Regardless of whether you love cars or not, you probably aren't a fan of the process to actually buy one. Visiting a dealership to purchase a car—new or used—is a gigantic hassle. First, you have to persuade them to let you test-drive one, and success usually means 10 minutes on side streets with a salesperson sitting next to you. Then there are the hours of negotiation, full of obfuscation and upselling. The salesdroid often does their best to get you to sign a finance agreement that's most beneficial to them rather than you, the customer. Unsurprisingly, a recent poll found that most of us are deeply unsatisfied with the entire process.

The poll was commissioned by Beepi, one of a number of startups that's trying to use the Internet to change the way we purchase our vehicles in much the same way Amazon revolutionized the book market. According to Beepi, three in five Americans feel like they're being taken advantage of when it comes to buying a car, and the dissatisfaction is greater the younger you are. Tellingly, 34 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds would rather wait in line at the DMV than go to a dealership; 24 percent say they'd even rather have a root canal.

"For decades now people have been buying a car the same way their grandparents did," said Alex Lloyd, Beepi's head of content. "It's not a very pleasant experience."

Beepi got going in 2013, inspired by founder Ale Resnik's experience of buying a lemon of a car that caught fire shortly after leaving the lot. "After successfully suing the dealership, that spawned his mission," Lloyd told Ars. "What we do differently is, everything's online. We deliver it straight to your door, we handle all the paperwork."

All the cars for sale on the site have been subjected to a 240-point inspection conducted in one of 16 hubs around the country where Beepi sources stock. "We don't accept old cars, they have to be relatively new. They come with a three-month, 3,000 mile warranty and a 10-day money-back guarantee, so it's effectively like a 10-day test drive—no questions asked, if it's not the car you thought it was, we'll pick it up and take it back. And because we have no brick and mortar overheads like a dealership, the prices are considerably better," Lloyd said.

Beepi sources its cars from private sellers. Once the car passes the company's inspection, it agrees on a sale price along with a promise to buy the car for that amount should it not sell on the site within 30 days. "Usually they sell within two weeks, so the car remains with the seller. Once it sells we pick it up, take it to one of our facilities, and have it checked again, detailed, and then have it sent to the buyer. We don't really maintain any inventory," Lloyd explained.

Beepi isn't the only game in town; Carvana is another (ever-so-slightly older) startup with the same goal. "In an industry where there hasn't been much innovation in the past 75 years, that lack of innovation still results in someone having to go to a physical dealership even though they've spent more and more time online finding the car they want," Ryan Keeton, one of Carvana's co-founders, told Ars. "That four hours they waste at a dealership comes at a cost. If you look at some of the publicly traded companies like CarMax it averages out to $2,000 or so, and that's all passed to the consumer. What do you get for that?"

Like Beepi, Carvana's stock gets inspected and photographed before going online, although unlike its nationwide rival, Carvana is focused on a number of key markets around the country (currently 14 and expanding to the Washington, DC, area in the near future—although it will deliver cars nationwide). Buyers get their car delivered along with a seven-day no-questions asked return policy, and all the stock is subject to a 100-point inspection before being listed. However, Carvana buys all its stock outright (based on algorithms that calculate what cars might be in demand) rather than acting as a peer-to-peer service.

"When we first launched Carvana, it wasn't just saying 'let's be the next Uber for this,' we looked at it from an economic perspective—what are those costs, why are they passed on, and for a new and better experience what do we have to build?" Keeton said. "The reason it takes so long at a dealership is financing. They don't have integrated financing technology, they don't enable you to quickly understand what your terms are going to be. We built a proprietary financing algorithm to let people get actual financing terms in sub-second speeds for every car in our inventory. Consumers have 100-percent transparency. If it's a $1,000 down-payment and you want to put another $500 down, you'll see how your APR goes down. If you're happy with those terms you click on a button and those terms are the terms that are on your contract."

Neither company was prepared to share sales volume, but both were happy to tell Ars they were growing—Beepi by 95 percent over the first half of the year, Carvana now being the second-largest retailer of used cars in the Atlanta market (where it launched). Perhaps both companies' biggest challenge right now is gaining mindshare. Will they spell the end for the traditional used car dealer? All of those root canal-preferring young people may hope the answer is yes.