The White Subaru Hell Loop

A mortal human being finds himself stuck between two impressive organizations: the DMV, and an internet start-up called Carvana. He has a problem, but each side insists only the other can solve it. Search Engine’s crack automotive team investigates. Support the show at searchengine.show! https://www.searchengine.show/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

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• 2:37PJ Vogt?

  Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big, no question too small. Not too long ago, I found myself talking to a Search Engine listener. Do you mind introducing yourself? Can you say your name?

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Sure. I am Liz.

• 2:50PJ Vogt?

  Where am I talking to you from? Where are you?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  So I am at work at an undisclosed corporation in Kansas City, Missouri.

• 2:59PJ Vogt?

  Liz, who works for an undisclosed corporation, was calling with a question about a problem that was not afflicting her exactly. It was afflicting her partner, also a listener.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  My name is Jed.

• 3:11PJ Vogt?

  You can literally, if your privacy is important to you, you could just identify as Jed.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll just identify as Jed.

• 3:20PJ Vogt?

  Jed and Liz, two private people who are overriding their instincts towards privacy to talk into a microphone on purpose because of their curiosity about this event they'd experienced together. This event had to do with a car Jed had bought online. Buying the car had sent him into a kind of bureaucratic purgatory, the sort of hell loop that consumes people. And he wanted to know why that had happened. The whole ordeal began because Jed was moving from Ohio to be with Liz in Missouri, which meant all the usual logistics: selling his house, opening a new bank account. But nothing was really going right. There were problems moving the money. There were constrained deadlines. It felt like a cursed month.

• 4:02PJ Vogt?

  And on top of it, three days before this wretched move, he goes to the mechanic. The brakes have been acting up on his car.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  He takes a look at it. He says, "I shouldn't let you drive home, and you absolutely can't drive this cross-country." So he says, "We have two options." "One, I can..." I think he had to replace the brakes entirely. He said, "That's going to cost significantly more than the car's worth." Two, you get a new car. I had three days to figure this out. And I was working at least nine to five on those days. I didn't have time to go around and visit dealerships. So I started looking at websites. I looked at Carvana. It was like the only realistic way that I could get a car in three days.

• 4:44PJ Vogt?

  Carvana, like Nirvana, but cars. A website where with the push of your thumb, you could order a car off the internet as smoothly as you would buy a pack of batteries off of Amazon.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Oh, it was so easy. I chose a car that night and financed it and was ready to go.

• 5:00PJ Vogt?

  That's amazing.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  I would describe this as like atypical Jed behavior. Like Jed is the kind of guy who like, when you need to buy like new art for the house or like a new lamp, he will make a PowerPoint presentation researching all of the options and like present it to you. So this was like, I think it really was, you were kind of like at the end of your rope with all of this. So this was probably like a pretty unique situation for you, I would say.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just needed a solution.

• 5:25PJ Vogt?

  Carvana promised the car would show up like magic. And on June 2nd of 2023, just two days after Jed hit buy on the website, that's exactly what happened.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  They bought my old car with the bad brakes. They dropped off a new one. They were delivering it to my front door. So the plan was they would deliver the car and I would take off at that moment.

• 5:47PJ Vogt?

  There was a hitch. Jed says that the 2015 white Subaru Outback arrived with a folder of paperwork, but there was no title to the car in that folder. A car's title is the document that says you are its legal owner. It's like your deed for the car. Jed also needed registration. That's the document where the state says this car can have a license plate, it can be driven on the road. Carvana was supposed to handle the registration for Jed, but it needed a couple more documents for him to get this new car registered in the state where he was going to live, Missouri. But for now Jed was fine. Carvana had supplied temporary tags, which meant Jed could proceed with his plan and drive on. So Jed arrives at his new home with Liz, and for the next several months, he gets busy with work.

• 6:30PJ Vogt?

  He hasn't paid much notice to the phone calls and emails from Carvana saying he's missing some documents.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  I'm not that worried about it. Like, okay, we're missing a few documents, but this, how hard could this be? When I have a free afternoon, I'll go down to the DMV and I'll take care of it.

• 6:44PJ Vogt?

  So then what happens?

• 6:45Speaker 02

  So, one of the documents that they need is what's known as a certificate of non-assessment, just showing that I don't owe any property tax on the car, because I just moved to Missouri.

• 6:58PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  So, to get that certificate, I have to go down to the county courthouse. Fine, no big deal. So I make some time, I go to the courthouse, and they won't even talk to me without a title. And, of course, they won't. I don't have any proof that I own this car.

• 7:14PJ Vogt?

  And when you say won't talk to you, like, what does that look like? Like, they're just like, you take a number, you get to the thing, and they're just like, get out of here?

• 7:21Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. I did, I took a number, I waited, it was frustrating, right? I get to the front desk, they ask me, do you have the title? I say, no. They say, well, go, go get the title and, and come back. So I call Carvana, and this was the moment when I realized something was up. So, the people at Carvana were remarkably friendly. That's something that stuck with me. Just, just remarkably friendly and eager to help. Everything's gone really well up to this point. And I'm talking to this nice woman in Arizona where they're based, and I explain the situation. And, she says, "Oh, so they won't give you the certificate? That's odd." And, in the friendliest tone. And as she keeps talking, I realize, wait a minute, I am in the middle of a game of chicken between Carvana and the state of Missouri.

• 8:06PJ Vogt?

