Show HN: AutoGlance is the Hipmunk for Used Car Searches

This is stupendous! I've done these kind of car searches many times and this is a huge improvement. Seriously wish I had this for my last car search. Well done!

- The lineup and grouping by price, sort order and "worse deals" are all done right. This is a pretty big deal. Congratulations.

- The "generations" are excellent data to have. Great value for the user.

- It would be nice to know that there is a real picture awaiting my rollover or at least a disclaimer on stock photos if that's possible.

- It's not clear that I should click on the car for more information. I wanted at first to click on the bluish price on the rollover. Maybe just put a little "click car for details" at the bottom of the rollover window.

- Rounder mileage levels would really help. If there were tick marks on each row for 25K increments, that would be the most help.

- It would of course be nice to refine the search.

- Sluggish like crazy at the moment, which I understand.

OP: Please note that you can fit a line that predicts price based on the mileage (linear regression). For any car that the actual price is smaller than the one predicted is a good deal - that's what you want to have most visible. Obviously, you can use more variables for predicting the price, but the point is that cars that deviate from the fitted curve are either a bad deal or a good deal and that's where machine learning gives you monetary value on your web service. You could make even one step further give API for other websites to use your "bad deal"/"good deal" prediction engine and set your revenue this way.

[EDIT] The more variables you add the more accurate your model can be. You could even use NLP to extract the narrative about the car. You would disrupt KBB, by providing more user friendly interface. It does not have to be the visuals but just the fact that you can boil down the number of all cars that sell down to a hand full number of cars that deviate from the fitted curve. Even if you are not able to tell whether the deviation makes it a good or a bad deal, you are selecting a smaller number of cars worth looking at than any other website. At least you build a time sever which is worth money, too.

[EDIT2] I think I had an epiphany. The distance from the fitted curve is a buyer's risk. Someone comes to your website and you ask what car and what risk. Some people don't want a good deal, they want a fair deal; they want a car that is priced just right. Others might venture to get cars that are outliers, maybe those car have an engine modification or someone is in a rush to sell. In any case you would have a criteria for searching cars that no one has. KBB gives you the sound and fair deal prices but yours index could be calculated in near-real-time and thus more accurate. All depends how you implement regression model.

Note to self: excellent data mining application with interesting visualization

This really distills the car search information down to exactly what I want. Presented in such a way to where I get a feel for what the meta trends are, as well as the best/worst deals (or other anomalies). Very nicely presented!

Feature Requests:

- The ability to search for sub car models (Subaru Forester XT vs Subaru Forester), it looks like some higher end models might be filtered as worse deals at the moment.

- It would also be nice to have a free text field to search for other misc specific car features in the listings.

The "X is the Y for Z" line only works if Y is really popular and the whole analogy is easy to get.

In this case, I don't know what Hipmunk is...

Great analogy. Wonderful presentation.

I've been using autotempest.com to search across several sources but it is like rocks to a hammer when you compare the UI.

For rare makes (Triumph, Fiat, Delorean) I would like the ability to search only by make and for much larger radii. The only Fiat showing is the new 500, but there are plenty of older models available across the country.

Very cool! Not sure where the data is coming from, but no results near my ZIP code (95129) for Acura NSX even though there are plenty on AutoTrader and Craigslist.

Having attempted the creation of a number of flight search products I am sympathetic how hard it is to get this sort of data - you either pay lots of money for it or you screen-scrape. Ick.

But, overall, awesome!

This is really great. As a suggestion I would put the prices rows (From 8K, 12K etc) outside of the grid and the grid will just contain information of the current car, being easier to eye scan. X axis: Kms/miles Y axis: Price For the tooltips saying ("14 cars that are worse..") that could be on the right side. But not sure about this one.

Sorry to all who are having issues using the site, our server is getting killed right now. We're doing our best to keep the site running, here is a screen shot in the mean time: http://minus.com/m5EvCsoTv#1

Nice work.

My suggestion would be the ability to add a simple tag next to each vehicle. I could then scan the vehicles and mark which ones are off the list or I should follow up on.

In canada auto trader rules: they seem to have every car for sale listed, both by dealers and private. Its nice to only go to one place, but will these data owners pull out on you?

I select Make, then Model just holds on "Loading..."

Doesn't seem to work, at least in my area. I'm getting zero results on some pretty common cars.

Really neat interface, but all of the cars I clicked were no longer available.

What's the reason for not offering more scope limiters?

What is the hipmunk for car insurance again?

Do you have an email you can be reached at?

unable to view the site

nice..saves lots of my time getting a good car :)

wow, this is awesome

This is great! I am in the used market at the moment. But, I am not looking for one specific make and model of car. I am trying to spend 4k or less and I have some parameters like mileage, must have a clean title, etc. So, the search experience is a bit too rigid -- most places where I can select one, I'd like to select many. But the results display is way, way better than anything I have used.

Lastly, I feel like a lot of cars (at least in the price range I'm looking) are sold on craigslist, which isn't used as a source here, for good reason I'm sure.

I've been working on almost exactly the same project, and a very similar way of displaying the best deals.

The main roadblock is not the UI, but the car data source. It looks like he is parsing other sites, and displaying their data. This is illegal for most sites, unless he uses their API or has a deal with them.

What data are you using?

...sorry if there's a faq, still offline

What data are you using?