Ten years ago, we delivered our first car. Today, we’re delivering over 1.3M unique AI-generated videos to our customers celebrating their car-buying journeys. Needless to say, we’ve come a long way.

In 2012, Ernie Garcia, Ryan Keeton, and Ben Huston had a dream that founded a company. Carvana was going to “change the way people buy cars.” In January 2013, Carvana.com went live in our first market – Atlanta, Georgia. By February, our founders were heading to Atlanta to deliver the first Carvana car themselves.

In the ten years since, a lot’s changed. We went public on the New York Stock Exchange. We opened 34 coin-operated car vending machines across the U.S., so our customers could choose to pick their car up or have it delivered to them. We launched Sell to Carvana, letting people across the U.S. sell their vehicles for a fair price — all without leaving the comfort of their homes.

Our journey hasn’t always been easy or straightforward — but then, what’s a road trip without a few unexpected twists and turns? One thing has remained constant — our commitment to driving customers happy. And what better way to drive someone happy than a joyride?

Introducing: Carvana Joyride

Remember the day you met your Carvana car? We do. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), we’re taking each and every customer on a joyride of the day they bought their Carvana car with an AI-generated video tailored to their car-buying journey. Take a peek:

Carvana lives at the intersection of technology and the automotive industry. Joyride represents both sides of that coin, using cutting-edge technology to give each customer a unique snapshot of their car, when they bought it, and the cultural events surrounding that purchase via AI-generated video. 

How does it work? Let’s take a look under the hood. 

The Art of AI: Concepting an AI-Generated Video Platform

Back in 2015, Google released Deep Dream – an AI capable of turning data into images. Since then, AI art generators such as Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, and MidJourney have entered the mainstream, skyrocketing in popularity. The technology fascinated us — and we knew leveraging that technology was a must if we wanted to create millions of procedurally generated videos tailored to specific customers and their cars. 

The first step was deciding what data points we wanted to incorporate into our AI-generated videos. We landed on a few — the name of the customer, the kind of car they bought, and where and when the purchase took place. 

Once we knew what the “pillars” of each video would be, we dug deeper, thinking about what images in a video or words in a script could represent a purchase. What time of year was it? What was going on culturally at that time? What could a customer in that area use a car for? From animating customer names to making flags for national holidays and beyond, we spent months brainstorming ways to create an all-encompassing snapshot that could help customers re-live the moment they met their car. 

Then, came the art. Photographing the vehicles on our website from every angle does more than help us show them off — it allows us to make 3D models of the vehicles we offer. Leaning on a network of talented 3D modelers, animators, AI experts, and visual artists, we created a system to turn our vehicle models, AI-generated art, and 3D assets into seamlessly-animated videos with a signature style. 

Giving AI-Generated Video A Voice

The visual component was only half the battle. We knew we wanted a narrator — but we also knew that asking a voice actor to record millions of lines to cover every possible combination of “name, vehicle, place, season, and cultural events” wasn’t exactly feasible. 

Fortunately, AI hasn’t only made strides in the art world. After hiring a voice actor to record a variety of lines, we used two emergent technologies — text-to-speech and re-voicing — to turn scripts into audio bites that sounded close to our actor. After applying a filter to blend the two, we ended up with the best of both worlds — AI voiceover, fluidly combined with our voice actor’s original work, to create a unique narration for every video.

Putting It All Together: How Carvana Joyride Works

Now that we’ve explored the different elements of our Joyride videos, let’s look at how it all comes together using an example joyride:

We know that our customer, named Holly, bought a Carvana Corvette on September 29, 2019. September 29 is National Coffee Day, and everyone was talking about the ending of Game of Thrones (it… certainly was an ending). Our system combines that knowledge with AI art, animated assets, and stylistic parameters to weave those elements into our AI-generated video. 

We also know that Holly purchased their car — a 2019 red Chevrolet Corvette — in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. With that knowledge, our system incorporates location-specific carpportunities — like driving through snowy roads or visiting the Great Lakes – into the artistic elements that appear throughout the second half of the video. 

Last but not least, over it all, a combination of real and AI-generated voiceover elements are blended to create a smooth, natural-sounding narration. Ultimately, you get what you see on-screen: A video tailored specifically to Holly, created by a system capable of generating over a million other unique videos for each and every customer we’ve had the pleasure of selling a car to. 

When all was said and done, we were left with a cloud-based system capable of rendering up to 300,000 videos per hour, that’s already produced around 45,000 hours of personalized content (that’s over five years’ worth of videos watched back-to-back!).

You Drive Us Forward – What the Future Holds

Creating the tech behind Joyride and its AI-generated videos was no simple task. We leveraged the expertise of hundreds of skilled professionals across dozens of disciplines. Our employees and customers drive us forward – without them, none of this would be possible. 

Not so long ago, selling just one car felt like a question mark. “I remember our first sale – we were constantly watching the site, tracking customer progress, and then I heard, ‘hey, someone just got financing!’ We were doing pushups because we were so excited,” recalls CEO Ernie Garcia. “All of a sudden, it was like, ‘hey, these real people in the real world found out about us.”

“Trying to go from selling that first car to contemplating a million cars sold is a massive step. Of course, you have the dream, but when you know everything that goes into one sale, and you imagine that work happening for every single one – it’s almost impossible.”

Looking to the future, we’re committed to bringing the same care and attention to our customers that we have since day one. “I hope we keep that same dream. Life’s the journey, not the destination. It’s fun to be a part of something you can look back on and say, ‘we achieved so much, and the thing we achieved is good for other people… nobody believed in us, and we were right.’ I think doing anything great is always hard. It’s more satisfying and fulfilling if we keep the mentality we had when we were little, keep that dream alive, and keep doing good for more people.”

Still looking for a joyride? Find more at carvanajoyride.com