Car Vending machine opens in Austin

A new addition to the motor mile in South Austin allows car buyers to select a vehicle as if it were a bag of potato chips. Tuesday, Carvana opened a five-story car vending machine.

Carvana has taken car buying to a whole new level.

The company refers to itself as the "Amazon for autos." Shoppers select what they want on the website and within days they can watch it spin out of a five-story vending machine.

Carvana Co-founder and Chief brand Officer Ryan Keeton showed FOX 7 how it works. Just like you'd buy a coke, you select your car and drop a coin into a machine.

"We trigger the system. The machine basically starts, grabs that vehicle, brings it all the way down and escorts it into the delivery bed," said Keeton.

Buyers will wait by a delivery bay for their vehicle to come to them, but Keeton let us watch the process from a place only staff is allowed -- the inside of the vending tower.

"You'll see as we go up, we'll basically grab a car off the pallet. We'll then descend back towards the bottom," said Keeton.

The vehicle then moves down a hall and once it's safe, sliding glass doors open and the owner is handed the keys.

"I think the car machine is everything you can get for fulfillment for pickup but none of the things that come with it meaning sales people, upselling, anything like that," said Keeton.

This is the second car vending machine built in Texas. Keeton says the marketing is working.

"People will bring their families and their friends it's like a gathering right, they're social media-ing, they're capturing, they're showing the video it's really fun," said Keeton.

Keeton expects Austin to be just as successful as the other cities.

"It's a really cool market. It's very I think tech forward. I think it has a nice demographic," said Keeton.