Show HN: InstaMotor – Taking the pain out of selling your car
instamotor.com
instamotor.com
A "voting ring" is when people get friends to upvote their stuff. This is against the rules. We want stories to be on HN because they're good, not because they were promoted.
It's sadly common for a great Show HN post to get demoted because its creators, eager to get it on the front page, tried to game it. I've noticed a pattern, too: usually their gaming technique is pathetic. Perhaps that's because they're creators, not promoters. Unfortunately, it has the side-effect of making it certain that the ring detector will nail their otherwise good post, while we carry on the real cat-and-mouse game with people pushing crap.
I've got what I believe will be a sweet solution to this problem, but it awaits time for implementation.
Please everybody, don't ring-vote your posts; just take your chances with HN's randomness. If a post is solid and hasn't gotten any attention yet, a couple of reposts is ok. Be careful not to abuse that, though, since we penalize accounts for reposting too much.
I'm going to demote this comment as off-topic so it won't get in the way of the real discussion. Send any moderation questions to hn@ycombinator.com.
I email my friends (that read HN) about finally going "public." Because they are my friends and they've heard about my ideas and work for a while now, they up vote.
Thanks for the note. Yeah you're right. We'll make the update to clarify that. We had it as "saved" before, but that didn't seem to make sense. Still trying to find the right wording, but we'll update it today or over the weekend most likely. Thank you!
I jest of course. I think going for the simple "Get more cash out of selling your car." Is probably the simplest.
Dealership pays you: $5,000 InstaMotor pays you: $5,500 --------------------------- You get paid an extra: $500
I had the same issue. Couldn't figure out the 'you earn' part for a solid 30 seconds or so.
Dealership pays you: $5,000
InstaMotor pays you: $5,500
---------------------------
You get paid an extra: $500I think showing what they make from a dealer, then what they make from you like this:
Dealer Trade In: 10000
With InstaMotor: 10500 (+500)
The big "selling" point to me is: this is really easy -- and it won't cost you anything extra in time or money. In fact, you could end up getting more money for your car and with almost zero effort. Which, I think the copy does a good job of.
While I know what you are saying reading it quickly seems like you give 80% less than a dealer. That you are a worse deal. Might want to rephrases it just a bit.
I think something like "that's an extra x with InstaMotor" or "Make X more than the average" It's hard to restrict it down to just one word -- don't do it if you don't have to. I was very confused by earn at first.
Maybe instead "Make 2,000 more with Instamotor"
Unless you have time & money to burn, you really should never never never trade your car into the dealership. It's the worst price you're going to get along the used car supply chain. And even if you think you're getting a good price, it's because you're probably pairing it with buying a car (and paying too much for the car you're buying).
The worst-case used car dealer supply chain works like this (going backwards):
* You buy a used car for $20,000.
* The used car dealer bought it from a wholesaler for $19,000
* The wholesaler bought it from a wholesale auction for $18,000
* The dealership who sold it at auction paid $16,000 as a trade-in.
(*I saw worst case because not all of these steps happen each time)
Note the chain begins with trade-in -- because dealerships know that people who are trading in are pressed for time and want a no-hassle deal. But in doing that, they're giving up $thousands to each step along the chain.
So when selling a car - going direct (or using a service like InstaMotor) is always going to net you more $$ than trade-in.
And now ya know :)
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/513/1...
In fact, I used a lot of the knowledge from '129 cars' to help with a recent purchase of a Jeep (not from that dealership, sadly). I'm going to write up a blog post about the experience - I learned a lot and it should be helpful to others.
Also, don't forget the tax benefit you get by the lower price of the care you're buying. Not sure if this is new cars only but that offset can be thousands, depending on the trade-in value and new car cost.
To explain (for anyone not familiar since the way you phrased it might be confusing):
New car price: $30,000 Your trade in: $10,000
Net price: $20,000
So Sales tax 6%20,000 vs. 6% 30,000 (example of a state with 6% st)
If you sell the car yourself you can still use it as a trade in if you can coordinate with the dealer and your buyer and do what is known as a courtesy trade.
But you have to get the buyer to show up and take your used car when the dealer delivers your new car. The dealer does the paperwork and usually charges a few hundred dollars or less for handling the sale. It is well worth the trouble if you can get the cooperation from the buyer.
