It could be said that the most critical components of the Carvana brand take place far away from the flash and sizzle of the Car Vending Machine, or the joyful delivery experience we aim to bring to every customer who purchases a car from us online. In many respects, Carvana’s lifeblood and the heartbeat of the company resides inside the walls of a Carvana Inspection Center (IC) and the thousands individuals who comprise our teams at well over a dozen IC locations across the country. Indeed, the around the clock work that takes place at a Carvana IC is what ultimately fuels our ability to deliver high-quality pre-owned vehicles to car buyers from coast-to-coast with consistency and efficiency.
But how does it all work, and furthermore, as Carvana has grown, how have our processes evolved along with our ability to scale to meet car buying demand? To answer those questions, and more, we visited Carvana’s Tolleson IC located west of Phoenix to speak with Angie Schiavo and Daniel Coscia – two of our foremost faces at the Tolleson IC.
As it relates to processes, older “legacy” sites, such as the Tolleson IC, represent the original approach Carvana took to inspecting and perfecting vehicles. With newer ICs coming online, however, that approach is rapidly changing, according to Coscia.
“We’re standing at one of our legacy sites right now [here in Tolleson],” said Coscia. “As you’ve seen, we’re spread out over about five buildings and 80 acres. Currently, with the new prototype ICs, everything is housed underneath one roof with all of your processes. You’re not spread out kind of like we are now, and there are definitely some benefits with that.
“Here, we’re taking vehicles from one building to the next. There’s a lot of driving and movement involved. In the new buildings, it starts in one process and flows right into the next, so there’s a lot of waste that’s been eliminated in terms of travel and motion, so it saves a lot of time there.”
While the newer ICs have been streamlined for efficiency, folks like Angie and Daniel put in some serious work traversing the 80 total acres where the Tolleson IC sits to ensure the operation runs like a well-oiled machine. In fact, according to Angie, she logs thousands of steps on a daily basis.
“By the time I get home, I’m at 25,000-plus steps a day,” says Schiavo. “The IC is very big, but I try not to drive the golf cart as much. The highest I ever had at the IC while working the second shift was 32,000 in one night.”
“On this site, fully staffed we’re over 600 associates and reconditioning specialists,” said Coscia. “When you include our logistics team and our local delivery hub, there’s upwards of 1,000 people on site on a given day.
“I think just on our reconditioning process alone we have just over 600 associates on site, and they’re comprised of everything from inventory associates to cosmetic associates to technicians. We have everything from entry level technicians where this is their first job out of tech school, to technicians who have worked for major auto companies for 30-plus years. It’s really neat to see. We have an internal paint school where we teach all the basic entry-level skills for paint and body work, so we have associates who worked in collision shops for an entire career, and then we have folks that we teach the basics on how to sand down a car and stuff like that. It’s very exciting all the opportunities that are here at every level.”
With the staggering amount of manpower on hand at the IC on the daily, it allows for the Tolleson IC to quickly and effectively inspect and perfect literally hundreds of vehicles every single day. According to Coscia, the Tolleson IC – when operating at full capacity – can inspect, recondition, and photograph 300 vehicles in a 24-hour period for a total of 1,280 vehicles in a week that pass through that particular IC. In fact, the Tolleson IC was the first Carvana Inspection Center to reach that weekly milestone en route to processing 45,000 vehicles in all of 2021.
Though Carvana ICs have maintained a level of consistent excellence when it comes to processing the vehicles that come through their doors, the amount of time that it takes for a single vehicle to pass through an Inspection Center can vary, largely depending on the vehicle’s age.
“It all depends on the car,” says Schiavo. “If you have a 2021, it doesn’t need much done to it. If you have a 2014, it’s going to need a little more work done to it, so it’s going to take a little longer. If it has to go through paint, through build…a lot of times when you do get a 2021, they only need maybe an air filter and some wipers and that’s it. The older cars, they need a little more TLC.
“If you have a brand new car, some vehicles go through the site in one or two hours,” added Coscia. “If you have a Tesla that’s brand new and doesn’t even require an oil change, it can fly through here in an hour or two. We also have some older vehicles, our economy vehicles, that require a little more cosmetic work, a little more detailing, but on average, most of our vehicles pass through the entire process within 14 days.”
Every single vehicle that arrives at a Carvana Inspection Center receives a thorough 150-point inspection. At the Tolleson IC, four inspection lines run around the clock which are comprised of five different inspection stations where vehicles are checked for mechanical, safety, and glass standards, as well as any cosmetic issues with paint and the like.
“Most of our vehicles will go through the cosmetic department first and will receive anything that is cosmetic in nature, such as paint, airbrush, paintless dent repair, and wheel repair, where you fix things like curb rash,” said Coscia.
“From there, everything gets an oil change and gets all the mechanical work done to it, and then it proceeds along to our detail department where everything gets a shine. Finally, the vehicle ends up in our photo department after it passes a second 150-point inspection where they validate that all the work was done correctly and is within the Carvana vehicle standards. It then proceeds through the photo dome and onto the website.”
Considering the sheer number of vehicles that pass through a Carvana Inspection Center, some may wonder exactly how each vehicle is tracked once it arrives on the premises. The process is actually fairly straightforward, according to Schiavo, as each vehicle is individually registered before going anywhere on IC grounds.
“When a car comes in, whether it’s third party or wherever it comes from, it gets an RFID tag and you’ll see them in the windshields and that’s how we track the car,” says Schiavo. “It starts out in the RFID station, then it goes to inspection, and then it follows it through. That’s how we start tracking the vehicle.
“We also have an internal inventory management system that we call ‘Carli,'” added Coscia. “What that does is it shows a live vehicle status as it goes through the process, so I can look up any time and see that a vehicle is pending for paint, or it’s waiting for the tires to be changed, so we get a live status for all 2,500 that are currently going through the process – where they are, what they’re waiting on, what’s been done to it, and what’s coming up next.”
Yet, as impressive as all the technology and processes are at any given Carvana Inspection Center, the element that makes our inspection centers go are undoubtedly the people. Without inventory associates, no cars get moved. Without skilled painters, no cars would be painted. Without photo specialists, no cars would be photographed. Every role is vital and the feeling of pride that is display on a daily basis by Carvana team members in their work at the Inspection Center is palpable.
“It’s an exciting time to be part of what Carvana is doing,” says Coscia. “We’re changing the face of the whole used car market. Just here at the IC level, we’re touching 40,000 to 50,000 vehicles a year, but more importantly I think is the opportunity for people.
“People come here with no experience and they fall in love with it. It’s not just getting quality cars for our customers. The next car could be our mom’s, so we try to send every car out of here like it is going to our family member. But just the lives we see change every single day with folks coming in and falling in love with what we’re doing here. A lot of people come here and are just curious about what we do and end up falling in love with it and decide they’re going to stick around for awhile. It’s exciting to see all of that on a daily basis.”
