Amazon Autos now includes Chevy, Jeep, Kia, Mazda, Subaru, and Hyundai. The service has expanded to more than 130 cities across the United States. Dealers remain part of every transaction, handling the final paperwork. In late 2024, Amazon started selling Hyundai vehicles through dealers on its marketplace. Now, it’s quietly expanded to include Kia, Subaru, Jeep, Chevrolet, and Mazda. That means you can buy a new Corvette while you’re adding paper towels to your cart, pausing only to wonder how you ended up cross-shopping a mid-engine V8 with dish soap. On top of that, it’s currently growing the location network to include over 130 cities across the USA, including Dallas, New York, Los Angeles, and more. While that momentum doesn’t appear to be slowing anytime soon, dealers stress that there’s still a place for them. It’s clear to see why buyers would appreciate the Amazon car-buying experience. Forget lengthy hours in a dealership as a middleman goes to his boss-middleman time and time again, during negotiations on a price that’s already inflated due to silly things like nitrogen-filled tires and door trim packages that dealers refuse to remove. Instead, Amazon shoppers get a transparent price, the ability to finance it then and there online, and the freedom to pick up the car whenever they want. Dealers pay to list their vehicles, but in the process get in front of the eyes of customers shopping online. Some like the tradeoff. “I think it’s a really innovative product,” said participating dealership owner Matthew Phillips to The Wall Street Journal. Phillips is in the early going and has only sold one car on the platform. Others with more experience say that Amazon Autos started great, but is beginning to degrade with more traffic. “Before it was click, click, click, and then the buyer would show up, sign four documents, and leave with the car,” Alex Ruiz, general sales manager at South Bay Hyundai in Torrance, Calif., said of the early days of Amazon Autos. As traffic increased, “we started to run into issues. I think it will take off, but it will take time,” Ruiz said. For now, new-car sales are still heavily regulated to keep dealers alive. Unlike Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid, Amazon isn’t trying to cut dealers out of the process. Instead, it’s acting more like a giant digital showroom. That relationship between one of the world’s biggest brands and dealers isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. As such, dealers might just have a new lifeline, even if they don’t like the deal as much as they do like charging hidden fees and markups. Photos Amazon Autos
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