  Oh, no.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  This is their whole perspective. It's like, well, that's, that's weird, they should just give you the waiver. And I'm saying, well, maybe they should, from your perspective, but they're not going to. I can't talk them into this. You can't talk them into this. Like, we're talking about a state government here. They're not going to yield.

• 8:21PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, and I will say, like, one of the worst places you can find yourself in American life is between two institutions when you have a problem, each of whom have a representative who's claiming that the other institution would need to solve it. Like, it is the most damned feeling you can have as a citizen.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. And, you know, it's just immediately crazy-making. And, like I said, this woman is friendly and helpful. Otherwise, she's asking if there's anything else she can do. And I'm saying, wait, but we need to resolve this. Like, there has to be a way through here. And I really don't think the way through is bullying the state of Missouri into...

• 8:52PJ Vogt?

  They're a strong state.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Into violating their policy, yeah.

• 8:56PJ Vogt?

  Jed had officially entered a hell loop.

• 9:01PJ Vogt?

  We've all been here. I certainly have. The way a hell loop works, ordinarily in America, customers actually have a decent amount of power. Corporations want to keep us happy. They're afraid of the various tantrums we can threaten them with, to take our business elsewhere, to take our complaints to the internet. But sometimes, your power just goes away. You end up stuck between two institutions, each one assuring you, no, no, no, you're the other one's problem. And you find yourself filled with panic. How many weeks of your life are going to sink into the void? How many numbers will you be asked to take before you get your normal life back? Will you stand in front of a mirror, aging in fast motion, watching liver spots appear on your face

• 9:43PJ Vogt?

  while you mutter the words, yes, I'll hold? Will they glue the phone to your ear in your casket as your adult children lower you into the ground, wishing they'd gotten to know you? That's the fear. To return to Jed, who was standing on the steps of the Missouri courthouse in the first hours of his hell loop, what he knew then is that both parties were standing firm. Carvana insisted Jed needed the registration from Missouri. The woman at the Missouri courthouse insisted Jed needed the title from Carvana. By this point, Jed's temporary tags had expired, so he could not legally drive his white Subaru Outback. He needed to solve this. So he goes back into the courthouse to convince that state employee to give him the one document that he needs.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  I took another number, and I went back to the desk, and I started explaining what was going on. And the woman interrupted me and said, "Carvana, huh?"

• 10:35PJ Vogt?

  Oh.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  And she said, "This happens all the time. We're always having problems with Carvana." She said, "It's a problem on their end, and they need to work it out." Then I went to Google, and I started finding stories just like mine. Found the story of someone else in Missouri the year before, who had waited, I think, a year for his title.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  A silver Subaru Outback with all-wheel drive. Derek Munt Hank thought he'd hit the jackpot.

• 11:02PJ Vogt?

  This local news story from Fox 4 Problem Solvers is from February 2022. It's about a guy who'd bought his Subaru Outback, also from Carvana, also in Missouri, and ended up in his own hell loop.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  He paid in full for this Subaru 11 months ago, but he still doesn't own it because Carvana has never given him the title under Missouri's--

• 11:23PJ Vogt?

  Fox 4 Problem Solvers, they lay it on a little thicker than we do at Search Engine.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  Carvana had the nerve to tell Derek to take the title "application" to the DMV and try to register the car with that instead of the actual title. Well, that didn't work.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  I told the lady I bought a car from Carvana, and she chuckled at me.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  That's because Derek--

• 11:44PJ Vogt?

  You could understand why, for Jed, this might feel uncomfortably like seeing yourself on TV, the hapless customer talking to the nodding reporter. The story goes on to say that Carvana has had problems in multiple states.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  And states are cracking down. North Carolina's Attorney General temporarily suspended Carvana from selling cars in Durham after failing to deliver a title. Carvana is also on probation in Michigan--

• 12:08PJ Vogt?

  That North Carolina suspension had happened in 2021. A year later, regulators in Michigan and Illinois also cracked down on Carvana. To Jed, these stories were more evidence that the problem was being caused by Carvana. And it seemed insane to him that the company wouldn't just hand over the paperwork, his paperwork.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Why wouldn't Carvana give me the title to the car that I owned and had been driving, or that I understood that I owned and had been driving for months? Why don't I have the title to the car that I purchased?

• 12:39Speaker 01

  This is when I like get frustrated and email PJ because I am taking this extremely personally because I am the reason that Jed has sold his house, has bought this car to drive across the country, has like given up everything. And I'm thinking like, can one thing go right here that makes this cross-country move to be with me feel like a good idea?

• 13:00PJ Vogt?

  Oh, I had not understood that at all because it's like, I mean, not in a judgmental way, but I was like, why is Liz getting involved enough that we're talking to Liz? But I totally understand when you explain it like that, which is like, I've seen this dynamic in Friends, actually recently, where it's like someone moves for someone else. And then all of a sudden, it's like anything that goes wrong in the new place, the partner who encouraged the move feels like, I'm sorry, this is happening and also can I fix it?

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I'm not the reason this is happening, but it doesn't happen unless he moves across the country to be with me.

• 13:39PJ Vogt?

