This Startup Drives Used Cars Right to Your Door

The problem with used cars, at least from the app-centric perspective of Silicon Valley's eager disruptors, is that prospective buyers can’t simply order up a test drive as easily as a pizza. You can imagine the elevator pitch for a startup promising to remedy this injustice: It's like Uber for cars. Well … used cars.

Shift Technologies has for the past year been trying to steal a slice of secondhand car sales from Craigslist, CarMax, and traditional dealerships. In the magical cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, where the marginally more convenient future sometimes arrives first, would-be buyers can now skip the used-car lots and awkward e-mails to strangers with a 2009 Honda Civic to spare. Flush with $50 million of funding led by the venture team at Goldman Sachs, the San Francisco-based Shift plans to take its car-shopping service to 18 more U.S. cities by 2017.