The Straight Shift with The Car Chick

Can You Really Buy a Car on Amazon?

• LeeAnn Shattuck, The Car Chick: Your Car Buying and Repair Expert • Season 2 • Episode 124

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Summary

Amazon Autos promises to make buying a car as easy as clicking “Buy Now.” But is it actually easier — and more importantly, is it better for car buyers?

In this episode, The Car Chick® breaks down how Amazon Autos really works, why Hyundai was the first automaker to partner with Amazon, how the platform has evolved into used and certified pre-owned vehicles, and where dealership bullshittery can still sneak in. We compare Amazon Autos to TrueCar, Autotrader, and Cars.com, explain who this model works for, and why convenience often comes at the cost of leverage.

Takeaways

  • Amazon is testing a new car buying model.
  • Hyundai's flexibility makes it a suitable partner for Amazon.
  • The buying process is still dealer-centric despite the online platform.
  • Fixed pricing reduces negotiation but may not guarantee the best deal.
  • Convenience often comes at a cost in the car buying process.

Resources:  

https://www.thecarchick.com/perfect-car-package


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Copyright ©2024 Women’s Automotive Solutions Inc., dba The Car Chick. All rights reserved.

The Car Chick (00:00)
Hey everyone and welcome back to The Straight Shift. I want to start this episode with a bit of a confession. I am an Amazon junkie. Seriously, the Amazon Fairy comes to my house pretty much every day. Sometimes more than once a day. I know my regular driver by name. His name is Jeff. But I call him Mr. Amazing. He actually gave himself that name, but he earned it when he helped me unload a whole bunch of flat pack IKEA furniture

from the trunk of my car, threw it over his shoulder like a superhero and carried it into my house. I kid you not. That is the relationship that we have. So when Amazon announced that they were launching Amazon Auto, I laughed and said, of course they are, because if anyone could pull this off, it's Amazon. They built an entire empire around one thing, convenience.

I wanted to find out more about this, so I did what any responsible car nerd would do. I set up a totally bogus personal Amazon account just so I could poke around in there and see how this thing actually works. In addition to researching it from within inside the industry and getting a few sneaky sources to leak me some information. And that led me to one very important question.

Can you really buy a car on Amazon? And more importantly, should you? Is it a good deal? So that is the question that we are going to be answering today on The Straight Shift.

Amazon Auto was announced in late 2023 as a strategic partnership between Amazon and Hyundai. Why Hyundai? Why not GM or Toyota? They're both a lot bigger. Well, Amazon didn't need the biggest automaker and they certainly didn't need the most conservative one. They needed one that was willing to move, to experiment and honestly to tolerate a little bit of discomfort and a learning curve. They wanted someone who was willing to help them figure it out as they went along.

And that's what Hyundai does. They've spent the last decade or so being very aggressive about their growth, increasing their market share, trying new retail ideas. While Toyota is very famously conservative and methodical. They rush into nothing. That's why it took them 14 years to finally redesign the Sequoia. They don't like beta programs. They don't like to upset the status quo. That's part of the Japanese tradition. And it's what helps keep Toyotas really reliable.

But it doesn't make them a good partner to try something new. GM has the scale, but they also have layers and layers of bureaucracy and multiple brands, and not to mention all the politics. So, Hyundai kind of sits in that sweet spot. They're big enough to matter, but they're still flexible enough to be able to move, and they're definitely hungry enough to try something new.

But they also have another important piece. They have the financing arm. This is what a lot of consumers don't know a lot about. Hyundai has its own captive finance company. And I talk about captive finance companies a lot. Toyota Financial, Hyundai Financial, BMW Financial. Not all those companies are actual individual banks. A lot of them have that as the doing business as name, but really behind them is Bank of America or

JPMorgan Chase, one of those big ones. Hyundai is backed by a company called Hyundai Capital. They are their own bank. And that makes it a lot easier to control the approvals and deal with paperwork and doing a backend integration in a project like this.

Then there's a legal piece that really matters. Hyundai was willing to work with both Amazon and the National Auto Dealers Association, as well as a slew of franchise law attorneys to figure out a framework that would actually work in all 50 states without blowing up all the franchise laws and the existing franchise agreements that the dealers have with the auto manufacturer, which can be rather fraught. So this isn't something that just any automaker would be willing to take on as a grand experiment.

