The firm that bought my car for more than I paid new has lost 98 percent of its value

A Chicago firefighter checks a crushed car at the scene where a four-story building partially collapsed due to an explosion on Chicago’s West Side on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2022.

E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune via Getty

Carvana, the used car dealer that trusts robotic algorithms to buy your car practically sight unseen, was the third-fastest company to ever make it onto the Fortune 500 — only Amazon and Google did it faster. But for the third day in a row, its stock is trading for just around $7 a share, plummeting 98 percent from its all-time high of over $360 last August.

Image: Google

All of Carvana’s pandemic gains, wiped out

My first thought on reading the news: maybe the company shouldn’t let robots pay people more than their cars cost brand-new? This February, I sold a seven-year-old car to Carvana for more than I paid out the door and wrote a story about the perfect storm of factors that led to that outcome. (Stimulus...