Auto1 – A young Berlin startup valued at $2.8B | Hacker News Reader

Auto1 – A young Berlin startup valued at $2.8B

techcrunch.com

19 pointsnarmak12 comments

Welcome to .com bubble v2.0

The only things I ever used (and heard of) for used cars that look legit are mobile.de and autoscout24.de. Auto1? This sounds very new - they're not known in Germany or Poland (disclaimer: I'm Polish working in Germany).

Edit: looking a bit more into their website - they do B2B auto1.com and B2C autohero.com. Why everyone insist on calling a simple company a "start-up"? It's just normal company, nothing interesting there ;)

They also run wirkaufendeinauto.de, which practically everybody in Germany knows due to their omnipresent marketing.

Acknowledged, but I must be reluctant to their marketing - seriously never heard of it.

You should watch more stupid-tv. WirKaufenDeinAuto is basically a stupids-scam which buys your car for much less than it's worth. That's why they only advertise on poor-mans-channels where are enough people that need money fast enough so they will throw away money.

The german word for that is 'Bauernfängerei'

Can you explain Bauernfängerei a bit more? The direct english translation seems to be "Egg Catching Farmer", and I don't understand why that represents con artist / confidence trick.

The problem with German is here that it concatenates words without any indication what the break is :)

Your translation is for BauernFängerEi ("farmer catching egg", which doesn't make too much sense), while this is BauernFängerei ("farmer catching/trapping"). "...erei" is similar to "...ery" in English.

I guess the saying comes from the prejudice that farmers are not the smartest people, and therefore people trying to catch/trap/trick/prey on stupid people are called "farmer/peasant catchers".

Ahh! I thought the farmer was the one doing the catching, not the one being caught. (I'd started dreaming up an idiom about "as easy as catching eggs from a trapped hen".) Thank you!

It is the first time hearing this word(seems to be an older word ) but a better translation would be something like "Farmer trap". According to Wikipedia it originated in a war where mercenary groups got farmers drunk and had them sign contracts to have them work for them. Nowadays it's just used as a word to describe a scam where you trick people that don't really understand what they are agreeing to sign a favorable (to the scammer) contract, etc.

"Bauernfängerei" is just another german meaning for deception and has a historical background(farmers were lured into signing a contract to fight in the army).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War

> buys your car for much less than it's worth

Which is clear, if they buy it from you, then sell it to a dealer who then sells it to the next owner. These are two intermediate steps where someone needs to make their cut.

You as the seller would get the most if you sold directly to the next owner, but that is much more hassle for yourself. You have to make appointments with people who want to see the car, test drive it, ask a lot of questions, and then try to bargain for a low-low price.

If you sell to one of their sites, you get less money but it's a very simple and quick transaction.

I think we're at least to 3.0 by now.

The ads on this page redirect my browser and attempt to open the App Store on iOS. Flagged.

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