But Hyundai thankfully was. So here's how this evolved. The first phase started in early 2024 with a true pilot. Amazon employees themselves were acting as customers and they were working with a very small group of select Hyundai dealers in just a handful of major metro areas. Seattle, because that's Amazon's backyard, Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York City, and Denver. They wanted to get

different state laws and different titling systems involved, because California is a pain in the butt, New York has its quirks. So they wanted to be able to test a lot of different variables in state laws and back-end processes that are dictated by those laws. So Hyundai has strong penetration in each of those markets, so they could do that. And they also wanted to include both urban and suburban consumer buying behaviors, because remember, this is really just one big marketing experiment.

This would help them to uncover a lot of those problems more quickly and see how viable this truly was in different markets. So by the middle of 2024, they expanded that pilot to the family and friends of Amazon employees. And then by the end of 2024, they opened up the beta to the public and expanded to 48 cities, still limited to just new Hyundai cars, but they were VIN specific listings. So this was

actual inventory, not hypothetical build your car or this type of Hyundai, this make, this model, this trim level. No, it was tied to actual inventory that was available. The search radius was capped at a maximum of 75 miles from the user's main address. And I'll talk about why that is a little bit later.

And it also features fixed non-negotiable vehicle pricing that is displayed upfront, kind of like CarMax does in the used car world. And you could either select to pay cash or finance online, but only through Hyundai's Capital Finance Company. They allowed you to upload documents to their server and get all the digital paperwork done ahead of time, but the deal still has to be completed at the dealership.

Pilot contained no leasing, very limited information on trade-ins. You're pretty much on your own with that. No test driving. And of course, no home delivery. The Amazon Fairy is not going to show up in two days with a car on your front doorstep. And there are also no guarantees, no returns, nothing that has really defined Amazon's level of customer service that people have grown to trust more or less.

But really what Amazon was doing was testing the process. Does this business model work? Does dealer onboarding work? Does the process work? Are we compliant with all of the laws? Where are the customers, the car buyers getting confused in this process? What do they like? What do they not like? Where are the dealers screwing up the process? Because this always happens. And where do the friction points show up

with the franchise But they worked out a lot of the kinks and they started expanding. So by August of 2025, they officially expanded into some used and certified pre-owned vehicles, not just new cars. It was originally with a group of Hyundai dealers in Los Angeles with their certified pre-owned inventory, but they are quickly expanding that.

Now you can see not just Hyundai certified pre-owned cars, you can see Ford certified pre-owned cars, you can see other used cars for sale on Ford dealers lots that are participating in the program that are certified. I'm using air quotes here under Ford's Blue Advantage program, which is a program that Ford has that allows their dealers to put a type of certification, in other words, a little microscopic warranty,

on used cars of other brands to give consumers a little bit of peace of mind. It's kind of a cool program. It's not a lot, but we'll take what we can get. And they also got Hertz on board for selling their used cars. They sell their own used car fleets and have been doing that for years as opposed to just hauling them all to auction. So if you want to buy a slightly beat up, questionably maintained, former rental car, you can also do that on Amazon.

One of the things that they added was a few consumer friendly protections that help it feel a little more like Amazon. There is a three day or 100 mile return policy on used vehicles. So that allows you to get it home and take it to your mechanic and get it inspected. If you do it really quickly and then say, Nope, I don't like this. That's very similar to what Carvana has.

And there's also a 30 day or 1000 mile limited warranty on the used vehicles. This is something that a lot of dealerships do anyway. It is a very, very limited, basically the big parts of the engine and transmission only, not everything else that could possibly break. Little more of a marketing tool than actually something useful for the consumer. But again, better than nothing. But of course, the truly manufacturer certified like Hyundai's

certified pre-owned vehicles still carry the certification warranty from Hyundai, which is the best in the business.

