buy it from us. Carvana also wanted us to get the oil change.
Figuring out what I needed to do to the car before I could sell it to the online platform wasn’t nearly as easy as the rest of the process. My next blog post might cover some of these issues. I did get much help from Latoya, who cut through a bunch of miscommunications and scheduled today’s pick-up visit. So props to her.
Just before Corey arrived, I realized that I had never before been the slightest bit emotional about the car. So we had never taken any pictures of it. I’m glad we took a few today.
