Three words: Bait...and...screw. KBB's "cash offer" will generally be higher than Carvana's. The difference? Carvana will actually PAY YOU CASH for your car. With KBB, you have to take your car to the dealership... and negotiate. (It would be interesting to see if ANY KBB deal is ever actually completed with that value.) Wanna bet they will find enough "imperfections" on your trade-in to reduce their "instant" offer to at or below Carvana's? DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME WITH KBB's INSTANT-CASH NONSENSE. It should actually be illegal.

You won't get what KBB promises - a ripoff! Their fine print says: "the Offer amount may be decreased. Kelley Blue Book and its affiliates are not responsible for Offer adjustments or if a Participating Dealer won't accept your vehicle. Dealers pay a fee to participate in the Kelley Blue Book Instant Cash Offer program." Fact: when I arrived at the dealer, without even seeing the car, the first thing he said was that his actual price would be substantially lower! And he was right! It was about 25% lower than the KBB promise!

KBB Vehicle Valuation Request -- DON'T BOTHER! On August 8th, I began helping a friend who needed to buy a new car and sell her old one (mechanic said he wouldn't advise fixing it anymore). We completed a request for Kelly Blue Book to value the current car so she could get an idea, for budgeting purposes, of what to expect in terms of sale price/trade in value. Just received the KBB response today -- September 10th -- after my friend's been driving her new car for over a week! If it takes 32 days for KBB to provide a valuation, why bother? In today's car market, you have to move quickly or new car options are snapped up and you must then wait weeks for another shipment to arrive, often from overseas. KBB was a major disappointment.

Had to give a star... I think it takes away the legitimacy of the KBB Valuation The process and choice to use KBB came with expectations. Top of list -Professional Accurate Valuation of my vehicle. The calls came in 2x-3x daily, finally answered and went to dealership. Unprofessional people that want to steal your car. 100% abuse of a system. I tried to educate the people in that fact that I WAS NOT born yesterday. I would say it is as aggravating as placing your car for sale in marketplace.

Service is reducing trade-in prices Service is reducing trade-in prices. It used to be that consumers trusted KBB to help them determine the fair trade or resale value of a car. Now, what KBB does is provide obscenely low cash offers AND broadcast those obscenely low offers to every dealership in your local area. As a result, you not only get spammed by every dealership, you also lose out on fair offers for your car because ALL of these dealers know that KBB sent you with an obscenely undervalued offer, so they can offer you one or two thousand above that - or even less than the KBB offer - and appear "generous" when, in fact the trade-in value of your car was much higher. Reported this to the FTC. In my case, every other "Book Value" service valued my car at several thousand dollars more than KBB. I also checked around on the used car prices and private seller sales prices of the same model car - again several thousand higher than KBB.