Meanwhile, the established auto dealers are competing with a new breed of dot-com auto sellers, which are using sophisticated databases and other technologies to create interactive tools that can handle the complexities of car inventories and provide consumers with more purchasing information than they were ever able to gain from dealers and conventional print media sources.

CarOrder.com, in Austin, Texas, uses interactive tools such as needs analysis and comparison engines to assist customers in their search for the right car. CarOrder.com, is owned by Trilogy Software Inc., an Austin, Texas, software manufacturer that recently inked a deal with Ford to develop and manage all of the automaker's Web sites.

Joshua Walsky, lead developer for CarOrder.com, says creating interactive tools to help consumers sort through the myriad of makes, models, features, and capabilities of new cars was much more of a technical challenge than they originally anticipated. The Web site relies on many of the tools developed by its parent company Trilogy. For the needs analysis feature that helps a visitor figure out the kind of car he or she wants, CarOrder.com relies on Trilogy's Configuration Solutions software, which supports business rules for sorting out what combination of features are possible with each auto model. The tool works in conjunction with a Microsoft SQL 7 database and in-house and Trilogy-created file structures.

Another tool, a comparison engine, which can take two similar models and compare each one's features side-by-side, also uses the Configuration Solutions from Trilogy with proprietary tweakings. "At first this problem seems very easy, but variables are expansive," Walsky says.

The site also use the Java programming language and its ancillary programming tools, such as Java server pages, to create other tools and support miscellaneous functions, such as an order-processing capability that can estimate a delivery date and assess a customer's financing needs.

CarOrder.com also relies on back-end devices such as an extranet to facilitate communications among its network of auto dealerships, which finalize the sales generated at the site. It uses dual and four-processor Intel machines running Windows NT 4.0 for most of the site and distributes the processing load among many machines, Walsky says.

While most car shopping portals focus on providing as much information as possible to help shoppers make a car purchase decision and then finalize deals through traditional person-to-person means at partner dealerships, some companies such as DriveOff.com, in Denver, are stretching Internet technology to automate nearly every step of the car buying process.

Michael Kranitz, president of DriveOff.com, says his customers can process online all of the necessary paperwork for a car purchase, including financing and registration applications--everything short of actually signing the documents.

The company gets revenue from dealers for the finance and insurance and from financial institutions for loan origination. The company partners with 1,800 auto franchises through the Interactive Automotive Dealers Marketing Association, which is based in Denver and includes dealers in 46 major markets. It used Enterprise JavaBeans and object and relational databases such as Oracle8i and ODI's ObjectStore 6.0 to create and run the site.

Even with the strong growth in online car sales, most dealers--even the most pro-Internet dealers--don't expect online sales to account for more than a small percentage of their business. Still, that percentage is growing as more consumers become comfortable with the idea of making big-ticket purchases online.

"We're starting to do more Federal Express back and forth," JM Lexus' Knapton says, referring to the transfer of documents, such as contracts, registration, and lease agreements, to customers for approval and signing.

It will still be several years before a consumer can transact an auto deal entirely online, given the legal and technical hurdles involved in approving and signing all of the required documents. Even Internet start-ups such as DriveOff.com, which aim for completing as much of the auto purchase process online, still must have customers come in the local dealership to sign forms.

So one way or another, dealer-ships will still play a roll in auto sales for many years. And, besides, there's some things the Internet just can't provide. Says Knapton, "People still like to come in to smell the leather."

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