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In November, New York- and Dallas-based Vroom — part of the growing direct-to-consumer online used-car space — announced it would start providing its services to dealers, as well.

Through an app built specifically for them, dealers can sell their vehicles to Vroom, with the same appraisal process as the consumer-facing side of Vroom’s services. Dealers can also have Vroom create a white-labeled “sell your car” page on their respective websites. Additionally, Vroom’s system is designed to fully integrate with the dealership’s inventory management.

So, it appears at least one of the so-called “disruptive” platforms is looking to involve traditional used-car players in its business model.

And vice versa.

In fact, Cox Automotive — home to such companies as Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book and Manheim — has a group specifically devoted to investing in start-ups, utilizing the company's own assets.

“We literally have a group of people internally who are looking outside as well as looking inside, and saying, ‘Hey, how can we recombine things that we see here to try to create new forms of value,’” Cox Automotive Media Group president Jared Rowe told Auto Remarketing in a late October interview at the company’s headquarters. “Some of them work, and some of them don’t work, but ultimately we’re making that specific investment internally.”

One of those is Cox Automotive’s Flexdrive product, a program the company said is designed to offer a “fresh alternative to traditional car ownership” that allows for weekly or monthly “subscription” to a vehicle rather than permanent ownership.

Another is alt_driver, a relatively new website designed to share car content gathered from social media and throughout the Web, including everything from stunts to videos of classic cars. It already pulls in an audience of 3 million unique visitors each month, according to Cox Automotive. 

Rowe said that with alt_driver, Cox Auto has used “video content to create an automotive intending audience, mainly by leveraging social media.”

He said it’s a “great example of learning how to grow a new form of audience outside of our existing audiences,” and that the company is now working with the alt_driver team and Cox Auto clients to determine how the company can best leverage that audience.

Another way in which the company aims to harness disruption, largely within the Media Group division Rowe says, is “trying to, in a disciplined way, ask the question ‘why?’ of our most strongly held beliefs.”

Rowe explains that further:  “We don’t get to say, ‘We’ve done it this way forever because it’s made us successful.’ We always have to ask the question ‘why.’ Because there’s something we talk about internally (called) the ‘tyranny of truth.’

“As soon as something becomes true, you cease to question it. As soon as you cease to question it, it will become a weakness eventually,” Rowe said. “It’s no different than what our clients have to do every single day. They have to continue to evolve how they interact with consumers. They have to continue to evolve how they manage the F&I process. We have to do the exact same thing.

“So, a lot of what we do in terms of trying to disrupt ourselves is really simply to question what has made us successful or at least what we think has made us successful,” Rowe said.

But perhaps the best example of how Cox Automotive embraces disruption was one within its own house: the 1997 formation of AutoTrader.com.

“And it was started at a time when the newspapers were actually the dominant generators of EBITDA inside of Cox,” Rowe said earlier that October day to media gathered at Cox Automotive headquarters. “So, if you think about the discipline and the foresight it took for that leadership team at the time to say, ‘Hey, we see a disruptive technology coming, and we don’t want to be disrupted by it. We actually want to benefit from it, so let’s build something that will actually focus on eroding our core businesses to a certain extent.’

“That is a great example of how Cox thinks about innovation and how Cox thinks about continuing to evolve their businesses over time,” Rowe added. “There are no such things as sacred cows inside of Cox; we need to continue to invest, grow and evolve.”

And dealers? They're getting in on the action, too. Stay tuned for Part II of this series, where we look at how dealers are using the disruptive model to their advantage.