Showroom - New-car research | Hacker News Reader

Showroom - New-car research

showroom.is

30 pointsnicksergeant46 comments

I hate to say it, but it does suck, quite a bit. The interface is nice and clean, but the functionality isn't there.

I tried redoing my recent search for a good SUV-like vehicle. I started off in SUV, hoping I could pick models to compare between. I headed straight for the Subaru section, since I ended up buying an Outback. But the Outback was not there. The CrossTrek, Forester, and Tribeca were there. The Outback ended up being under Cars, even though it is, arguably, more of an SUV than the Tribeca.

Okay, so I found one of the cars I was wanting to compare. How do I choose others? Oh, no way to do that. Okay. Well, let's at least look at the Outback.

I have tabs, that shows me different model years, not much else there. Down the left side are some, but not all of the engine and trim options. Clicking them does...nothing. The main content is a bunch of pretty marketing photos. Finally, at the very bottom is the first actual information about the car. The price and the MPG. I would also say that it has the "Category", but seeing as it says the Outback is a "Car", when it is either an "SUV", "Crossover", or "Wagon", I can't really count it.

Oh, but look, they have an affiliate link that takes me to Edmunds! Finally, a site where researching new cars doesn't suck!

Right now, one searches for a car type and a car model. But that's not really the way I've searched for my last few cars.

Most importantly, I want to be able to:

1. Require a minimum fuel efficiency (e.g. at least 20 mi/gal)

2. Specify a drivetrain (e.g. AWD, FWD, ...)

3. Specify features (e.g. Bluetooth, A/C, ...)

4. Specify a price range (e.g. $20,000 to $45,000)

There's a ton of stuff we can / want to do. The first step is getting the data / photos in the UI, and then we'll innovate in the research space.

Understood. I'm just saying that as an MVP I'm not sure it demonstrates as much value as I'd like. (That's just to me, personally, of course -- I'm sure different people search differently.)

Definitely agree, but we wanted to get this in front of people to garner feedback and reinforce the things we should work on next.

I want to filter out anything with a fuel tank and sort by range. I know that's only a handful of cars right now, but I'm not gonna be buying anything that runs on minisplosions.

You need more filtering on the main lists. Let me filter by price range, high/low brand, size of vehicle, number of seats, engine size, petrol/diesel, air con, sat nav, cruise control... So rather than filtering the cars also filter the model of each car. Help me find the exact model I want.

Then let me create a collection of cars to compare, show a table of data about each car side by side.

Take a look a https://www.google.com/fonts and take some insparation from that for the "comparison" system.

EDIT:

What you want to be aiming for is becoming the Hipmunk of car shopping. show me prices from all the dealers, where can I get a model of car that matches what I want the cheapest

Yep, I actually originally had this in the first version of this app, when it was Auto Swatch: http://i.imgur.com/vvUHt85.png

Those filtering options will be coming soon.

And comparison will be the root of the app once we get rolling. Boiling down your options to a handful of vehicles and then helping you make an informed (and engaging) decision is the point of the app.

On your point about inventory: we'll have all of that. We're using the Edmunds API, and they give us the ability to show inventory near you.

It's a good exercise, but it's not something I would use as my starting point for car research.

- The landing page feels unfinished because most of the page is filled with greyed out icons.

- Once you pick the type of vehicle (cars), you have to navigate through 9 pages of car models. I know that there's a search bar, but it's not what users will see first. Why am I being given an alphabetic listing of cars? You may want to allow users to drill down further by car types, make the search more prominent, and if you have to provide a list of cars, order them by what you think the user will be likely to look at, instead of an alphabetic listing. At the very least, group them by manufacturer.

- Once you pick a car, the information is very sparse. Some pictures, some info about mileage, cost, and then an affiliate link to Edmunds.

The amount of information you get about a car after all that trouble is not even close to what car buyers are looking for. In the end, the only way to do research is to follow the link to Edmunds, so this entire website feels like a way to get affiliate revenue. If you are serious about the website, you may want to provide enough value of your own (Edmunds already makes it fairly easy to browse to the car you want, so that's not a differentiator)

This seems like a good opportunity as the process of researching and buying a car can be so onerous.

I recently helped a non-car savvy friend with his purchase of a Mazda3 and he was overwhelmed by the choices and the process of shopping for a car. Feature research was a primary interest with pricing next.

Feature research will be huge, same with pricing info. If only features weren't grouped into packages and if car pricing wasn't so murky.

Of course, there is a lot of room for improvement as you mentioned. Some suggestions:

- Please focus on the data part, I would want the relevant i nformation presented well, not a bunch of images.

- The default alphabetical sorting is not very useful, sort it by popular/cost/mpg etc.