  So, search engine had been consulted. And to be clear, Jed and Liz weren't asking me to solve their problem. They're grownups. They were asking me to answer their question. Why? Titles to cars are not valuable on their own. There's no reason to hoard them. Liz had asked in her email, given the bad press, I have to assume Carvana has a compelling business reason for refusing to give those titles up right away. What is it? Which I thought was a really good question. Liz first wrote to us a year ago, November 2023. And after months of digging, learning a lot more about used car dealers, a bit more about pickleball, and talking to Carvana, who you will hear from in the story, I have an answer. Not an answer I would have imagined last fall.

• 14:24PJ Vogt?

  That answer and the story that led us there. After a break.

• 14:57PJ Vogt?

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• 16:06PJ Vogt?

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• 17:19PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show. So I was a newbie when it came to wondering about Carvana, but I knew a reporter who's been wondering about this company for years, long enough that I think it may have frayed the edges of his mind. Okay, I feel like you will be able to answer at least the first question.

• 17:35Speaker 04

  Okay, that's a good start.

• 17:37PJ Vogt?

  Can you introduce yourself?

• 17:38Speaker 04

  Oh crap. I'm Ben Foldy. I am a reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

• 17:48PJ Vogt?

  I've referred to Ben as the youngest curmudgeon I've ever met. I stand by that characterization. He has the world weariness and back complaints of someone beyond his years. He's also a formidable journalist. Right now, he's an investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal's finance section. But back in 2019, he moved to Detroit to cover the auto industry for the journal. First thing he did, bought himself a car. Where did you buy your car?

• 18:15Speaker 04

  On a used car lot, like a real old school used car lot.

• 18:19PJ Vogt?

  Did you get a good deal?

• 18:21Speaker 04

  Uh, I don't know.

• 18:26PJ Vogt?

  Buying a used car from a used car dealer, for most of us, is not a great experience. But one of the big stories Ben would wind up reporting on as an autos reporter was about this daring young company that was trying to change all that. What is the origin story of Carvana?

• 18:42Speaker 04

  Ooh, how much time do you have?

• 18:44PJ Vogt?

  A decent amount of time.

• 18:45Speaker 04

  Okay, so Carvana was started by a guy named Ernest Garcia III.

• 18:49PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 18:50Speaker 04

  He's a youngish guy for a CEO. He's very energetic.

• 18:54PJ Vogt?

  How young are we talking?

• 18:55Speaker 04

  In his early 40s at this point.

• 18:57PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  He's also a ranked pickleball player, so you can watch him play pickleball on YouTube if you want.

• 19:02PJ Vogt?

  I don't, but that's fascinating.

• 19:04Speaker 04

  I've done it.

• 19:05PJ Vogt?

  And he's good?

• 19:06Speaker 04

  I mean, I don't know how to judge a pickleball player.

• 19:09Speaker 05

  Ernie, you're also the CEO of Carvana, who's our title sponsor for this event. Thanks a lot for doing that for pickleball. Why get into pickleball now?

• 19:16Speaker 06

  Well, I personally absolutely love the sport. It's kind of what I do for fun these days. It calms me. Obviously, we have no real...

• 19:22PJ Vogt?

  Ernie Garcia, here being interviewed courtside. He's a handsome CEO with wavy black hair. I guess this reveals some prejudice I didn't know I had, but he looks a lot more athletic than I pictured a pickleball player being.

• 19:34Speaker 06

  This tournament this year versus last year is a completely different thing. So we're really excited about where it's going.

• 19:38PJ Vogt?

  Anyway, that's Ernest Garcia III. But Carvana's story actually begins one Garcia generation earlier.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  Ernest Garcia III has a father, Ernest Garcia II.

• 19:49PJ Vogt?

  I would assume.

• 19:50Speaker 04

  Ernest Garcia II had, still has, the largest of what's called a buy here, pay here dealer in America.

• 19:58PJ Vogt?

  Buy here, pay... So he's selling to people whose credit might not be great.

• 20:02Speaker 04

  By and large.

• 20:02PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 20:03Speaker 04

  That's the business model.

• 20:05PJ Vogt?

  That company, owned by the father, is called Drivetime, an enormous used car retailer with locations in 30 states. The father had made a fortune selling used cars the old-school way. The son will try to make his fortune in a new world, the shiny, gleaming world of internet startups.

• 20:24Speaker 04

  So the younger Ernie, the son, he goes to Stanford, as one does, makes friends with Stanford people and comes out. And he first goes to work briefly in Greenwich, Connecticut, as an investment banker for a banker that had a pretty close relationship with Ernie II. And then he joins Drivetime and he starts working his way up. But Ernie III, the son, also has this kind of Stanford startup, you know, bug, right?

• 20:55PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 04

  Like, he wants to go his own way. The family business is not a particularly sexy business, right?

• 20:59PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  Like, used car sales to subprime borrowers is like, it's a fine way to make a living, but it's not like Silicon Valley startup. You're not going on the podcasts to talk about that, usually.

• 21:14PJ Vogt?

  So in 2012, after some years spent working for his dad at Drivetime, Ernie Garcia III would co-found Carvana. And it would end up being a business that would get attention, both from entrepreneur podcast hosts, but also the business world at large.

• 21:28Speaker 06

  We're incredibly delighted to have you, Ernie. You guys are about to hear one of the most...

• 21:33PJ Vogt?

  Incredible software stories in the country right now. And it just so happens. This clip is from 2017, an interview on billionaires.com. Ernie III here clad in a royal purple zip fleece, loafers, no socks. The interviewer asked Ernie to tell his founder's story. And Ernie begins by talking about the problem he was trying to fix. Buying a used car in America has not changed for over a century. And it's not an experience that anyone seems to enjoy. Plus, he points out, it's a very inefficient market, sliced up among so many different car dealers.

