Carsabi Opens Access To Car Data (Apparently Green Cars Are Cheaper?) | Hacker News Reader

Carsabi Opens Access To Car Data (Apparently Green Cars Are Cheaper?)

carsabi.com

26 pointsraccoonone13 comments

Is it possible to get a view that shows average price AND the number of samples (maybe if you mouse over a column) at the same time? Or maybe some info about stuff like variance, stdev, median, etc?

Trying to figure out why green cars are cheaper:

It looks like green cars are mostly from 97 to 2003 in a roughly normal curve, while most other colors are exponential (so mostly from the last couple years instead, and dropping off dramatically once you reach 2005 and older). Not counting purple, which has 8 samples and is therefore mostly useless, hah.

Ya, I'll add that to our list of feature requests. Would definitely like to put some more features in, to help people with blog posts or other research in the car space.

Ah yes, I would seem that green cars are going out of fashion, dunno who would want a purple car =P

If you're buying a Benz, it's a good way to save a few bucks...

Green cars aren't cheaper, but people that choose the color green also choose cheaper cars on average when compared to people that buy any other color.

Since the price of a use car is to a large extent determined by what the market will bear, doesn't that amount to the same thing?

Not necessarily. If you say "I will only buy a car that's green," and money is no object, you are likely to spend less money than if you buy a car of any other color. However, if you want a 2009 Honda Civic, a green one may not necessarily be cheaper than a blue or black one.

My theory is that there aren't many green luxury cars out there (think black!), but plenty of cheap commuter cars that are green. Another theory: younger people want green and younger people happen to spend a lot less on cars on average.

I went looking through the categories and the only time green is not the cheapest is when it's a station wagon. In that case, red is cheaper than green, but not by much.

How do you get the car data? I see you have data from cars.com do you have custom code that scrapes the data or do you use some known tools?

Thanks

They used to get it from Craigslist. The listings were directly linked to Craigslist listings. I see that they don't do click-outs any more so I'm curious as to where they are getting them from too. By the way, I had done the same thing about 2 years ago but had to stop after realizing that scraping Craiglist was against their terms of use.

The uniformity of buying recommendations makes this seemingly useless. I looked up 4 very different make and model combinations and every recommendation was "Buy a 2009-2011 for the best value"

But it's neat that greens are cheap.

oh yeah, this has nothing to do with what you should buy - we just built the tool after a few beers this weekend because it seemed like it would be cool to easily visualize every car for sale in SF... hope its enjoyable!

also - we are building a comprehensive recommendation engine for the top 50-100 models by collecting everything from EPA & NHTSA safety data to style awards and max lifetime mileage. this is probably a month out and has required getting pretty creative about crawling a number of heterogeneous data sources

Awesome, I'm looking at getting a car and a resource like this would help a lot.

Interesting. Apparently for Hyundai cars green is the most expensive. :p

For Volvo, red is slightly less expensive than green. Benz and Honda cheapest in purple. A couple others have black, silver, grey and white. Not sure why this is so interesting.

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