- Many people don't know what car they want, are you planning to cater to them?

- The icons for van and minivan are identical.

I need something like this, but I don't think this is it.

I don't care at all about photos of cars. I would at some point, but I'm not sure when.

What I need is:

* Each model broken out by every trim (this is 80% of what I need right there) so I don't have to dig through flash-heavy car company websites to figure out what my engine options are

* Comparisons across cars/trims on BHP, torque, and displacement, city/hwy MPG, cabin & trunk space, &c. These are all stats that are readily available but annoying to track down

* Aggregation and summary of existing reviews

* Some notion of the "maturity" of the current model year (what's the last model year that had a major refresh)

* A metric of what the used market for each car looks like for the past couple years

* Some notion of availability and price variability across regions

If this already exists, please someone tell me, because I'm driving a car whose engine is at any moment going to fall out of its compartment and onto the street below, almost entirely because of what a galactic pain it is to narrow down my options.

Also Total Cost of Ownership Comparison- factoring in MPG, Lifetime Expectancy, Maintenance and Operating cost as well as Trade In Values at various mileages. I want to buy value, not hype.

Hey Thomas,

Thanks for the comment. Some great insights here.

Honestly what we have on Showroom right now is not useful. We put this on HN to generate exactly what has happened here: opinionated discussions about what people really want / need from a shopping experience. It's clear (to us) that there can be innovation in this space, and there are a ton of ways to do it.

The thoughts you have are similar to what we've been planning for a while. We want a visual representation of trims for a model - how do they relate to each other, and how do they relate to similar vehicles?

On top of digesting the data that we have (which is a lot), we're going to aggregate stuff from around the web - YouTube reviews, blog post reviews, etc.

Anyways, thanks again for your comment (and not just saying stuff like "this is shit", like other commenters). This is exactly what we posted here for.

Stay tuned :)

It takes some work, but Wikipedia is good at aggregating info like this. Lots of links and info about underlying platform and so forth. Like the 2010 model had this 3.0 engine, but the 2011 has a different 3.0 engine that's more reliable.

I like the idea, but I'd rather have a less glossy and more data-focused approach. How about searching for 0-60 times, limit by 4 seats, limit by price, sort by aggregated reviews, etc.?

I'm pretty familiar with Porsche's lineup (I own one) and the 911 listing is pretty useless (http://showroom.is/porsche/911/). When I click on a 911 Turbo S, I see photos for a Carrera 4 that costs half as much, etc.

A frontend to a MySQL instance where I can fire off queries would be far more useful, frankly. Just remember to sanitize input. :)

Instead of sorting by name, you need to find a better way to order the cars in each category (and allow several sorts, price, mpg, popularity, etc)

There is very little value in showing me 300k Bentleys next to 30k BMWs. It makes navigating the site a real chore, unless I know exactly the model I'm looking for, but then why would I use showroom.is in the first place, right?

This is just our "MVP". We have a lot more planned:

- Better trim organization.

- Actual data on trims (MSRP, major trim features, etc).

- Proper galleries.

- Aggregation of YouTube video reviews, blog reviews from around the web, Edmunds reviews, etc.

- Aggregation of user-submitted photos of models / trims from Flickr, etc.

I would hardly call this an MVP. The site isn't really useable in it's current state. It's a list of cars, with a price and no sorting, filtering, really anything...

Even after i click on a car all it does is show me pictures of it... Not even correlated pictures but it looks like you took the first 5 images off Google. Most of them don't even have pictures of the interior.

If you knew how much work went into getting it to this point, you'd probably have a different opinion.

It doesn't really matter how much work goes into something. That doesn't make it "Viable" or a "Product". Right now, it's only accomplishing "Minimal".

I hate to break it to you, but the amount of work that goes into a product is completely irrelevant. It's all about the usefulness to the end-user.

If the amount of work mattered, we would be digging holes with spoons instead of backhoes.

Unfortunately making this site really, genuinely useful for the typical car shopper is going to be something of a monumental task.

The ultimate tool in this space, which would be an absolute bitch to make and keep up to date, would probably replicate, in a generic way, all the custom "build & price" apps that are on various car manufacturers' websites. It would let you save custom builds of vehicles, each potentially from a completely different vendor, so you could review and compare side-by-side your own custom builds, with pictures, packages, pricing, etc., all arranged in ways that are conducive to comparison. It would be great if you could simply share URLs with friends so they can see exactly what you're considering and give you feedback. Popular builds could be saved publicly and ranked and discussed by the site's community and more.

That is what I would personally envision as a sort of revolutionary tool in this space, but there's probably a reason it doesn't exist. It would be pretty hard to maintain a custom build & price tool that generalizes basically all the custom ones out there--and to then keep it up to date at that.

