Drive Motors (YC W16) Lets You Buy a New Car Completely Online

by Y Combinator3/9/2016

The process of going in person to a dealership to shop for a new car can be intimidating and time-consuming, to say the least. Drive Motors is a company that is launching out of our Winter 2016 class that lets you bypass that altogether, enabling people to buy cars completely online.

TechCrunch’s Josh Constine wrote an in-depth story about Drive Motors and how it works recently:

“We’re in the era where everything can be done online, so it’s crazy
you can’t buy a new car straight from the web. Every site and startup
that claims to help you do that just dumps you on a contact form to
request more info or a meeting with a car dealer.

But Drive Motors
does exactly what you imagine should already happen. It’s a plugin for
car dealer websites. Pick a car you like, and Drive lets you configure
options, set up a financing plan, and pay the dealer right there. Then
all you do is drop by the lot and pick up your new car. Drive brings the
Tesla buying experience to every other car brand.

If it sounds simple, that’s because it is. But still, no one had
built it right. Car dealerships don’t know their way around tech.
Neither do the car manufacturers, and even if they did, the dealerships
don’t want to give them any more leverage. Plus, dealerships would want a
manufacturer-agnostic system.

So that’s what Drive Motors built. The startup is part of this
season’s Y Combinator batch, and has raised a $1.5 million seed round
from the accelerator, Khosla Ventures, Propel and Gil Penchina.”

Read the full story on TechCrunch here.

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  • Y Combinator

    Y Combinator created a new model for funding early stage startups. Twice a year we invest a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200). The startups move to Silicon