DriveTime Names New CEO

DriveTime, the nation’s second largest used car retailer focused solely on used vehicles, announced the appointment of a new CEO this week.

Mr. Don Reese will join DriveTime as its new CEO beginning in late March.  Mr. Reese will also be appointed to the DriveTime Automotive Group and Bridgecrest Acceptance boards of directors.  Mr. Reese replaces DriveTime’s previous CEO, Mr. Ray Fidel.

“We are very excited and pleased to welcome Don to DriveTime,” stated Ernie Garcia, Chairman. “Don’s considerable leadership and operational experience in new and used auto sales, as well as his background as a CFO, make him an ideal candidate to lead DriveTime at this time. We continue to reinvent our dealership and digital customer experiences and offerings, and expect to begin acquiring new car dealerships beginning in 2018.  I also view him as a very valuable addition to our boards.”

Mr. Reese has over thirty years of experience in new and used auto sales, leadership and finance having spent:

  • 11 years as the COO/CFO for the Maroone Auto Group,
  • 6 years as a Senior Vice President in operations and finance, and covering the Midwest Region, for AutoNation,
  • 15 years with the Gurley Leep Automotive as COO, and
  • Was most recently COO for Sheehy AutoStores

About DriveTime

Headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, DriveTime is the nation’s second-largest vehicle retailer focused solely on used vehicles.  DriveTime operates over 140 dealerships nationwide with annual sales exceeding 150,000 used vehicles, 1.2 million+ monthly visitors to its website, drivetime.com, and over $2 billion in consumer credit requests each month. DriveTime now provides used vehicles and used vehicle financing to the full range of customers in the market today, including competitively priced, lower mileage used cars.

Transforming the buying and financing of a used vehicle with a fair and transparent experience, DriveTime offerings include used car features on its online inventory; speed of financing including a credit score and the starting down payment in less than two minutes; prices on every used vehicle online and at its dealerships; no-haggle pricing; salaried associates trained to help our customers find the right used vehicle for them; and a five day, no questions asked used vehicle return program.

For more information on DriveTime, please visit drivetime.com.

DriveTime Opens 145th Dealership Nationwide

DriveTime, the nation’s second-largest vehicle retailer focused exclusively on used vehicles, announced the opening of its 145th dealership in Van Nuys, California. Van Nuys is located in the San Fernando Valley region of metro Los Angeles.

The dealership is DriveTime’s 6th in the state of California. Located between Costco and Target at 5835 N. Sepulveda Blvd, the store will be open Monday through Saturday.  The store has over 14,000 square feet of retail space designed specifically for today’s consumer and room for over 100 vehicles.

“California has been a great home for us and we are excited we have this opportunity to better serve the greater Van Nuys community.  With our competitively priced, low mileage vehicles, cutting-edge digital retailing and a customer-friendly sales process, we look forward to meeting their needs while contributing to the growth and development of the area,” said Scott Worthington, VP/Retail Sales, Marketing.

For more information about DriveTime, go to drivetime.com.

About DriveTime:

Headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, DriveTime is the nation’s second-largest vehicle retailer focused solely on used vehicles.  DriveTime operates over 140 dealerships nationwide with annual sales exceeding 150,000 used vehicles and 1.2 million+ monthly visitors to drivetime.com. DriveTime now provides used vehicles and used vehicle financing to the full range of customers in the market today, including competitively priced, lower mileage used cars.

Transforming the buying and financing of a used vehicle with a fair and transparent experience, DriveTime offerings include used car features on its online inventory; speed of financing including a credit score and the starting down payment in less than two minutes; prices on every used vehicle online and at its dealerships; no-haggle pricing; salaried associates trained to help our customers find the right used vehicle for them; and a five day, no questions asked used vehicle return program.

8 Features of DriveTime’s New Mobile Site

More consumers are shopping for their next car using their mobile devices, and we wanted to upgrade our mobile site offerings in an effort to capture those potential sales.

On February 13th, 2018, we announced the launch of our new mobile site with innovations designed to extend to both the customer experience and the technology we’ve employed

in launching the site.

When visiting DriveTime.com on their mobile device, customers will now see:

 

– Improved and faster page navigation when customers are on our site (single-page application platform).
– Changes to content layout and imagery based on user behavior.
– Content tailored to the phone location (geolocation logic).

 

Our new mobile site includes:

—Enhanced vehicle photos.
—New search filters to enable customers to find exactly what they are looking for in DriveTime’s new used car inventory, including the number of prior owners and accidents.
—Market price comparisons on thousands of used vehicles.
—Three-day guaranteed online pricing of customer trade-ins that’s being tested in select markets.
—Easy to find AutoCheck vehicle history reports on any of the 15,000 DriveTime used vehicles available nationwide.

At the same time, we emphasized that we’ve retained all existing customer-friendly features of the DriveTime experience, including:

—Streamlined contracting and e-signing
—Speed of financing online with a credit score and starting down payment in less than two minutes
—No haggle pricing, a no questions asked five-day used vehicle return program
—Salaried sales advisers at dealerships, focused on helping our customers find the right used vehicle for them from the thousands of used vehicles available

“There are a number of off the shelf mobile or website products offered by vendors to the new and used car industry. With over 1.2 million users each month on our desktop and mobile sites, we elected to custom develop our mobile site based on what customers are telling us they want — quick and easy access to the information they want to see, a customer experience game changer in used vehicle retailing,” said Scott Worthington, DriveTime’s vice president of retail marketing. “We’re just beginning to reimagine the entire vehicle retail experience,” Worthington added.