• 22:05Speaker 06

  There are 60,000 dealers in the US. I mean, 60,000 dealers, that's a tremendous number. You know, the largest one has a 1.6% market share. So competition is really fragmented. And it was just like, what do you want? You know, it's like, you've got to.

• 22:19Speaker 04

  The question that Carvana was trying to answer is that used cars are an incredibly fragmented market.

• 22:24PJ Vogt?

  Meaning that there's like all sorts of used car dealerships. There's not like one.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's like a guy in Queens with like 40 cars in a parking lot and a little booth.

• 22:33PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 22:33Speaker 04

  And that's a used car dealer.

• 22:35PJ Vogt?

  Right. And what the internet has done to almost not every industry, but many industries to be like, oh, there's tons of bookstores. No, there's one bookstore. It's called Amazon. It's like everything.

• 22:45Speaker 04

  Scale effects, right?

• 22:46Speaker 06

  Good way to say it. I think it was just, it felt so obvious. So I mean, if you, not to bore people with numbers, but automotive retail is a trillion dollar industry, which to put that in context, you know, like the whole economy is 15 trillion. The retail economy is 5 trillion. So for every dollar of physical things that are bought and sold in the US, 20 cents of that dollar is car. So the market is massive. I think.

• 23:06PJ Vogt?

  That massive market, Ernie was saying, Carvana might capture it. And he believes that if the company succeeded, one day, the idea of buying a used car from a used car lot, it might just be another story you bored your grandkids with.

• 23:19Speaker 04

  The vision for Carvana in the beginning was, they said this a lot in the early days, the Amazon of cars. Why not consolidate and make a giant profit generating behemoth à la Amazon?

• 23:33Speaker 06

  So it just felt like, like you're never going to get another shot like this. You gotta go.

• 23:38Speaker 04

  But there's an issue with the Amazon of used cars.

• 23:41PJ Vogt?

  Which is what?

• 23:42Speaker 04

  If you think about it.

• 23:43PJ Vogt?

  Well.

• 23:45PJ Vogt?

  I'm gonna get it wrong. Okay, one thing, books are easier to ship than cars.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  Books in everything are easier to ship than cars. Like, and not only that, but if you buy, you know, Chinese-made fly swatter from company A versus Chinese-made fly swatter from company B, like, these are interchangeable products.

• 24:04PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 24:05Speaker 04

  Used cars, by definition, are individual little snowflakes.

• 24:09PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  Right? Like, no two cars have been driven the same.

• 24:12PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 24:12Speaker 04

  Not only do you have these kind of little snowflakes, but they're snowflakes that weigh a ton or two tons, right? And, and then you have to drive them around the country.

• 24:23PJ Vogt?

  Right. They're not widgets. They're like the opposite of widgets.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  I mean, let's snowball how often we see an Amazon delivery car or truck on our block, right?

• 24:31PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 04

  We see that seven or eight times a day. You know, how many orders are piled onto that, like, dolly that they're wheeling around? You can't do that with a car.

• 24:41PJ Vogt?

  So Carvana is trying to do something very difficult. Something difficult enough that Amazon hasn't been able to pull it off. But Carvana starts building an entire supply chain. A website where customers can buy and sell cars, but also physical spaces to inspect cars and get them ready for sale. A transportation arm to deliver cars to people's homes across America. Carvana builds the chain, but when they're done, they realize that what is missing is the customers. Carvana needed a way to get attention.

• 25:10Speaker 06

  We were not a hot Silicon Valley, you know, company with, with venture capital investors that had a lot of attention from the media.

• 25:19PJ Vogt?

  Here's Ernie Garcia III on the Cars and Culture Podcast.

• 25:22Speaker 06

  We could not get anyone to cover us to save our lives. We were trying so hard to get any coverage because, you know, for a startup, you know, media coverage is, is one of the only ways to get your word out.

• 25:32PJ Vogt?

  In 2015, Carvana hit on a way to finally get the word out. They seized on a diabolical marketing gimmick.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  The used car business is going high-tech with Carvana, the world's first fully automated coin. Operated car vending machine launched today right here in Nashville.

• 25:49PJ Vogt?

  These structures that Carvana would call car vending machines really meant this. The company would have some physical locations and those locations would be 75 foot high class structures modeled to look a bit like the vending machines kids buy little toys from.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  It's the first complete online auto retailer in the world that allows you to pick up your car

• 26:15Speaker 03

  from an auto vending machine.

• 26:17Speaker 06

  The whole thing's automated.

• 26:18PJ Vogt?

  If you bought a car from Carvana, you could get it delivered to your house the boring way, or you could come get it from one of these snazzy new machines.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  You come here to the Carvana Welcome Center where you're given a coin. You put the coin in this machine and that starts the vending process. And get this, you even get to keep the coin.

• 26:41PJ Vogt?

  It was completely silly. It had very little to do with Carvana's core business or even what was novel about the company, but it was a hit. And Carvana opened vending machines all across the country. The vending machines, when I mention Carvana to people, are still the thing that seems to have stuck in everyone's heads. But the thing that got Wall Street to pay attention to Carvana was actually something beyond the company's control, the pandemic.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  So the pandemic was like amazing for Carvana at first, right? Because people weren't going out shopping. The last thing you want to do is like, I was at a car dealership on March 11th or something like 2020, just kind of being like, what are we going to do? Like watching, watching a car dealership kind of reckon with the coming sales apocalypse.