The average dealership doesn't know if they're going to keep a car for their own inventory or going to sell it at auction/wholesale until they own it. Standard procedure is to purchase a car (purchase = take it on trade-in/buy it) and then have the mechanics inspect it to see what it needs done on it to get it back out to sell. If it's too expensive, they wholesale/auction it. This means, 90% of the time, they default to offering you the lowest value.
However, anyone with a half-decent credit score can get a loan from a bank or credit union. Those loans almost always have a better rate than a dealer will offer on a used car so you not only save thousands on the principal but you'll end up paying hundreds less over the term of the loan.
I just cannot fathom how people can walk on a dealer lot and buy a used car without taking one minute to look up the market value on KBB. There's just no way you wouldn't feel ripped off.
CC, it's actually a little more insidious than that; dealerships have always survived on the asymmetry of information between dealer and buyer. Not to sensationalize, this happens in roughly 30% of sales, (usually by the sales person without actually thinking about it)... 1. A person has seen a car online that they want. They may do the legwork and research the car. 2. The walk into the dealership looking to buy the car. The 1 thing people don't think about (generally) is the financing. 3. They find out that they don't have the credit, income, etc... to actually finance that car. 4. The sales person "places" them on a new car, one that they haven't researched. 5. The buyer gets caught up in the moment, falls in love with a car etc... They buy the car for way more than its worth.
This is why Dealers hate companies like TrueCar. It destroys the asymmetry. It's also why dealerships are getting squeezed; the average deal takes a few hours, in that time, people can use their phones to check the car they're buying.
It's an interesting dynamic.
A car dealer can put a short or longer term warranty on a car that gives a buyer confidence.
If you are buying a used Honda from a Honda dealer who is reputable (and my guess is that is 99% of them are or they wouldn't remain franchised), as opposed to the local used car lot, you generally and on average are going to have better purchase security than buying a car from a stranger that does not come with any warranty or guarantee.
A car dealer also has (in theory) experienced salespeople who know how to drag the most money out of a buyer and exploit their weaknesses. You as a private seller don't. So you will (on average not the exception) not be able to get as much for the same car as the dealer will.
This is not to say that the idea presented by the OP won't work (because they appear to be adding a level of guarantee to the deal). Just that in the example you are giving there are reasons why "you buy a used car for 20k". Reasons that are separate from what you would get if you tried to sell the same car for 20k.
1. Warranty - We've actually talked about a lot of these items, including adding a warranty on top of the cars we represent. We'd be able to do this because we do a mechanical inspection on each car. The 1 thing we can't do is add CPO (that's manufacturer only).
2. Experienced Sales People - sales person turnover is roughly 50% per year at the average dealership. Because of this, dealerships don't spent money on sales person training. Experienced sales people are difficult to get.
We're working on it and want to add more value than dealerships for less!
I'd love to talk more. If you're interested, please email me at val@instamotor.com
Exactly. Exactly. (2x for emphasis). (Although there is value for sure to the warranty part.
They can invent their own word and certification. But they also need to provide a warranty for sure.
What you are really getting is the fact that someone is standing behind something. You are getting a warranty. And so it's a fancier way of describing a warranty. After all who really cares about the inspection part if someone is saying they will fix things?
For BMW:
Nicholas here. I started Carlypso.com last summer when Chris (my co-founder) and I had helped a number of our classmates sell their used cars after graduation.
About 9 months ago, I had the pleasure of dealing with Instamotor founder Sy when he bought his Audi A4 with our help. His feedback over email was really encouraging:
"About your idea:
1. I was looking a bit at ways to remotely unlock a car over a network connection. It seems to me that the technology story around that is a bit weak, but not completely infeasible. First, there's automatic (http://www.automatic.com/) though i don't know if they'll ever ship a product, but in theory it's really what you guys want. Second, there is a myriad of small stuff like this http://www.text2car.com/
2. I really liked the concept of being able to take the car for a drive, free of any awkward conversation with the owner. It's really pleasant actually, and it gave me the time to think about the purchase and inspect the car. The user psychology is really nailed on that one. That's the way I want to buy every used car from now on."
