There is now a car vending machine, and it is five floors high

Vending machine have all but changed the way we buy products. While they’re still not as ubiquitous in our country as they are in other parts of the world, the convenience of dropping in a few coins into a fridge-sized machine and having the likes of a bag of wafers, chocolates or even electronic gadgets pop out of them is undeniable.

Now a company in Nashville, Tennessee, may have just taken this concept to an altogether upscaled level: they’ve built a building-sized vending machine that dispenses… cars. That’s right, using the familiar ‘dropping a coin into a slot’, customers of an online car dealership called Carvana can now buy their favourite wheels like they do Lay’s wafers.

Carvana already does have a car shopping website where customers can browse, compare, select and buy through their portal. While this process is largely comparable to other car shopping websites, it’s the fulfilment and delivery that is unique. With the money saved when customers opt to pick up the cars themselves, Carvana came up with the idea of putting this money into delivering a revamped car delivery experience.

At the time of delivery, customers actually receive an oversized coin that that they drop into a vending machine-type slot. This sets a chain of events into action within the massive vending structure: the buyer’s car of choice gets retracted by a robot and handed over to another robot that drives the car down to a bay, where the customer can walk up to it and inspect it. Interestingly, the funds for the actual payment of the car are not made at the time of slotting in the coin, but only after the new owner actually drives it out of the parking structure. And if customers are not entirely sold on the legitimacy of a vending machine car, the company offers a 7-day no-questions-asked return policy.

Even with the high up-front cost of building the automated car vending machine being high, the company expects significant savings by way of fewer staff needing to be employed, renting lesser real estate and stocking fewer cars. The pomp and spectacle of the system notwithstanding, the car vending machine actually enables them to sell their cars for up to $2,000 lesser.

Watch it in action: