Carrera Motors of Bend is expanding beyond its longtime market of Central Oregon and into Southern Oregon.

On May 1, the dealer of Audis, BMWs, Porsches and Volkswagens will open a used-car dealership and service and rental operation along the Crater Lake Highway in north Medford, near other dealerships.

To house its new Medford facility, Carrera is remodeling an existing 30,000-square-foot building on a 4-acre lot.

“It has plenty of pavement,” said John Younger, general manager of the Medford dealership. “That’s one of the reasons we decided to be there.”

More importantly, Carrera has sold plenty of cars to people from Southern Oregon, but those customers don’t necessarily have a consistent service partner in Jackson and Josephine counties.

“A lot of the customers like to buy here from Carrera Motors, but they wish they had a service option there in Medford,” Younger said. “That was the main reason for looking into the move. The more we looked, the more we realized we could do more on the sales end, too.

Carrera’s expansion into Medford marks its first additional facility in its 30 years of existence.

In choosing Medford, Carrera is joining a city with a considerable car-sales industry. Lithia Motors — the nation’s ninth-largest dealership group, according to the trade publication Automotive News — has its headquarters in Medford.

Younger said Carrera wants to capitalize on Lithia’s efforts to direct car shoppers to the Crater Lake Highway, by way of Lithia advertisements.

At its new facility, Carrera will sell used cars from European manufacturers, including Jaguars, Range Rovers and Ferraris, on top of the German brands it sells new in Bend.

“We’re going to sell a lot of late-model stuff that’s not necessarily new, but close to new,” said Younger, who was general manager of Bend’s Smolich Motors for a decade before joining Carrera.

While Carrera’s business in Medford will primarily be retail in nature, it still sounds good to local economic-development officials.

The new Carrera location will have between 12 and 15 employees.

“They are, by their nature, very skilled jobs,” said Ron Fox, executive director of Medford-based Southern Oregon Regional Economic Development Inc. “There’s a reason I don’t lift the hood of my car.”

What’s more, the opening of the Carrera dealership will translate to a roughly $500,000 investment and bring service for Audis and other cars, which currently isn’t available in the area, Fox said.