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Ernest Garcia

Co-Founder, President, Chief Executive Officer & Chairman, Carvana

Search every verified Ernest Garcia interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Ernest Garcia, chief executive officer of Carvana, discussed the company's recent performance and growth strategy on earnings calls in the last year. On the Q4 2024 call, he described 2024 as a defining year for the company, stating it became the most profitable public automotive retailer in US history as measured by adjusted EBITDA margin while also being the fastest growing. He reiterated the company's goal of selling millions of cars annually and becoming the largest and most profitable automotive retailer. In Q1 2026, he reported record results, including 187,000 cars sold in a single quarter, record GAAP operating income of $581 million, and record adjusted EBITDA of $672 million, and noted it was the ninth straight quarter of being the most profitable and fastest growing automotive retailer. On the Q2 2026 call, Garcia discussed the company's expansion plans, saying there are opportunities across the country and that the team has a clear buildout plan balancing optimal inventory locations with regions where management teams are executing at the highest level. He said the financial returns on growing the company are "extreme" and that the primary constraints are execution-related, such as building facilities and hiring and training people. He also commented on car prices, stating that he believes car prices are high, citing that general consumer goods are up roughly 25% and cars are up 35-40% since pre-pandemic, and that this has to be impacting people.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“There's one state that actually puts out public data about how often title work is submitted on time across all dealers, and that's about 70%. We were approximately as bad as all other dealers at the time that we were getting blown up in the media; we are now way, way better than other dealers at it.”

“When investors basically, you know, through our stock price said you no longer have access to investor capital, we had to also undergo a massive strategy shift to get to cash flow positive on our own very quickly because we did have like a clock ticking because we had this debt with a bunch of interest expense.”

“As AI becomes more important, vertical integration becomes a better answer because horizontal businesses introduce frictions; to give a customer an instant, informed answer you need logistics, finance, inventory and search tightly integrated. Otherwise the agent can't combine the data and provide high-quality, instantaneous recommendations.”

“The used-car market in the U.S. is roughly a 40 million unit per year market — it's probably the single biggest single-product retail market in the world. If you make the experience simpler and cheaper so people replace cars more often, the market could instantaneously grow by about 40% (to roughly 55 million transactions).”

“We were at a place where investors believed in the unit economics and were financing it, so we were running really fast to get to the scale where those economics would show up. Then we got hit by the shocks of car prices and interest rates and we didn't yet have the unit economics, so cash dwindled while we were still losing money.”

“I think the fundamentals were always such that we absolutely should have gotten to this place and, if we do our job from here, we'll go a lot further.”

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