So where is Amazon Auto today? Here we are sitting in early 2026. It is still very, very much in the beta testing phase, which it says, if you go onto Amazon Auto, it says literally beta. And that's okay because they are making this up and figuring it out as they go along. And each time they get everything perfected, they get their processes stabilized. Things are working...

then they expand. It's smart. You don't want to just roll out this thing everywhere. Just like how the robo taxis have been in very specific places. They're testing them out. Amazon is doing the same thing, but because this is what they do, they are ultimately a technology company and e-commerce platform. They have a lot of resources and a lot of experience to build on. So they tend to do it better than everyone else.

So today, Amazon Auto is available in about 130 US metro cities and that is probably growing by the day. But even within those supported markets, the inventory is entirely limited on which local dealers have opted to participate. This is not mandatory. In fact, under franchise law, Hyundai cannot force its dealers to participate. They can't even force them to adhere to specific types of pricing.

That's the whole thing about franchises. They control a bunch of stuff, but then there's things they cannot control. So what's available is really going to vary city by city, depending on what inventory those participating dealers have. Your search radius is still limited to a maximum 75 mile radius from the zip code that you have set up in your Amazon account as your primary home

address. is different than if you go on something like AutoTrader or Cars.com. You can search nationwide if you want to. You cannot do that on Amazon and I have yet to find a way to hack that and get around it.

But they intentionally designed it this way because they want the whole process to be based on you going to your local dealer to pick up the car, to finish the transaction. They specifically designed this not to be a place where you could go find a car from anywhere.

This is partly making the dealers happy and keeping in the tradition of the franchise agreements, which give dealers a certain amount of control over a territory. So they don't want to be competing with dealers outside of their main geographies. And it makes Amazon happy because if you're picking up the car from a local dealer,

it is less likely that there will be problems from their perspective with the transaction and it will fall through. Therefore, more successful deals equals more money for them. And hey, better reviews, which is of course the unspoken currency on Amazon. Five stars, five stars. Right now it's still limited on new cars to Hyundai.

So if you're shopping for a Toyota or a Honda or a GM, you're not going to find it on Amazon unless it's a used one

that happens to be in the inventory of one of the participating dealers on the certified or used car side. But at least you can in a lot of markets lease a new Hyundai online. When they first started, there was no leasing. It was cash or just finance through Hyundai Financial. Now they've worked through the extra hoops that you have to jump through with leasing or they have to jump through more than you do even. And they're getting that worked out. So you could lease online.

And in some cases, you can also purchase additional products like the extended warranty or prepaid maintenance, those things that they love to sell you in the finance office. And because you do have to physically go to the local dealership to finish the paperwork and take delivery, you'll still get the full finance office experience. So that leads me to how does this really work and how does it not work?

Amazon Autos lets you shop for that limited number of new and used cars on Amazon. But Amazon is not selling you a car. They are simply hosting a shopping experience, which will feel familiar to people like me who are Amazon junkies. But you do have to have a personal Amazon account. Doesn't need to be a prime account because again, the car is not going to be delivered to your house in two days by the Amazon Fairy.

But it has to be a personal account. I happen to have a business account through Amazon, so mine didn't work. Hence why I had to create a bogus one to go out there and do my research. But the cars you do see on there belong to local dealerships that have chosen to list their inventory, chosen to participate within that 75 mile radius of your primary zip code. So Amazon is basically just the storefront window facilitating the checkout process.

They're not the one doing the real selling. You are buying the car from the dealer. This is not like Tesla's model and Rivian and some of the ones that are pushing that franchise law boundary with trying to sell directly to consumers. That is not what is happening on Amazon. Amazon is simply providing technology platform to facilitate you buying the car from your local dealer.

And since you are looking at a specific VIN number for a car they have on their lot, you're not going to encounter as often, I'm sorry, that car's not actually, we sold that, it's not actually on our inventory. That's a lot of the bait and switch that happens with platforms like TrueCar, where, they say they have it, but then you're not really negotiating or seeing a price on a

So when you get to the dealership, oh, lo and behold, well, we don't actually have that one in our inventory, but let me show you this other one that's $5,000 more. This will reduce that bait and switch, but it won't be perfect. A lot of it will depend on the backend integration between Amazon and the dealer's inventory systems, because even the dealer's inventory systems are not always up to date. I go on there all the time and there's been a car there listed for six weeks and I'm like,

we're interested in this car like, that sold a while ago. Then why is it still on your website? Dealer backend technology is a whole other topic. Don't get me started about how piss poor that can be and the processes behind it. So not 100 % accurate. It could happen, but it will reduce the likelihood of the bait and switch that you can see with other platforms. The price that you see is a fixed non-negotiable price set by the dealer.

