在庞大的二手车市场，CarMax与Carvana就美国人如何购车展开交锋In a Large Used-Car Market, CarMax and Carvana Clash Over How Americans Buy

The nation’s biggest used-car dealer is trying to hold on to its crown.

In a world known for mom-and-pop shops, pushy sales tactics and sometimes dubious quality, two corporate giants offering no-haggle prices are vying for supremacy. In one corner is CarMax, America’s original national big-box auto retailer.

In the other is digital upstart Carvana, which is growing much faster than CarMax and has become a darling of Wall Street.

In a dig at CarMax, Carvana Chief Executive Ernie Garcia III said his company is “knocking on the door” of becoming the nation’s largest used-car retailer, during its earnings call last month.

CarMax CEO Keith Barr shrugged off the comparison. “It’s not as if there’s going to be one winner and one loser here,” Barr said in an interview. “We’re going to be one of the largest retailers in the United States in the used-car industry for years to come.”Their rivalry encompasses a broader debate about the future of car buying: In the online age, will phone apps become the primary way we buy cars? Or do people still want to browse a dealership lot and sit in a vehicle before forking over tens of thousands of dollars?

CarMax is betting on the former. It has 260 dealerships covering most of the U.S., as well as online-only sales. But it is in the middle of a turnaround project that echoes digital-native Carvana, which lets people find a car, arrange financing and schedule a delivery from their phone or computer.

Jeff Lick, an analyst at investment bank Stephens Inc., says Barr is smart to take cues from a rival. “Great leaders have no ego when it comes to good ideas,” Lick said. “If your competitor is doing something new or unique or better than you, then just copy them.”The intensifying competition comes as more consumers are turning to used cars. New-car prices have soared to around $50,000 on average, while insurance and maintenance costs have risen sharply. About a million fewer new cars are sold annually in the U.S. than in the prepandemic years.

About 20 million used cars are sold at retail in the U.S. annually, a roughly $550 billion market, according to Cox Automotive.

CarMax and Carvana collectively represent less than 10% of the pie—but both aim to take more of it in the coming years.

CarMax says its vast collection of physical stores gives it an edge with people who want to test-drive the car they might buy, and deal with a human salesperson. But investors view the company as behind the technological curve.

The company parted ways with former CEO Bill Nash in 2025 after years of declining sales. CarMax peaked at 924,000 vehicles in the year ended Feb. 28, 2022, sliding to 766,000 two years later. It has executed three rounds of layoffs in about a year.

Now Barr, a hotel industry veteran with no previous automotive experience, is tasked with getting CarMax back on track. CarMax tapped Barr in large part because of his track record beefing up digital capabilities at the international hotel chain IHG, parent of brands including Holiday Inn, Kimpton and InterContinental.

Barr’s strategy calls for “an evolution, not necessarily a revolution, for CarMax,” he told investors.

CarMax wants to improve its online sales experience, but Barr says he isn’t about to chase Carvana into an exclusively online sales model.

“Customers, even though they say they’re digital, the truth is the vast majority of them are still going to a store to test drive,” Barr said. (At Carvana, the primary way people try out a vehicle is by buying it with a seven-day, any-reason return policy. Its “car-vending machine” towers around the country are for delivering cars ordered online, not for browsing cars for sale.) Yet in subtler ways, Barr is pushing CarMax to be more like Carvana. Barr is racing to digitize the company’s behind-the-scenes work, aiming to reduce costs so it can offer lower prices without detracting from the bottom line.

When it comes to sprucing up the used cars it buys, Carvana has dozens of stand-alone sites that are run like a factory assembly line. CarMax, meanwhile, still primarily uses the service bays at its retail stores to recondition cars for sale, relying on clipboards and paper to execute repairs.

To speed this process up, CarMax plans to use computers and software to decide what work needs to be done and what parts must be ordered. Carvana has been doing this since 2023, using software it created in-house.

CarMax started opening stand-alone reconditioning sites in 2024, and Barr is planning more.

Carvana’s hub-and-spoke logistics network enables the company to move cars around the country at lower costs. Barr wants to move CarMax’s decentralized network of stores toward a similar design, so cars can travel together more often.

CarMax also aims to capture more profits by financing a bigger share of its own sales, especially to customers with midlevel credit scores. CarMax says offering loans to more customers with less-than-stellar credit will dent profits at first but pay off in the long run.

Carvana, meanwhile, finances about 85% of its own sales to consumers of all credit profiles, quickly unloading these loans to banks and investors at a profit.

Doug Hall, a 56-year-old lawyer, has purchased two cars from CarMax. He likes the variety of vehicles available at its main store in his home of Charlotte, N.C.

Hall has sold a car to Carvana, but even with the generous return policy, he is wary of buying sight-unseen. He once found an Audi at a local dealer that looked perfect online, only to discover it reeked of pot inside.

“I would not buy a car—especially a used car—unless I saw it and drove it first,” he said.