• 27:33PJ Vogt?

  Were people terrified?

• 27:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, the salespeople were scared because they work on commission.

• 27:38PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  And so if nobody's coming, like people weren't sure if car dealers were essential businesses.

• 27:43PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 27:44Speaker 04

  Nobody's going to like put you in the box to talk about your financing.

• 27:47PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 27:47Speaker 04

  Like that's the last thing anybody wants.

• 27:49PJ Vogt?

  Or do a test drive with a stranger.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:51PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  And so there's that. New car assembly stopped for a while, which drove up used car prices like crazy.

• 27:59PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 28:00Speaker 04

  It was kind of a perfect tailwind for Carvana. They were growing. They expanded super, super rapidly to like, keep up with their growth trajectory.

• 28:09PJ Vogt?

  In 2021, Carvana sold over 425,000 cars. The stock price more than quadrupled. And Ernie III was all over TV, celebrating his company's extremely good quarter. On CNBC, host Andrew Ross Sorkin asks, essentially, won't the Carvana stock price eventually have to settle down a little bit? It can't just go to the moon.

• 28:31Speaker 07

  I think the bigger question for the market and trying to understand where we are in our economy and what's going on in terms of supply with cars, new cars, used cars, is whether this is going to sustain itself.

• 28:44PJ Vogt?

  Ernie, like any good CEO, instead just answers the question he wished he'd been asked.

• 28:49Speaker 06

  If you don't mind, I want to take a moment to take a victory lap and say it's our first positive quarter and to thank all the people at Carvana that have worked so hard over the last eight years to make that possible. You know, eight years ago, we launched, we sold a couple hundred cars. And this quarter, we sold over 100,000 cars. And this year, we'll sell 1,000 times many cars we sold that first year. And to do that, have our first profitable quarter, is something that we're really, really proud of. And so, thank you to everyone out there on the Carvana team for a job.

• 29:15PJ Vogt?

  Ernie's face on CNBC, next to a big, green hockey stick of his company's stock value, it's hard not to think, this is probably something he visualized in the eight hard years of trying to build this company, when nobody paid attention, when he had to go on local TV news in a giant vending machine to try to get Wall Street to take him seriously. He's finally in the place where he must have wanted to be. And he's about to get knocked out of it. Because the same pandemic that shut down the brick and mortar competition, that made a lot of people desperate to find a car, that pandemic was also shutting down a kind of in-person office that Ernie's company actually depended on.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  One of the things that happens is also DMVs shut down, and DMVs slow down. And so, all of the normal kind of title processing and all the paperwork side gets really screwed up.

• 30:07PJ Vogt?

  Oh, so at the same moment, they're having a ton of customers come in the door. At many state levels, the-

• 30:15Speaker 04

  The actual processing of the paperwork gets all messy.

• 30:20PJ Vogt?

  Interesting. That would not have occurred to me.

• 30:25PJ Vogt?

  Turns out, the hard thing about being Amazon but for cars isn't just that cars are heavy to ship, or that used cars are unique and unwidget-y, it's that buying a car is one of the more paperwork-intensive purchases in life. To be an Amazon means to take care of pesky logistics invisibly. But with all these state DMVs under stress, those pesky details became quite visible. Without a DMV, you can't transfer a title, which normally means you can't sell a car. But Carvana kept selling cars. And the first place Ben saw them get in trouble for this was in Raleigh. This is August 2021.

• 31:03Speaker 04

  The first thing that put them on my radar is they had a dealership get suspended in North Carolina.

• 31:07PJ Vogt?

  A Carvana dealership?

• 31:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:09PJ Vogt?

  And what did the state say? Why were they doing it? Because of?

• 31:11Speaker 04

  It was because of paperwork issues.

• 31:13Speaker 07

  You've likely seen the big vending machine of cars from the Beltline in Raleigh. The machine is now out of order after the state accused them of improperly filing car titles, inspections, and temporary tags.

• 31:23PJ Vogt?

  Do you remember how our listener Jed would years later hear a news story that referenced Carvana's license being suspended in North Carolina? This is that story.

• 31:32Speaker 07

  The DMV claims Carvana violated licensing laws, failing to deliver titles to the DMV, selling cars without a state inspection, and issuing an out-of-state temporary tag on a vehicle sold to someone in North Carolina.

• 31:46PJ Vogt?

  And why don't the states, at the risk of asking a very obvious question, why are the states bothered by having people drive around with either temporary tags or out-of-state temporary tags?

• 31:55Speaker 04

  Well, part of it is that licenses are revenue for that state, right? So if you're the North Carolina DOT and Carvana is dealing with Georgia to get you to be able to drive, you're not getting the revenue that you should be getting.

• 32:10PJ Vogt?

  Interesting.

• 32:11Speaker 04

  So that's part of it.

• 32:12PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 32:12Speaker 04

  Other car dealers who are doing all that paperwork and have to do things the way that things have always been done are grumbling. Car dealers are also a pretty powerful lobby in every state, so...

• 32:24PJ Vogt?

  I didn't know that.

• 32:25Speaker 04

  And they're no friends of Carvana.

