With consumer interest in EVs at an all-time high, “instant offer” sites that advertise buying and selling EVs online are popping up everywhere. Driveway.com is one of many sites that entered this market in 2020, and they claim they’ll help you sell your used EV “from your happy place.”

However, we’d like to point out that their “happy place” may not be the same as yours in the current EV market. Here are 5 reasons why NOT to sell to Driveway.com, and where you can go instead to get the best offer for your EV.

Reason #1: An Instant Offer for Your EV Doesn’t Mean an Informed Offer

Driveway.com has a seemingly great feature for the time-strapped EV seller: an Instant Offer generator that gets you a rapid quote valid for 7 days. They’ll only ask for your VIN and a few details about your car.

Unfortunately, speed does not equal quality. As with many other fast quote generators out there, the Driveway instant offer for your EV gets its pricing information from places like Kelly Blue Book (a service which historically hasn’t calculated EV values with much accuracy, especially when it comes to Teslas). Most of the pricing information used by general car buying sites isn’t as informed as it should be.

We don’t like to deal in vague market values. That’s why Find My Electric’s Instant Cash Offer system asks for more information than the fast quote generators out there. Our Premium EV Dealer Network wants to make sure they are getting you the most accurate, up-to-date offers with real research and expert EV knowledge behind them. When our dealer partners reach out to you, their offer is based on an accurate view of the market for your used EV, not a generic estimate.

Remember, if you have any extras on your electric vehicle that increase its value, or possible issues that would decrease value on inspection, the instant offer you get from places like Driveway likely won’t reflect the real value of your car. Which brings us to the next reason not to sell your EV to Driveway.com:

Reason #2: No Haggle Means No Selling Power

When you hate to haggle, the promise of a hassle-free offer from a car company sure is tempting. Driveway.com only makes one offer and promises that it’s “no haggle.”

Unfortunately, “no haggle” means you don’t get a say in your price. By the time someone from Driveway.com arrives to pick up your car and settle the bill, the price is pretty much fixed. That is, of course, unless they find something they don’t prefer on their 30 minute test drive, meaning your offer will likely change, and not for the better.

When you get an Instant Cash Offer from our Premium EV Dealer Network, you are still in control. Real offers from EV dealerships that have some room for negotiation are worth the extra communication! And while it may be tempting to get a “one-and-done” offer from a place like Driveway, having more than one offer from informed EV dealers leaves you with no obligation and only takes an extra minute or two. Remember, when dealerships compete—you are the one that wins!

Speaking of time, let’s talk about one way an offer from a place like Driveway could waste more than a few minutes:

Reason #3: Inspections Happen on Their Time

As with many other sites that make you an instant offer for your car, you won’t deal with any real inspection of your car from Driveway until an employee (or 3rd party contractor) comes in person to see it. That means getting on their schedule and within their timeframe. You may rearrange your entire schedule to wait in your “happy place” and twiddle your thumbs, only to get a call informing you that the inspection needs to be rescheduled.

Worse, Driveway.com doesn’t always have an in-person pickup or inspection person in all regions, so you may be asked to complete a virtual walkthrough of your car if you aren’t close enough to them. But the walkthrough isn’t the bad part; if you are unlucky enough to need one of Driveway.com’s virtual inspections, you may be expected to do the rest of the work, too, by dropping off your car at one of their locations.

We don’t make you wait for a rep to physically visit you. With our Instant Cash Offer system, your inspection is virtual AND our dealer partners arrange pickup of your vehicle from your location. Best of all, the program is available across the continental US.

Reason #4: Communication Isn’t Always a Two-Way Street

One of the problems that large, generic instant offer sites tend to have is variable communication. Return calls from Driveway.com reps may be slow in coming, and you may have more than one agent to deal with each time. After repeating yourself over and over and waiting for the next round of phone tag to start, you might find yourself a little further out of your happy place than you’d like to be.

We don’t want to keep you in the dark when you sell your used EV with us. We’ve vetted and verified each member of our Premium EV Dealer Network, and you can expect them to be professional and conscious of your time. Our EV dealer partners will walk you through the Instant Cash Offer process from start to finish. No more trying to figure out who’s turn it is to make a call! Plus you can reach out to us at any time if you need additional help or info.

Reason #5: EV Knowledge is a Specialized Field

Is Driveway.com legit? In a word, yes. Driveway.com was designed to help its parent company, traditional dealership group Lithia Motors, buy and sell more cars. They’re old hands at the car salesman business and have historically been focused on sales of ICE vehicles. That’s where their biggest knowledge base for inspections, features, and pricing lies (in fact, if you search for Driveway.com reviews you’ll see quite range of opinions, with an average rating of only 3 out of 5 at the time of writing on Trustpilot.com).

But what does that mean for Driveway’s EV game? Let’s just say it’s one we wouldn’t risk playing.

EVs are a very different field of study, and the EV marketplace needs to have specialized knowledge of the ins and outs of electric cars to make accurate sales and offers. That’s why we make sure our EV dealership partners are experts in Tesla and EV-specific features. If you say your Tesla is Autopilot-ready, they ask “which hardware?” When you need to sell your EV, stick to the people who know them best.

Find My Electric: The Ultimate EV Marketplace

If you want to sell your EV from a happier place than yet another generic offer site, check out our Instant Cash Offer. Our trusted and verified EV dealerships know the market AND the cars when it comes to Teslas, Rivians, Ford EVs, and more, and they are 100% ready to make you real offers with no obligation.

We absolutely recommend and stand behind our Instant Cash Offer dealer partners, but we’d also like to point out that there is another way to sell your EV:

To get top dollar for your Model Y, Rivian Adventure, Mach-E, or other EV, you can also sell privately through our online listings!

We’ve got the listing interface down to a science. Forget having to show your used Rivian Explore off next to a gas-guzzling truck or your used Tesla Model 3 next to a hybrid; we’ve designed our site to be EV-specific, user-friendly, and free of all the extra clutter you see on other used car sites.

Check out our pricing page for more info on how we can help you create the best used EV listing out there, or browse our active listings to get a feel for what’s on the market right now!