General Motors’ new CarBravo platform allows dealerships to sell certified used vehicles of all makes online, but it also replaces GM’s traditional certified pre-owned program for stores that choose to use it. Other automakers are likely to follow the strategy, one expert says.
“It just makes sense,” said Jonathan Banks, vice president of vehicle valuations at J.D. Power. “We have been talking about, how can OEMs partner with dealers to optimize the used-vehicle experience? This is a good way to do that without infringing on dealers’ ability to run their business as they’d like to.”
CPO sales make up only a sliver of the 40 million-unit used-vehicle market. Dealers sold about 2.75 million CPO vehicles last year, up about 5 percent from 2020 and down about 2 percent from 2019, according to J.D. Power. But 16 percent of all used vehicles sold through franchised dealerships were CPO. With CarBravo, GM aims to broaden its CPO share for Chevrolet, Buick and GMC by allowing consumers to view inventory from dealerships beyond their area and by expanding to non-GM brands and company-owned vehicles.
“It should increase sales for certified vehicles because the scale of CarBravo is a lot bigger than what the dealer would traditionally have,” Banks said. “Certified vehicles do better than noncertified from both days to turn [and] from gross profit. Having all your vehicles certified and having this platform to distribute them should be a boon for certification overall.”
CarBravo offers perks such as certification, company advertising and standard warranty coverage on all vehicles. But Chevrolet, Buick and GMC dealers must choose between CarBravo and GM’s CPO program. They can’t use both.
“It allows us to get non-GM vehicles. It’s a transition from certified,” said Dan Ahearn, senior manager of GM’s pre-owned business. “It’s really, from a messaging standpoint, just clearer to have the two separations.”
Dealerships that run their own independent CPO programs can continue to do so and enroll in CarBravo. To participate, a store must dedicate at least 60 percent of its eligible used-vehicle inventory to the program, including non-GM brands, Ahearn said.
Dealers who spoke with Automotive News were enthusiastic about the wider reach they’ll have with CarBravo but said it may not be a solution for everyone.
“Is it going to be for every dealer? I’m not sure. There’s a lot of guys that just feel like what they do is the best,” said Bo Mandal, CEO of Mandal Automotive Group in Biloxi, Miss., and chairman of the Buick-GMC National Dealer Council. “I think it gives us a competitive edge against some of those disrupters in the market like Carvana and Vroom and others.”
Ohio Chevy dealer Keith McCluskey said he expects as many as 1,500 GM retailers to sign up for CarBravo. Choosing between CPO and CarBravo is necessary to avoid mystifying customers with two separate certification programs, said McCluskey, dealer principal at McCluskey Chevrolet in Cincinnati and chairman of the Chevrolet National Dealer Council.
“There’s got to be an alignment and a clarity of the brand. It would be confusing to have certified Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and CarBravo-certified everything else,” he said.
Ahearn estimates that 40 percent of dealers’ used-vehicle inventory is from non-GM brands, and Banks anticipates that at least 40 percent of CarBravo’s inventory also will be non-GM.
“This basically opens up new opportunities to sell non-GM vehicles, to have that certification, to have that exposure,” he said. “I would say if it’s 40 now, I would bet that it’s going to be higher.”
Ford Motor Co. introduced its own online used-vehicle platform, Ford Blue Advantage, more than a year ago. Ford offers two levels of certification: blue and the more comprehensive gold. Gold is equivalent to what’s offered through Ford’s traditional CPO program, said Andrew Ashman, Ford’s U.S. used-vehicle manager.
“We’ve made the program so flexible we allow the dealers to run the business the way they’ve been running it,” Ashman said.
Some of the primary benefits of these programs are the option to list vehicles of competing brands, giving dealers better odds against Carvana and others, and the national branding.
“We’re going to be able to certify a used Toyota with 87,000 miles on it,” McCluskey said. “It’s nice to have an additional national brand out there to get someone’s attention. In our case, if they live in the Greater Cincinnati area or the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana area and they find one of our McCluskey Chevrolet units on that website, that will be sent to us, and that may be a sale that we obviously wouldn’t have gotten on just our advertising.”
Michael Martinez contributed to this report.