• 32:28PJ Vogt?

  Some version of this situation in North Carolina was happening in lots of states. Carvana getting in trouble with local officials, in some instances, facing class action lawsuits. 2021 to 2022 was a dark time for the company. Most crucially, Wall Street saw Carvana making what it believed was a bad acquisition, taking on a lot of debt. And Carvana's stock price plummeted from a high of $370 to 3.5 bucks per share, a 99% drop in value.

• 33:01Speaker 07

  Good afternoon, and welcome to the Carvana Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2022 Earnings Conference Call.

• 33:08PJ Vogt?

  In an earnings call in 2023, Ernie had to stand in front of everybody and defend his leadership. Ernie?

• 33:16Speaker 06

  Thanks, Meg, and thanks, everyone, for joining the call. 10 years ago, in January 2013, we launched Carvana in Atlanta, Georgia. We were a passionate group of people who believed we could build something new in the world that we would be proud of.

• 33:28PJ Vogt?

  Ernie's voice sounds tight here, almost like an adult in detention. Unlike his previous victory tour, he does not sound like a man having fun. Who would be?

• 33:36Speaker 06

  2022 had a lot of hard days, but we're a scrappy group, and hard days aren't always the worst thing in the world for scrappy people. Scrappy people find a way, and we're finding a way.

• 33:48PJ Vogt?

  By the time this earnings call happened in 2023, Carvana was saying publicly that it had worked out the kinks in its system. The DMVs the company relied on had long since reopened, the paperwork backlogs had been worked through. The source of Carvana's headaches, in theory, should have been resolved.

• 34:07PJ Vogt?

  That summer, a man named Jed, a man with excellent taste in podcasts, would be moving from Ohio to Missouri to be with his partner Liz. And in a bind, he'd buy a car from Carvana. He'd buy a car, but for months, he would not have the title to that car, and he wouldn't understand why. Why didn't Carvana just take the title from wherever they were keeping it and send it to him? Only Carvana knew the answer to that question. After a short break, Carvana.

• 34:58PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value in fixed income is not easy. Bond markets are massive, murky, and let's be real, lots of firms throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day. But not Vanguard. Vanguard bonds are institutional quality, meaning top-grade products built as a true commitment to your clients. Their impressive lineup features over 80 bond funds actively driven by a global team of 200 sector specialists, analysts, and traders. While other firms push star portfolio managers, Vanguard relies on collective brain power, so every client benefits from shared expertise. Instead of chasing high-stakes gambles that lead to volatile rides, Vanguard delivers steady, reliable, and consistent performance designed for the long haul.

• 35:43PJ Vogt?

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• 36:01PJ Vogt?

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• 36:44PJ Vogt?

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• 37:06PJ Vogt?

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• 37:51PJ Vogt?

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• 38:19PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 38:21PJ Vogt?

  I've spent a lot of time in Jed's paper trail, frankly, more than I wanted to, as somebody who tries to avoid almost all bureaucratic entanglement in my own life, at any cost. Meaning, I don't want to speak to the manager, I don't want to chase down the refund, if you bring me the wrong food, I will just eat it. It was strange for the Search Engine team to dive so deeply into someone else's hell loop. But we did. We got Jed's permission to go through his correspondence with Carvana, we talked to Carvana, we emailed with the Missouri DMV, well, the Missouri Department of Revenue, which oversees the DMV, a fact I never wanted to know. But I now understand what happened. I know who messed up, I know why Jed's title was so hard to get into his hands.

• 39:05PJ Vogt?

  And now that I do know it, I also know a little bit more about how the world works, and how it sometimes doesn't. So let me take you along. To understand this whole problem, like, what was happening behind the scenes of the process driving Jed nuts, I want to start by playing you this conversation I had with a man named Tony Hall, who works at Carvana in a very important role.

• 39:29PJ Vogt?

  Can you say your name, introduce yourself and what you do?

• 39:31Speaker 07

  Yes, my name is Tony Hall. I'm the head of policy for title and registration modernization. I'm part of Carvana's government affairs team.

• 39:38PJ Vogt?

  Tony works at Carvana now, but part of why I wanted to talk to him is because of where he used to work. At an institution Americans have hated, maybe since its invention, the DMV. Because the answer to our question really starts with the DMV. And before he worked at Carvana, Tony Hall spent a decade at the Texas DMV. Actually, a little more than a decade.

• 40:00Speaker 07

  I spent 10 and a half years working for the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles. Seven and a half of those were actually on the title, policy, and procedure side of the house.

• 40:11PJ Vogt?

  So you lived for like a decade just in paperwork?

• 40:15Speaker 07

  I spent a decade living in paperwork and trying to move to digital processes, yes.

• 40:21PJ Vogt?

  Tony was able to give me a picture, not just of how inefficient a DMV actually is, which way more than I had imagined, but he was actually able to offer an explanation for why it might be that way. It's something he first began to understand in September 2011, when he was just a young DMV employee. I don't know very much about the Texas DMV. How paper was it when you started and how digital was it when you ended?

• 40:43Speaker 07

  When I started, essentially, everything was relatively paper-based. There were some very old-school methods that dealers had where they could enter data into a laptop, put the data on a thumb drive. They would take the thumb drive with the physical paperwork and walk it into the county tax office. The county tax office would plug the thumb drive into the state computer terminal. And then, no joke, they would sometimes literally put a stapler on the enter button and have it run through all the screens on the transactions. And I think the thumb drive could hold 25 transactions. And then they would kind of post-audit the paperwork to make sure, do we have all the documents? Are things signed where they need to? Obviously, if there were paperwork issues, they were sending those back to the DMV.

