Mark Miller Subaru launches Carvana-style sister website

If you build it, they will buy. That's the idea behind the latest creation from Chris Hudson and his team.

Hudson, general manager for Mark Miller Subaru in Salt Lake City, and his crew assembled a digital purchase path that removes the salesperson and puts the human in total control.

"Promise Path is the name of the journey,” Hudson told CDG News. "It’s the path the buyer walks from first click to keys-in-hand.”

Driving the news: The group launched Promise Path Saturday on the group’s website (we’ll get back to that).

If customers change their mind, they can “pull the handle at any time” and get a human on board, Hudson said.

They call it the "keep the dealership, skip the salesperson" option.

How it works: Buyers go to the page and click a “skip the salesperson” button to begin the journey.

Choose: They can pick from inventory or build a custom order, with a personal concierge available throughout. And, yes, the AI concierge has a name. It’s “No Sell Nell,” and she is available 24/7, Hudson told us.
Pricing: Instant upfront pricing is offered, plus an instant cash offer on any trade-in and a full deal sheet covering cash, finance, and lease options.
Trade-in: A firm trade offer arrives within three business hours, redeemable whether or not the customer buys.
Credit and documents: Submit a credit application, driver's license, and insurance card; cash buyers also complete a short federally required form. This unlocks a final deal sheet based on approved credit.
Final review: Review and accept the final numbers based on approved credit.
Delivery: A delivery specialist brings the car (with paperwork and a walkthrough) to the customer's home or office, or the customer picks it up at the dealership, where any trade-in is collected at the same time.

Even a fully digital deal ends with a human handoff.

Hudson said the group still runs a delivery process to stay in compliance and to give the customer their choice on how they will collect the new car.

(Deliveries within a 50-mile radius of the store are free; a fee applies for further out).

Between the lines: Hudson said the group's pricing strategy, Promise Price, allows their model to work.

Launched in 2015, Promise Price is the group's one-price model: A fixed, market-based price with no negotiation baked in, paired with product specialists instead of salespeople and no markup on interest rates (they sell at buy rate).
That structure, in place for a decade-plus, is what let the group move into a Carvana-style purchase flow because there is no price haggling needed.
Regarding the Carvana comparison, Hudson said their model is kind of like the best of both worlds: A frictionless buying experience with the comfort of a dealership and its humans to help if needed, and to service the cars, too.

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The $64K question: So how are they able to do this and say they're in compliance?

The Promise Path option exists as the primary message on the company's main page, not the specific dealership sites. (The group also owns Mark Miller Subaru South Towne in Sandy, Utah.)

Hudson said promoting Promise Path on the group site gives the team room to customize messaging that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

"If we were to try to do that on the Subaru sister sites, it would not have been as easy, because there's requirements for us to have different things on the websites," Hudson said. "With this group site, we can make it however we want it to look to market this new way to purchase a car."
The group site also hosts a separate AI tool: A chat widget that helps shoppers narrow down inventory before buying.
It was built in-house using an MCP, a custom knowledge base, and a system prompt. It lives on markmillersubaru.com and will be on the sister sites this week.
Hudson noted people can feed it intel, such as if they have kids and a dog, so it can help match them with a vehicle.

Later this week, a "skip the salesperson" call-to-action button, plus the widget, will go directly on individual vehicle display pages on the Subaru sites themselves.

That is allowed, Hudson said, but promoting it prominently on the Subaru sites is not.

What they're saying: Hudson, who spoke to CDG News this week about in-house AI tools, also has taken part in what he believes to be the first AI agent-to-AI-agent deal, which he discussed during a Daily Dealer Live podcast appearance in March.

"There's no emotion, there's no heart; it's all parameters with the agent,” he told host Sam D’Arc back then.
He described Promise Path as an effort to protect the emotional parts of car buying while stripping friction from everything in between.
"The invisible middle is what we are solving towards," Hudson said. "Working towards being the UberEats of the franchised auto dealership."

Odds and ends: The group completed about 40 transactions before the launch, running a blend of internal employee deals, select guests, and select internet leads through the process to fine-tune it before going live this weekend.

While the group isn't yet offering a human-less service experience, the goal is to have the same transparency and reduced friction in that department.
"We will still be their servicing dealer and offer a similar experience in service,” Hudson said. “We aren't quite to the human-less option in service, but we are completely transparent and remove the friction."

Looking ahead: Hudson said Promise Path will keep evolving based on how customers actually use it, particularly around F&I.

The group already shows every product to every customer, he said, and plans to start tracking how often specific products get used to build that data into the buying flow itself, similar to option-selection prompts on airline booking sites.

"As time goes by, we're going to try to fine-tune this," Hudson said. "One of the ways that we're going to do that is by adding a percentage of time that products get used. We're working with a couple of different companies to help us with the awareness and the value of the different F&I products."

At press time for this story, three potential customers were at different stages of the Promise Path journey.

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