Vroom

» see vroom.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

You picked a used car off a website, paid a fixed price with nobody to haggle with, and a truck brought it to your address with a week to send it back. No lot, no finance office, no Saturday afternoon. Vroom was one of three American companies that spent the 2010s trying to make that the ordinary way to buy a car, and for about eighteen months the stock market believed it had worked.

The company started in August 2013 as AutoAmerica, founded by Kevin Westfall and Marshall Chesrown, who had both come out of the dealership side of the business. The name changed to Vroom in November 2014, when Elie Wurtman and Allon Bloch joined as co-founders. In December 2015 it bought Texas Direct Auto, a Stafford, Texas dealer founded in 2002, and that purchase is what put real inventory and a reconditioning center behind the website. Revenue reached $900 million the same year, and AutoNation led a $146 million round in December 2018.

The IPO was on 9 June 2020 at $22 a share, raising $468 million. The stock closed its first day up 117 percent and ran to $73.87 by 1 September. In 2021 the site sold 74,698 cars, up 117 percent on the year before, which is the high-water mark for the whole category.

Underneath those numbers, each of those cars had to be bought at auction, inspected, repaired, photographed, stored, trucked several hundred miles and then titled in whichever state it landed in. Carvana built its own machinery for that work and still bled. Vroom never got the cost per car below the price it could charge, and the gap was covered by investors and by a floor-plan credit line, which is a lender paying for the inventory until somebody buys it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pitch ~

What all three of these companies were really selling was the absence of the dealership. The complaint the industry had been hearing for fifty years was about the showroom and not about the car, so the reasoning went that deleting the showroom would win on preference alone. The economics of actually moving the cars were a separate question, and nobody in the category solved them.

The Turkish version of this market never looked like Vroom and could not have. Used cars here move through sahibinden.com listings and through galerici lots, where the ad is an introduction and everything after it happens in person, with a mechanic you trust and then a notary. A transfer of title needs both parties standing in front of that notary, so the central premise of a mail-order car, that the paperwork can travel without the people, does not survive the border. Reading the American version from here, the part I kept catching on was the shipping bill rather than the trust question.

~ the day the credit line stopped ~

In January 2024 Ally Financial suspended the line Vroom used to buy inventory. A dealer that cannot buy cars has nothing to sell, and the company said plainly that it had been unable to raise the capital needed to keep an automotive retail operation running. On 22 January it announced that it was discontinuing ecommerce operations and winding down the used vehicle dealership. The remaining cars would go out through wholesale channels, and about 800 jobs went, ninety percent of the workforce.

The share price was 53 cents the day before the announcement and 25 cents after it. In November 2024 the company filed a prepackaged Chapter 11 and came out of it on 15 January 2025. The customers it had already failed were dealt with separately and later: in July 2024 the Federal Trade Commission announced a $1 million settlement over cars Vroom had advertised for delivery in fourteen days and in many cases delivered after sixty or ninety, and in 2025 the commission mailed more than $934,000 in refunds to 20,361 people.

~ what is left ~

United Auto Credit, a subprime auto lender, and CarStory, an analytics business, are the two pieces that survived the wind-down, and the listed company now exists to hold them. Both of them sell to dealers and lenders instead of to drivers.

vroom.com still answers. The page it serves is static: the lowercase wordmark at the top, an ABOUT link pointing at the investor relations site, a body that reads 404 Page not found, and a footer reading ©2024 Vroom. The FAQ link goes to carstory.ai. A company whose entire proposition was that the website could replace the dealership now runs a website that is a dead end and a copyright year.

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