We needed cutting-edge technology to deliver these unique, new customer experiences.

Don Irwin, director of IT, and Shawn Curran, managing director of retail and marketing product development, said, “With 125-plus IT employees at DriveTime, we have a large pool of IT expertise to draw on to review and execute exciting new technologies that allow us to truly enhance the customer experience within the used car industry. And, the mobile site was a key priority for our digital retailing initiatives. Because of our customer experience focus, load time and navigation performance were critical concerns during the development of the new site.

“It was also a lot of fun to dig further into SEO compatibility because of our unique approach with the single-page application platform,” they continued. “Our team also implemented a best in breed solution incrementally delivering data as required to make the used car shopping experience as fast as possible. We accomplished this using the Angular 4+ client-side framework and Node.js for the server build, and for data and other dependencies we were able to use bleeding edge technologies like Azure CosmosDB, Azure Search, Azure CDN, Redis Cache and Azure Service Bus,” Irwin and Curran went on to say.

“From an IT perspective, we had a blast with this project,” they added.

DriveTime Enhances Employee Benefits with New Surgical Benefit, SurgeryPlus

DriveTime is pleased to announce the expansion of its member healthcare coverage offering beginning January 2018 through Employer Direct Healthcare’s SurgeryPlus®.

 With operations in over 65 key markets across 27 states and growing, DriveTime is the nation’s second-largest vehicle retailer focused solely on used vehicles.  As one of the nation’s largest used car dealers led by industry disruptors, the company is continuously looking for ways to innovate the benefits available to their dedicated employees and their families. The partnership with SurgeryPlus will allow for the company to grow its benefits offering by connecting the company’s employees with a curated national network of elite, high-performing providers at significantly reduced costs. Providers in the SurgeryPlus network have been rigorously screened, significantly reducing the risk of surgical complications and therefore getting employees back to work faster and healthier.

John Zutter, CEO of Employer Direct Healthcare said, “As a true industry leader in the used car dealership space, DriveTime quickly adopted our product and understood the value it could bring to their members.  Our national provider network strongly overlapped with their store footprint, notably in states such as Florida, Texas and Arizona, where the company is headquartered.  DriveTime’s employees simplify the significant, yet oftentimes stressful process of buying a car, and we are excited to have the opportunity to return the favor and offer a concierge healthcare experience for the employees and their families.”

“We’re currently reimagining the entire used vehicle customer sales experience.  We’re starting with listening to used vehicle shoppers, who are telling us they want and we’re delivering used vehicle transparency (posted used vehicle pricing and features, AutoCheck vehicle history), an easy buying process (no dealership back office games, streamlined contracting, informative customer videos, 5-day no questions asked vehicle return program) and digital retailing (online and dealership connectivity, online financing terms).  In the same way, we’re also striving to offer a “reimagined” healthcare experience to our employees. SurgeryPlus is an integral part of that strategy,” said Jon Ehlinger, VP/Communications and Benefits.

SurgeryPlus® will create substantial savings, for both DriveTime and their members, through the benefit’s pre-negotiated and discounted bundled rates with providers.

By packaging surgical expenses into one simple bundled rate, SurgeryPlus® reduces members’ financial stress and burden from unexpected medical bills. Under this benefit, members will only need to meet their plan deductible; all other surgical costs are covered, potentially saving members thousands of dollars.

With SurgeryPlus®, members are provided with access to a dedicated Care Coordinators who educate members on their SurgeryPlus® benefit and simplify the medical experience by managing all scheduling, logistics and transferring of medical records for a white-glove service from start to finish.

About Employer Direct Healthcare and SurgeryPlus

Employer Direct Healthcare is an innovative healthcare service business providing a high-quality and cost-efficient solution for large, self-funded employers and their members. The company’s core product, SurgeryPlus®, is a supplemental, surgical benefit that includes a national network of 100% board-certified Surgeons of Excellence and high-quality facilities. SurgeryPlus covers hundreds of non-emergent procedures with pre-negotiated bundled rates, resulting in consolidated costs for each episode of care. Dedicated Care Coordinators provide full-concierge service to covered members, managing the entire procedure process on their behalf. Employer Direct Healthcare is majority owned by Dundon Capital Partners LLC, a Dallas-based private investment firm founded by Tom Dundon.

Learn more at www.edhc.com or by calling (855) 200-9511. Read the official press release here!

DriveTime Shifts to Meet New Consumer Expectations

Changing how we attract web-savvy consumers and streamline the in-dealership car-buying experience

“To meet customer expectations and cut the time it takes to buy a car, dealers need to provide a “connected retail” experience”, said Mike Burgiss, Vice President of digital retailing at Cox Automotive, pictured below.

“That means dealers should provide technology and tools that allow consumers to start their vehicle purchases online and finish it in-store,” Burgiss said. “The whole process is seamless, and convenient and more efficient and more profitable.”

Start purchases online?

The DriveTime experience: Get your down payment online, shop online for vehicles quickly and easily with full vehicle details at your fingertips.

 

Seamless and efficient in store?

We just rolled out at all of our stores, fewer legal forms and a contracting video with e-signatures to provide complete transparency and put the customer in control of contracting.

We’ve also added 6,000 low mileage, competitively priced vehicles to our inventory. DriveTime is focused on both the “click” (online/mobile) and “brick” (store) experiences of our customers—we are truly connecting retailing.

Read more about what an industry leader is saying about connected retailing and the future of car buying.

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