TL;DR Sold my used SUV to Shift.com for a crazy inflated price. Worth checking out if you are trading in...
I had a 2015 Chevy Tahoe 4WD with 65,000 miles on it.
I was going to trade it in to Tesla (who offered $29,000), but with my estimated delivery date for the Model 3 shifting between December and Feb, I didn’t want to wait and then get a lower offer if the trade-in went down in Feb.
I took offers online from Carvana, Vroom, CarMax, and CarZeus (yes, there are a ton of new places). Carvana was the cheapest offer at $23,000. Vroom offered $26,500. CarZeus offered $29,000-$31,000 depending on inspection, and CarMax offered $33,000 if I brought it in to a drop off place about 30 miles away.
I was all set and ready to go with CarMax, when my wife told me her friend had told her about SHIFT, and I should get an offer from them because the word was they were offering a lot of money for cars. I had never heard of them, and their price quote mechanism online was only four questions that you clicked a Yes/No on big cartoonish buttons before getting your quote. They offered $35,000, plus a $200 bonus if you had two sets of keys. Seemed a little scammy, and I was dubious.
I was skeptical, but I clicked “Accept Offer” on the email they sent, and I was called within a few minutes to schedule an inspection/pick-up. Their normal procedure was to send someone out to inspect the car, then schedule a truck to come out and take it away. But they offered to do a “remote inspection” by phone. I assumed this would be some sort of video call where we looked at the car. Nope, they just basically asked me the exact same questions as on the website “does it smell?” “is it clean?” - really basic stuff. After about two minutes of generic questions, I “passed” the “remote inspection”.
They offered to send out the truck to pick it up, but there was another $200 bonus if you drop it off at their location. No problem! I drove it over tonight. I’m in Austin and they had rented a tiny little place at the back of an half-abandoned strip mall on Burnett Road. They had painted the place bright green to match a stand-up banner with the SHIFT logo on it. The employees were dressed in sweatpants, ratty rock concert shirts, and flat brimmed baseball hats, but they couldn’t have been nicer. They had handheld ipads that walked them through another inspection which was once again the same four or five basic questions. At one point one of the guys went outside to look at the car and the other guy said “you don’t have to look, it’s already been inspected”, I guess referring to the phone call I had an hour earlier.
Signed a few papers, gave them my banking info, and they gave me a receipt for the wire transfer: $35,400. CRAZY!
If you read any reviews on SHIFT, there are a lot of negative reviews from people who buy cars with undisclosed problems, and a lot of positive reviews from people selling their cars painlessly like me. That pretty much adds up because their inspection process is minimal, at best. They must have some software program that lines up the car with another sale somewhere else in the country, because right now they are bidding way above everyone else and I don’t know how else they are profitable because the car I sold them (2015 Tahoe 4WD/LT, 65k miles) is for sale on every site around for less than I received.
While I was signing, I asked them if they took BMW leases. The guy said “Sure, we get Beamers in here all day long.” I told him that BMW was restricting lease buyouts, and the guy at the other desk piped and said in a confident voice, “Don’t worry, we can get it through.”
I don’t know what they are doing at SHIFT, but if you have a car to sell, get over there because it appears as though they are giving away money.
