Discuss HN: Crowdsourcing Open Car Maintience Startup Idea?
Have you ever been to a mechanic for routine maintenance? You'll notice they will say you'll need to do this or that or this for your car. Then you'll go to another mechanic and they'll say something completely different. So you then go to your car manufacturer website for the final authority. I mean, they did build it, right? Until you hit a wall.
Look at this for example: http://www.honda.com/ or http://www.bmw.com
Tell me, you need information on maintaining the $30,000 car you just bought. Where do you get it? Apparently you don't. Even Dell has a better site than this.
It's not unless you use your master search engine expertise to end up well, here http://techinfo.honda.com/Rjanisis/logon.asp?Region=US or here http://www.bmwtechinfo.com/.
So the car manufacturers are keeping their mouths shut. Where do you go next? I'm guessing Google and forums, right? Congratulations, by doing so, you entered Anecdotal Evidence Hell which ends up being just as bad as where you first started.
What I propose next is this. The creation of a car website with the equal authority of Wikipedia except for car ownership. It is a website where if a mechanic is saying you need a $600 car repair, you can quickly look it up on your smartphone and see if they are bluffing or might be on to something. For the fun of it, it will also allow you to compare costs of different car maintenance in your area as well as link to some DIY wiki page should you try to do it yourself. It will be the ultimate second opinion for your car.
So what do you guys think?