• 41:28PJ Vogt?

  Tony said back then, there was an entire job for someone called a title runner. Like, a car dealer would pay a title runner to pick up the title from the dealership and run it over to the county tax office. I'm an impatient person, so the fact of all this just makes my jaw drop a little bit. There are government offices that aren't famous for functioning well, but DMV offices are famous for not functioning at all. What is it about motor vehicle paperwork that stymies local government?

• 41:58Speaker 07

  You've got to keep in perspective that a motor vehicle, for many people, is the most valuable asset that they ever own. If you own a home, it's your second most valuable asset, generally speaking, right? So I feel like there's a lot of sense of, we've got to make sure, as a government agency, we are doing this right and we are protecting all the parties that are involved with it. People rely on a motor vehicle to get to and from work, take care of their kids, take care of family members, whatever the case may be. So what may seem like an innocuous error could be life-changing, and I think that innately drives this sense of, anytime you're doing something new and innovative, even when there's a demand for it, inevitably, you're going to be introducing new risk.

• 42:46PJ Vogt?

  So, look, obviously, or at least in my opinion, obviously, DMVs are inefficient for many reasons, but according to Tony, there's at least one good one, that in some way, their slowness may have a logic. They'd rather be inefficient than make a mistake, because, for many people, their car is their most valuable possession. Car dealers, when they sell you a car, they handle the title and registration for you, and they get used to the quirks of the rules of their particular state DMV. Carvana, as a national company, has had to learn the rules and regulations of 50 DMVs and stay on the right side of all of them. Tony said that gets complicated.

• 43:28Speaker 07

  Every state does things different.

• 43:31Speaker 07

  In some states, you have safety inspections. In some states, you have VIN inspections. In some states, you have emissions inspections. Some states, you have multiple combinations of those. Who can do those sorts of inspections varies. In some states, dealers can do those themselves. In some states, you have to take those vehicles and have somebody else perform those inspections.

• 43:52PJ Vogt?

  This is a podcast. We're not going to tell you about every one of these rules or every one of these rules' exceptions, but things get gnarly.

• 43:59Speaker 07

  And you also have state and federal regulations that govern the transfer of ownership of a vehicle. And you're trying to layer all these things specific to a particular person's circumstances.

• 44:12PJ Vogt?

  So every car is a snowflake. Every DMV is a snowflake. Every car owner is a snowflake, each more beautiful than the last. Jed is our snowflake, a nice man who was in a hurry to move across the country to be with his sweetheart, who just happened to get caught between two complicated and interlocking systems, the Missouri Department of Motor Vehicles and Carvana. So I want to retell you Jed's story. I'm even going to replay some of his quotes. But I want you to hear the story from the behind-the-scenes perspective that Carvana had. Carvana owned a white Subaru Outback. The company wanted to sell it. The title to that car belonged to Carvana. Again, the title, literally a piece of paper, like a physical piece of paper, that says Carvana owns the car.

• 44:56PJ Vogt?

  That title sat in the headquarters of Carvana was literally in a filing cabinet, among many filing cabinets in a building in Arizona. That title was in the filing cabinet when Jed pressed the button to buy the car.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  I chose the car that night and financed it and was ready to go.

• 45:13Speaker 05

  We delivered the car to the customer in Ohio on June 2, 2023.

• 45:20PJ Vogt?

  That's Haley Pollock, a senior manager of communications at Carvana. She used to work in customer service.

• 45:25Speaker 05

  The customer provided us a Missouri address that was his home address and then indicated that Missouri was where he wanted to register the vehicle.

• 45:36PJ Vogt?

  So the car has been delivered. The title stayed in the filing cabinet at Carvana. In order to transfer that title to Jed, here's what was supposed to happen, according to the rules of the Missouri DMV. The Subaru needed to be registered. To register it, the state needed proof of several facts. That this Subaru had passed inspection in Missouri, that Jed, its driver, had insurance, and that Jed had paid taxes on the car. Because in Missouri, everyone in the state pays an annual tax on their cars. I'd never heard of that. If Jed could prove those facts to the state, his car would be registered, meaning it could be driven. And if it's registered then, and only then, would the state of Missouri print up a new title and give it to Jed.

• 46:21PJ Vogt?

  All of this, a long way of saying that Jed needed three pieces of paper.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  I'm not that worried about it. Like, OK, we're missing a few documents, but how hard could this be? When I have a free afternoon, I'll go down to the DMV and I'll take care of it.

• 46:32PJ Vogt?

  Oh Jed, he had no idea.

• 46:35Speaker 05

  The customer called us. He was actually sitting outside the Jackson County assessor's office because that's when he received information that he needed, the title in his name, which starts a bit of a cycle.

• 46:51PJ Vogt?

  This bit of a cycle? This was the hell loop. This was where Jed got stuck.

• 46:57Speaker 05

  Our advocate is explaining that we can't provide a title in his name. She explains that we do have a title. It's titled in Carvana's name, but we can't provide it to him until the registration is complete. And so he actually walks inside the courthouse on his phone with the advocate.

• 47:16PJ Vogt?