Not set by Amazon, it is set by the dealer. So it is a no-haggle model. So you're not requesting quotes. You're not going to trigger a million phone calls from every dealer in your area. You can choose if you want to pay cash, if you want to finance through the captive finance company, or if you want to lease if that is available in your area. And you just get the whole process started online.

Some dealers have this process already on their own websites. Many of them rushed to get that technology out during the pandemic. And so it's really no different, except you're doing it under the Amazon brand. Amazon will help them collect all the basic information, the paperwork up front. It will keep the dealers from having to build a platform like this on their own, which most of them cannot necessarily afford to do.

It helps you from the perspective of cutting down on some of the back and forth later and the time you spend at the dealership. But there are some gotchas here. While the price of the vehicle itself is locked, it's just the vehicle, not necessarily the full out the door price. Because the car, if you've listened to me, is just one of about eight

areas in any deal where the dealer is attempting to make a profit off of you. They're a business, that's their job, but it does not protect you from getting to the dealership to sign the paperwork and then finding out, there's this $3,000 protection package with the cheap ceramic coating and the nitrogen in the tires and the wheel locks and whatever dealer added on crap that they once put on the car, that's not necessarily disclosed upfront.

And then of course you still got your taxes, your registration, dealer fees. So it doesn't lock in necessarily the out the door price. Again, they are relying on you focusing entirely on just the price of the actual car that you're buying, not all the other areas that they have found out where they can make their money.

So this is where the bullshittery can still happen. Trade-ins are now also part of the process, but there's nothing magical here. And Amazon is not buying the car. This works exactly the same as it does everywhere else - on dealer websites, on auto trader, everything. It is a third party estimator system, usually backed by NADA. There's a couple different backend vendors for it, but it's a system that is designed

to give you a nice low ball offer for your trade, contingent on the dealer actually seeing it in person and giving them the opportunity to give you a dozen reasons why it's not even worth that much. So again, convenience, but not necessarily to your financial advantage. They do let you schedule the pickup, which is just like scheduling your appointment at the dealership, not prime delivery. You're still physically going to that dealership to get the car,

to sign all the paperwork. You can test drive it before you sign all that paperwork. And I tell everybody to do that no matter how you are buying a car. Always at least look it over, test drive it if you haven't test driven it, just to make sure everything's good to go before you sign on that dotted line.

But really once you get to the dealership, it's kind of the same experience. It's going to be a little more streamlined, but you're still going to go through the finance office. They are still going to try and hard sell you on the finance products because this is where they make so much of their money. The dealers don't make profits on the cars themselves. Typically they make it everywhere else in the deal. That finance office is

critical. So just be aware that you're still going to get the hard sale once you come on to their lot, their property, you're in their house, it's their turf.

Amazon is not magically eliminating the dealership from this equation. So it doesn't guarantee in any way, shape or form that you're getting a good deal. And it doesn't remove every opportunity for the bullshittery. The best way to think of this is it makes the front half of the car buying process feel a little more familiar and less chaotic, but the back half is business as usual. I guess it's kind of the mullet of the car buying world now. Business upfront,

party in the back. Anyway, to truly understand how this is different from all the existing platforms like TrueCar, AutoTrader, Cars.com, we need to understand how those platforms work from the dealer's perspective and for you. They are primarily lead generation tools built for dealers. Nothing wrong with that. It makes it easier for you to search for cars and find things, and I use

AutoTrader and Cars,.com all the time. I think they're great platforms, but they're just search tools, which is then a lead generation for the dealers. That's why the dealer pays to list their cars there and it's free for you to use. Remember anything that's free to us as consumers to use isn't really free. We pay for it one way or another.

And all of these tools were built for the dealers not for the consumers, because that is the side of the bread that is buttered for these companies. That is who is paying the bills. TrueCar took it a step further by showing what upfront pricing kind of looks like.

