Chesterfield Carvana facility opens with 240 employees

Fortune 500 used car online retailer Carvana Co. is more than halfway to its 400-employee hiring goal for its $25 million, 191,000-square-foot Chesterfield County inspection center, General Manager Robert Sheets said Wednesday at the center’s ribbon cutting.

Carvana has hired 240 employees and expects to reach 400 workers when it begins full production later this year. The company started training employees at the end of June.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin attended the ribbon cutting and toured the facility at 15100 Woods Edge Road, near the county’s border with Colonial Heights.

“This is the final step of a real vision that got interrupted by the pandemic,” he said, “and this path to normalcy takes lots of twists and turns. That path to normalcy here in Carvana was all about persistence and fortitude, and finishing a project that needed to be finished.”

The project has had a bumpy road following its initial announcement in December 2019. Carvana paused the project amid the pandemic and then announced it would move forward in April 2021.

The Chesterfield center is Carvana’s 18th inspection center in the U.S., Sheets said.

“Our inspection centers are where we repair, recondition and prepare vehicles for sale on our online platform,” Sheets said. “Vehicles sold from our inspection centers can find their way to customers anywhere in the country.”

The facility launched operations with one production line, but Carvana plans to have three lines running by the end of the year.

“I would say by [the end of] November we would be ramped up where we would have about 400 people here and three production lines,” Sheets said.

The facility has capacity for eight production lines, he added, which would likely require more than double the 400 employees being hired now. There is no defined timeline for a further expansion, he said.

“Approximately 10,000 vehicles will be housed on this facility at one time,” Sheets said. Carvana employees perform 150-point inspections on each car. The center has “domes” to take 360-degree photos of vehicles for its online listings.

The target for one production line is 160 cars per week, and the facility would inspect and recondition about 480 cars a week by the end of the year. Should its production expand to eight lines, the center would complete inspections on almost 1,300 cars a week.

Carvana currently has nearly 350 employees across Virginia. The online retailer also has a car vending machine — a large metal and glass tower with stories of cars — that opened last November in Richmond. Buyers can choose to pick their cars up from that vending machine, so some cars from the Chesterfield center could end up there.

At the opening of the facility, Del. Carrie Coyner, R-Chesterfield, praised the company. “While people will ooh and ahh over the Richmond vending machine, which I admit is pretty darn cool, it will be this quiet, hard-working inspection center that ensures that vehicles are ready to keep our roads safe,” she said.

Founded in 2012, Carvana is based in Tempe, Arizona, just outside of Phoenix. It has more than 75,000 vehicles for sale online. In 2021, the e-commerce company reported $12.8 billion in revenue, a jump from $5.59 billion in 2020, and sold 425,237 vehicles.