  Wait, I'm sorry, can I ask you a question? Is this like, you're describing this in like a very high amount of detail. Is this because like, when it says like, "Your call may be recorded for quality assurance," was this call recorded for quality assurance?

• 47:29Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  I remember vividly standing in that courthouse just thinking, "I don't know where to go from here." I took another number and I went back to the desk and I started explaining what was going on. And the woman interrupted me and said, "Carvana, huh?"

• 47:44PJ Vogt?

  Oh.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  And she said, "This happens all the time. We're always having problems with Carvana." She said, "It's a problem on their end and they need to work it out."

• 47:54PJ Vogt?

  I can now, after months of reporting by search engine, although we were working on other stuff at the same time, confidently report this was actually a problem on the state's end. They needed to work it out. This one state employee, she made a human mistake. She misspoke. It happens. Carvana's customer advocate would wind up calling the state directly, figuring out that Jed did not, in fact, need a physical title with his name on it, that he just needed a photocopy of the title with Carvana's name on it. And Jed would end up showing that emailed photocopy to a state employee, who finally gave him what he needed. It makes me understand that a large part of Carvana's job is just to intricately understand bureaucratic logic.

• 48:37PJ Vogt?

  Bureaucratic logic is different from human logic. It doesn't pretend to be internally consistent. So, understanding why one rule exists won't necessarily help you predict another. But bureaucratic logic has to be followed by human beings, who make human errors. The answer to Jed's question, why didn't Carvana just hand over the title to him? Carvana is a car dealer. States expect car dealers to handle title and registration paperwork for the cars they sell. And dealers can't just improvise on the fly. Their state licenses are at stake here. Dealers have to give their paperwork to the state. And the state then issues the new title to the new owner. I did run this bit by the Missouri Department of Revenue, who runs the Missouri DMV.

• 49:22PJ Vogt?

  They confirmed it. Of course, the promise of buying a car on your phone is that, in theory, you're not supposed to have to know about any of this. Carvana is trying to offer a seamless experience. So, how often do they actually deliver that? What seems clear to me now is that the cases where Carvana customers do not get title and registration in a timely manner, Those were happening much more frequently from mid 2020 through 2021. The company acknowledges this. They shared internal data showing frequency of registration delays. You see some before the pandemic, more during it. But then, after the pandemic, after the company takes a big public hit for this,

• 50:06PJ Vogt?

  you see things get smoothed out. The tricky cases become increasingly rare. Tony from Carvana said that if you believe the customer experience is really getting better, it might not just be Carvana doing a better job. It might also be the DMVs. He says that the pandemic, which shut so many DMVs down, was also finally the push they needed to plug their systems into the internet.

• 50:31Speaker 07

  COVID certainly changed the narrative around the, how antiquated the title and registration processes, to the extent that DMVs themselves are having the most substantive conversations about this issue. And I would say they've had more conversations about this title and registration modernization just broadly in the last two, two and a half years than they probably have ever had before.

• 50:56PJ Vogt?

  It's funny to think like of all the unintended consequences of a global pandemic, one of them would be more pressure on DMVs to have electronic record systems that work. I would not have guessed that in the beginning. It's funny, you know, like early in our story, one of the things we talk about is that like the big idea that Carvana's CEO had in the beginning is just like to create essentially like Amazon, but of used cars. Listening to you talk, I'm like, oh, someone who would have been imagining that dream in like 2015, I think they, it would have been perhaps impossible to like totally understand the amount of tangle that they would ultimately have to untangle. It sounds like you guys are still untangling it.

• 51:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, it is a daily evolving process for us.

• 51:46PJ Vogt?

  So that's Carvana's story. The company seems to be in pretty good shape these days. Most news stories you see are about their comeback, not their problems. And the stock price has mostly recovered.

• 51:57PJ Vogt?

  We relayed all this to our listeners, Jed and Liz, who were at first, I think, a little confused. I think it's possible all of us here were maybe judging Carvana by a reputation it may have outgrown. It's a little tough to let go of. Who doesn't love the story of a glitzy startup founded by a pickleball-playing CEO that grew too quick and stumbled? We know that story. It's easier to tell. And you spend much less time having to learn about the intricacies of how paperwork functions at the Missouri Department of Revenue. Anyway, Jed and Liz, to their horror, now understand all of these intricacies. They will return again to the Missouri courthouse this month, but for much happier reasons. This time, they're picking up a marriage license.

• 53:21PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trudy Pennamineni, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact checking by Holly Patton. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support by Sean Merchant. If you'd like to support the show, get ad-free episodes and access to our upcoming board meeting in December, please consider signing up for incognito mode. You can learn more at searchengine.show. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perrello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor,

• 54:05PJ Vogt?

  Matt Casey, Laura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Shaw. Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vote now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

• 54:47PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by VistaPrint. As a small business owner running a podcast, I'm always looking for authentic ways to connect with listeners, which makes VistaPrint such a valued expert partner for us. I was on their site the other day brainstorming new things we could make for our show, and the creative momentum took over. I ended up designing Search Engine stickers and I tried to make a sign for our office. When your physical branding looks this sharp and professional, it immediately communicates credibility and shows your audience that you mean business. VistaPrint truly helps every dollar go further, delivering premium quality and design support that make your company look established without breaking the bank. Whether you need your design tweaked or a total rebrand, VistaPrint has you covered with the expert service small businesses deserve.

• 55:32PJ Vogt?

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