I like the clean, simple UI.

One improvement suggestion: There's a lot of whitespace because the pics and the text (which is only two small lines) are given equal space for each entry. I'd consider letting the pics take up the full square, putting the title above them, and putting the two bullet points side by side under them.

Other than the pretty interface, what is the added value of using this over just going directly to edmunds.com? Its seems they have much better filters, sorting, etc. edmunds.com may not be the absolution best interface, but its functional, and doesn't seem to difficult.

Right now, your website allows me to browse for pictures of new cars in alphabetical order, or search for pictures of new cars. That's it. Why would I bookmark this site? Why would I recommend this site to others? It doesn't yet serve a purpose.

You have data that you can use to boost your site's functionality. If you gave people sliders for base cost, city MPG and highway MPG, your website would be more useful.

People could look for pictures of new cars on google image search. Maybe you want people to look for pictures of new cars on your site by MPG or price. These are things that your website can leverage right now, all by changing the front end.

Until then, your website is a splash page for Edmunds.

Lesson learned on the tagline. We've killed the "doesn't suck" part. Thanks, HN!

And a note on us calling this an MVP: we've probably used that too loosely. This is more of a proof of concept to see if there's demand in this space. We believe there is, and wanted to show what we are starting with.

There's definite and obvious demand for making the car shopping (and purchasing, especially) experience less painful. It's a sad state of affairs when getting a loan was the easiest part of the experience.

I don't think you've fully decided on the problem you're trying to solve though. Is it comparing my new car options across manufacturers? What are the key deciding factors for someone getting a new car? Who are your customers? Who _aren't_ your customers?

At this point, what you've built is providing no insight into any of those questions for you, except that what you've got so far is not the product for the HN market. :)

I'd focus on those before going further down this road, but that's just one man's unsolicited opinion. I am fairly involved in the automotive industry, however, so I've got some insight.

Appreciate the insight. We definitely are in a super-alpha state where we don't really know what we're targeting yet. And by "we" I mean me and two others, doing this on the side :-p

Hopefully after a few iterations, we can get a better grasp on what we're trying to do and who we're doing it for.

Model/Price/Mileage is practically useless.

Give me a comparison site that allows me compare pricing with similar common options. I don't care if the car is priced "from $20k" if adding an automatic and A/C means $25k.

A good start with lots of promise. I hope this eventually ends up with a full faceted filter system so I can dive down on any category in any order and combination I want and have it offer me a couple options.

It will, thanks!

I wanted to research the following:

(manual transmission OR automatic w/ paddle shift) AND (rear-wheel drive OR all-wheel drive) AND (sedan OR coupe)

Sort by options: power to weight ratio OR 1/4th mile time OR price

For a very specific shopper like myself, this sucks. Can't even compare two cars.

If the OP started integrating more data sources for some of that information, things could get interesting: http://www.albeedigital.com/supercoupe/articles/0-60times.ht...

The downside is whether or not the enthusiast market would really want something like this - I know that review after review told me the new CTS was whooping on the german sport sedans, but after actually test driving all of them, there was an obvious winner on feel alone. I used a ton of online comparison tools, read through dozens of reviews, and still wound up buying against all their advice.

Some of your data is bad. For instance, your pics of the VW Golf (Also NB - synonyms...searching VW results in 0 matches) shows a leather interior...which you can't get in the US.

The pictures and UI are pretty cool, but right now, there's almost no functionality besides seeing some nice pictures of a particular model that you're interested in.

astonished that the first page of "cars" has only one or two that push 30mpg. Anything short of 50mpg just isn't trying surely?!

(of the 20 cars listed here[1] that are except from the London congestion charge, none are lower than 134mpg.)

[1] http://www.nextgreencar.com/congestion-charge-exempt/

Message to the site owner: Congratulations on fail

I tried to think of something positive to say, but really... if you're marketing yourself as something that doesn't suck and within 2 seconds I think "this site sucks due to lack of understanding about car research", you've failed.

Now you have the challenge of recouping credibility. You launched too soon, you didn't say beta, or even better, alpha which could have saved you.

I love the idea, but I want it for used cars. I don't by new cars as I think they're a waste of money.

We'll have data for older-model vehicles in the future.

That's great news.

it looks nice but completely lacking in functionality. at a bare minimum you should be providing some level of filtering to narrow down the results beyond the vehicle category

One thing you may want to add, if you're willing, is a link to a virtual test drive such as the ones done by winding road magazine on youtube. I'm sure they wouldn't mind the traffic, and it gives you a good first impression of how it drives.

But it's a good start. I would love to see something besides car.com, edmunds, or kbb to do a little research. All the info is all over the place and I've ended up having multiple tabs open with the manufacturer websites.

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