I love Alex comment as it couldn't be closer to my thoughts:
"but mostly because it all just looks like a big payday for Cox, Chip, and Executive Staff. It isn't about evolution or heart."
I know that some ATC people will dislike my comments and will come charging to defend their company. I understand, I would have done the same but let me tell you where you should be looking at: Who is hiring.
IMO autotrader started to lose revenue a few years ago as the market changed, websites like Craigslist created an impossible to win-over competition, and dealers realized that $10,000 (or more!) per month to be on ATC wasn't worth it. With great cash reserves they went on the hunt and bought a few great companies. Maybe.
KBB may lose a lot of its value with the new creation of this reputation and review business. While right now customers only review businesses for the most part. Pay attention and check sites like Nike.com, customers don't review Nike as a company but their products. The fact that customers could now quickly review vehicles, their reliability, consumption, comfort, etc may take a lot of relevance to KBB.
vAuto is an absurdly great tool, but without a patent to hold much of what they do there will be 10 other tools with in the next year. Maybe (just maybe) the auction houses will stop their data flow as they realize that since the customers knows the price point of the transaction now they are not making as much money as before. Without ATC having everyone in their site like they sued to have and the auctions holding their data, these tools are dead in the water.
Homenet was probably one of the best companies they bought, but their main team including Jesse Bitter is gone. With recent events and a loss of 40% of their business (rumored) it may be the first victim of the new conglomerate.
Vin solutions is actually the asset that will grow the most. Although I don't believe in the integration of all departments in the dealership (I've seen it to be impossible to manage even with a full time guy on it) it has a great selling pitch. John Holt said at Driving Sales after Chip Perry bragged about Vin that he had tried that and dealers always want to have the best tool for each part of the process. I believe that to be true and for that I concentrate my efforts on having the best system to sell cars.
All that being said and back to Alex, in paper all these companies look great but in real life I see a lot of holes. If you don't agree with me and think that I'm an idiot you can speak louder than what I can write--get the savings out of your bank account and put it all in Autotrader stocks.
....the fun part when a company goes public 
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