Does Adam Simms Have a Sale?

So Simms started thinking about selling cars sight unseen over the Internet. He told his friends. They told him customers wouldn't go for it. He discussed it with his wife. Her immediate answer: "Have you lost your mind?" He barreled ahead anyway. One year into AutoChoice's launch, Simms issued a directive to his sales staff to use the Web to locate cars that customers wanted but couldn't get at AutoChoice. Within a few months, the Internet was providing him with one-third of the store's volume.

Meanwhile, Simms noted that more leased cars than ever were streaming back into the market. (Last year, they numbered 3 million, up from 200,000 in 1990.) Simms reasoned that if he could electronically tie into a lessor like GE Capital, he'd know when and where their fleet of cars would be coming off lease. Next, auction houses like Manheim were beginning to aggregate listings of their inventory on the Internet, making it far easier for wholesale buyers to find what they wanted. Finally, consumers were beginning to demonstrate far greater faith in e-commerce.

Simms decided to liquidate AutoChoice's inventory and to turn entirely to Web searches. Suddenly, his company could offer its customers the 11,000-plus 5-year-old-or-younger used cars available in this country at any given time. The superstore, empty of its inventory, would take second seat to a refurbishing center where cars matching each customer's order -- down to engine type, year, and color -- would be thoroughly serviced, both mechanically and cosmetically. Next came a move to San Francisco as well as a name change to "iMotors.com."

"It's been a little scary over the past few years," says Dee, Simms's wife. "We had left a secure environment in Virginia; I was pregnant at the time" with a daughter, their second child. "But I thought that this was Adam's chance to do something really big, that so few opportunities like this come around; he had to take the risk."

The Hard Sell

Simms wanted $10 million in venture-capital funding, and one of his early calls was to Trinity Ventures in Menlo Park, California. "When we first sat down," says Gus Tai, 35, a general partner at Trinity, "I thought, 'Do we really want to do business with a used-car guy? Are these people really trustworthy?' " But Tai decided that he liked Simms's rapidly evolving sense of how to harness the Internet. "We pushed him on what we wanted," says Tai. "Adam would take it in and then come back to us with even better, richer ideas."

Still, people in the used-car business are legendary for reshaping the truth a bit -- and Simms, for all his eagerness to turn his industry upside down, still can't resist the salesman's chance to make a good story better. On one occasion, Simms boasted that his wife handpicked presents for every employee's child at the company's last Christmas party -- a total nearing 1,000, he said. When reminded that, according to his own account, iMotors employed just 150 people in January, Simms, ignoring the math, offers simply: "Okay, maybe there were 850 kids." He also claims to have won three state wrestling championships at Tuscaloosa County High School, a record that the state's high-school athletic association is unable to verify. When confronted with the discrepancy, Simms says only, "I may be able to pull out some medals from those days, but it's doubtful. We may need to give up the ghost on this one."

Yet Simms's energy and optimism has helped him build his company rapidly. Eli Halliwell, iMotors's unlikely cofounder and chief strategy officer, is among his believers. A 29-year-old Princeton grad who mountain bikes and who sports funky, black-framed glasses, Halliwell met Simms several years ago through a mutual acquaintance at Oak Investment Partners. Despite their having different backgrounds, Halliwell says that he was immediately drawn into friendship with Simms. "I'd been at school, spent some time on Wall Street, and Adam was unlike anyone I'd ever met before. He is 100% raw willpower."

IMotors has designed its Web site so that visitors can obtain a price quote on whatever used car they want within about 15 seconds. Users enter basic information such as "make," "model," and "year" before being given an opportunity to customize their order further by specifying colors or options like cruise control. All this is standard fare for Internet shopping, but so far it has proven popular for Web-based car shopping as well. Each month, according to iMotors officials, the site gets more than 600,000 unique visitors and more than 50,000 inquiries by people who indicate at the site that they would like iMotors to provide them with more information.

Shopping from iMotors.com isn't the cheapest way to buy a used car. Recently, the Web site was offering a 1999 Ford Contour lx Sedan 4D with cruise control, power windows, and 22,000 miles for $11,401, while the same make, model, and year, with the same options and with 3,000 fewer miles, was available for $9,988 from traditional retailer Hayward Ford in northern California. Simms nevertheless contends that his inspection, repair service, and warranties make his company the better choice.