But at its core, it's still a lead generation platform and one that has proven problematic and some manufacturers have forbidden their dealers from even using it. So again, from your perspective, is it somewhat convenient? Yes. Is it really in your best interest? Is it designed for your value? No, of course not. Any of these things are designed to give value to whoever is paying the bill.

Amazon has built their empire on convenience, as I said at the beginning. And there's nothing wrong with that. I am a perfect example of their target market. And a lot of us will pay more for that convenience. Yes, I can buy toothpaste cheaper two miles down the road at Walmart than I can ordering the same toothpaste on Amazon. But you know what? There are some days

when I just do not want to take the time out of my day, not to mention the hassle of going to Walmart, to deal with it. It's 11 o'clock at night and I just realized, I'm on my very end of my last two toothpaste. I can just go on Amazon and boop, boop, boop and it'll be here tomorrow. So I will pay extra for that toothpaste for the convenience. We do that a lot in life. Just look at DoorDash. So many

of the services that we pay for now are truly about our convenience. And we know, or we should know, that we are paying more for that. And sometimes that's okay. And if that is what it is about for you, I mean, that's exactly what it was with CarMax. It was more about, hey, no haggling. Well, that doesn't mean you're getting a good deal. It just means that you're not going through the hassle of haggling. You're giving

to get yourself a better deal to just not have to deal with the whole game behind it. This is the exact same thing. Ultimately, Amazon has not built anything truly new. They're making it feel new with a lot of marketing hype, but from the dealer's perspective, it is still pay to play. They still control the entire process from beginning to end, the pricing,

everything. It takes a lot more power away from you order to give you that convenience. And for some people, that is going to be perfectly all right. Same thing with companies like Carvana. It is all about the convenience. It is not at all about getting the best deal or even necessarily getting a good quality car, if you're looking at a used car.

You still don't really get the pricing transparency. It's not necessarily that much of a competitive price because the dealers are not going to engage in a bidding war on Amazon for your business. In fact, there's a bit of collusion that's actually going on behind the scenes to where the dealers are not aggressively pricing their cars on Amazon because if they get into a pricing war there, then

it's just going to take everything to the bottom and they are all going to lose. So again, is it in your best interest? No. Outside of convenience, it is definitely not. But again, if convenience and just your sanity and the ease of the process is what you are after, go for it.

Amazon will make it as easy as possible. They will continue to refine it. They will continue to make it better. They will offer more things. And will we someday be able to just order a car on Amazon and the Amazon Fairy delivers it to your doorstep two days later? I wouldn't put it past them. Probably. But for now, you're still ending up at the dealership and you've given up pretty much all of your power before you even walk in the door.

So will I be using Amazon Auto? No, there's no benefit to me. There's certainly it's not compatible with my business model because I rely on keeping the power, keeping the negotiating power, the research power. While I use the various inventory portals to the legwork of finding cars, then I go into the deep research, the vetting process, deep negotiating

on my inside knowledge of the car business as well as my deep relationships with the dealers all over the country. So I don't have to play the same games, so to speak, that you do as a consumer, but I still have to play them quite a bit. I just know how to.

These platforms were just not designed to save us money. Just the opposite. They actually want us to spend more money for the convenience. And let me tell you, it totally works in just about every other area of my life, just not for cars. So if you want just convenience, absolutely check it out and let me know what you think about it. What was your experience? Have you ever bought a car through Amazon Auto? Let me know what worked, what didn't work, how you liked it, what you think they could do better.

I absolutely want to learn because I think there is a market for a variety of different ways of doing things. And if this fills a niche for some people and it's a win-win all around, then I'm all for it. If you want convenience, but also keeping the power and making sure you are getting the right car at the best possible deal, end to end, no bullshittery, all of the factors taken into consideration, no surprises

when you sign those papers, no hard sells, then that's what my service is for under the perfect car package. And I will put a link to that in the description below, but you can check it out at TheCarChick.com. So I'm not worried about Amazon Auto. I'm always excited to see new technologies and new ways of doing things come into the industry, especially when it helps with convenience. But people, this is nothing new. It's just got a nice shiny Amazon logo on it. All right.

That's all I got today. Until next time, drive safely. I'm out of here.