Carvana Co.

Carvana Co. is an American online retailer of used cars that buys, reconditions, finances, and delivers vehicles through a vertically integrated platform, selling 596,641 cars to retail customers and generating $20.3 billion of revenue in fiscal 2025. Headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, and spun out of the used-car lender DriveTime in 2012, Carvana replaces the dealership with a website, a national network of inspection-and-reconditioning centers, an in-house hauler fleet, and the glass "car vending machines" that became its brand signature.

This file is less a story about a website than about a manufacturing-and-logistics company wearing an e-commerce skin — and about whether a business that nearly died can keep growing without breaking. Between 2021 and 2023 Carvana over-expanded into a collapsing used-car market, burned through cash, and ended up restructuring more than $5 billion of debt; by 2025 it had become, on its own description, the fastest-growing and most profitable automotive retailer in the United States for nine consecutive quarters. The central question the analysis turns on is whether the company can keep compounding retail units at 30–40% a year, on the way to a stated ambition of three million cars annually, without the unit economics, the balance sheet, or the credit cycle reasserting themselves.