Driveway
Launching of a national car buying platform
Driveway is Lithia Motors’ digital leap into online car buying and selling. With no existing platform to build on, Detroit Labs partnered with them to tackle the unique challenge of creating a complex, end-to-end experience entirely from scratch—shaping the brand, designing the experience, and leading a 60-person team to deliver a scalable, customer-first solution.
Lithia Motors set out to transform how people buy and sell cars—by replicating the trust and expertise of their nationwide dealership network in a fully digital format. While they brought deep domain knowledge, they were starting from zero on the technology side. They partnered with Detroit Labs to build Driveway from the ground up: a seamless, end-to-end platform designed to meet modern customer expectations and power a new kind of automotive experience.
The Challenge
Lithia wasn’t iterating on an existing product. This was a full-scale ground-up build: a new brand, a new platform, and an entirely new way of doing business. Everything had to work together—inventory browsing, financing, trade-ins, logistics, and support—while staying intuitive for the end user. And it had to perform at a national scale from day one. The stakes were high. Lithia needed a partner who could scale quickly, think strategically, and deliver across the full digital stack.
The Vision
Driveway wasn’t just a product. It was a new business model wrapped in a customer-first digital experience. Lithia wanted to make the process of buying and selling a car online feel as simple and confident as ordering anything else online. For Detroit Labs, that meant helping define the Driveway brand, leading user experience design, building both front and backend systems, owning key features and functionality of the flagship platform, and developing supporting tools like an iPad app for vehicle inspections—all in support of long-term growth.
The Process
To support a program of this scale, we built the largest team in Detroit Labs history—scaling quickly to meet ambitious timelines and bring a broader mix of expertise to the table, which accelerated delivery and expanded our ability to innovate up to around 60 team members across engineering, design, delivery, and product leadership. We embedded with Lithia’s teams to move quickly, stay aligned, and keep a shared focus on customer value.
Key streams of work included:
Brand Development: We worked closely with stakeholders to shape Driveway’s visual identity and tone—grounding the brand in clarity, confidence, and trust.
Core Platform Development: Multiple Labs teams owned foundational components of the platform, from vehicle search to user onboarding to payment flows.
iPad App for In-Store Use: In parallel with the consumer-facing experience, we designed and built a companion app to support in-erspon vehicle inspections.
Collaborative Scaling: We continuously adapted our team structure as the product matured—bringing in new expertise, balancing near-term delivery with long-term sustainability, and maintaining strong communication across all parties.
The Solution
The result was a fully integrated, multi-platform digital ecosystem featuring guided financing workflows and real-time inventory search—two experiences that helped distinguish Driveway from more fragmented online car buying platforms that delivered on the promise of online car buying. The Driveway brand launched publicly with a polished and intuitive web experience backed by robust services and infrastructure. Customers could browse inventory, get trade-in offers, secure financing, and schedule delivery—all from a single platform. Vehicles were shipped an average of 800 miles, demonstrating true nationwide reach.
Internally, Lithia had the tools and systems needed to support the business—plus a flexible foundation for ongoing growth and iteration.
Business Impact
Successfully launched a nationally-scaled car buying platform from scratch
Achieved 4,300 monthly shop-and-sell transactions, with an annual run-rate exceeding 51,000—25% above the original 2022 target
Reached more than 2 million unique monthly visitors shortly after launch; averaged 2.8 million in Q4 2023
Driveway Finance originated over $428 million in loans in Q4 2023 alone
Vehicles shipped an average of 800 miles, reinforcing the platform’s coast-to-coast scale
Expanded Lithia’s footprint into new market segments and revenue streams
Created a long-term foundation for continued innovation and in-house development, paving the way for future capabilities like enhanced personalization, integrated service offerings, and expansion into adjacent digital experiences
