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Comment by Kynlyn | Hacker News Reader

What about trim levels? Trim levels are crucial in the buying decision. For example, if you search for a Ford F-150 on your site, there is no way to see if it's an XLT, King Ranch, Raptor, etc. The price and equipment difference in those vehicles is huge.

What about options and equipment? Does the car have navigation? Sunroof? Most consumers have specific option packages in mind when searching for car online.

This is why VIN explosion is necessary for any serious automotive shopping site. If a consumer can't narrow the vehicles down to a trim and option package level then it won't get wide adoption.

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VIN explosion doesn't always return truck trims, as many times the actual truck beds are added after the vehicle rolled off the assembly line.

So they will probably need more than VIN explosion for that; there are some companies that do provide that data though.

Trucks are certainly the most difficult to decode. But if you are using something like ChromeData for the VIN data, and combine that with the info from the dealer's site then you can usually narrow the vehicle down to a specific trim level.

Not always however. Dealers frequently have incorrect or missing information on their websites, so garbage-in, garbage out.

This is why scraping dealer websites for data is always going to be problematic. Far better to work with the providers to have them send you the data. It's faster, easier and you get far better data.

I used to work for a competitor in the same space as AutoRevo =) Chrome was ok, but there was another provider that had exact vin matches in their catalog. It was a bit more expensive, but made it so the trim field was a non-issue. I don't remember the name, it's been too long.

It might have been AutoData, but they have merged with Chrome. Edmunds has a decoder, but it's pretty laughable. I'm not aware of any other major players in that field outside of those.

Chrome offers 1-1 matches on VIN to style Ids for most OEM's, but it's an additional cost.

We'll be adding the trim levels in the near future. We agree it can be very useful when buying a car. Thanks

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