Long story short, Sy and Val liked our service so much that they decided to just copy it. I'm all for competition and welcome Val and Sy into the used car market. It is sorely in need of a better solution, one which will make buyers and sellers happier and eliminate the inefficiencies and scamming of the dealer model.
I'm not a big fan of plagiarism but different people are different I guess.
If you'd like to stop by our offices, meet our team and see how we're doing, just PM me and we'll hook it up. Chris might even let you drive his 500 hp formula car, which he's been building over the last couple of years! :)
Cheers,
Nicky and the Carlypso team Nicholas@carlypso.com
Imitation is part of business. If you create something that's valuable and profitable, it's only a matter of time before someone copies you.
Here's a good and relevant read for you: http://blog.asmartbear.com/unfair-advantages.html
> "... The real question is: What are you going to do when another smart, scrappy startup copies it, and gets $10m in funding, and is thrice featured on TechCrunch?"
Sound familiar?
There's often a ton of communication between me and sellers to determine things like:
- mileage
- automatic / manual transmission
- whether car has been in any serious accidents
- whether there's any major upcoming maintenance
- whether the driver smoked
- whether the title is Clean
Then I need to get the VIN and run a CarProof (Canadian equiv. of CarFax).
Then, assuming it checks out, schedule a test drive.
Then, assuming the drive is good, get a mechanic's inspection done.
Then, pay and sign papers.
It's a royal pain, compounded by the fact that CL and Autotrader individual sellers seem to be a generally sketchy or uncommunicative lot: no email replies, missed appointments, lying about the title, etc. are all common.
Car buying won't be done like it currently is in 10 years from now; glad to see you're doing something to improve the experience.
I'm looking on craiglist in the Bay Area. It is pretty frustrating, I'll admit.
All those things you describe would be nice but any service like that would inherently restrict you to those seller savvy enough to put all that stuff down. Most people don't seem like and so you'd be only scanning a small subset of available cars. Is having them presented in an orderly fashion worth having few listings - of course not. Yeah, the sellers and buyers are a real mixed lot. But an organized website can't conjure a whole new pool of buyers and sellers into existence.
We’d love to get some additional feedback on the service. Any feedback provided is super beneficial. We’re specifically looking for some feedback on:
1. When you get to the site, within the first 30 seconds, do you understand what we do. Why or why not?
2. If you do understand what we do, would you ever use a service like this? How much would you be willing to pay for this service?
3. What’s the biggest benefit to the service that you see?
4. Any general feedback on the site the content, the service as a whole would be great.
Thanks for the help guys, We always appreciate it!
Was thinking about selling it for 3 months already but just takes so much time.
Haha, yes it is a real thing, unfortunately only in the bay area for now. We've already sold a few cars and wanted to get some additional feedback. We'll push for Chicago soon!
2. Yes, definitely. When I moved to SF, I drove here from the east coast. After realizing that I didn't need my car and it was expensive to keep, I looked into getting rid of it. It was a 93 ford taurus, and from what I could tell, not worth too much more than the cost of getting it registered in CA and in shape to sell. I ended up donating it because I just wanted to get rid of it. Having someone sell it for me would definitely have been worth it.
3. Not having to spend the time and effort managing the car sale, finding a buyer, figuring out the price, etc.
4. Looks handy. Your recently sold cars are all much newer and nicer than mine was, though, so I'm curious if your service would have worked for my older vehicle.
I just did the same thing for similar reasons. If there was no hassle for me, I would've sold it. 2 months too late!
Also, not sure if it matters too much, but generally framing things as "not-losing" is better than framing something as a gain.[1]
One thing that's really inspiring about this is that it has the potential to completely change the concept of used car sales. Just like how realtors take you around to go see houses that are for sale, a car salesman can become a person who takes you around to test drive cars for sale.
I might be wrong about your target market, but it seems like it is currently a market of wealthy individuals with high-valued cars to sell but no time to sell them. However, the quickest sales are the ones for lower valued cars - way back when I only had four figures in the bank, my only requirement for my used car was that it not make weird noises.
One lucrative direction you could go with this in the future is adding financing options, so someone could lease a used car from you and you could pass a percentage of the monthly car payments on to the car owner. Or, you could buy the car from the owner and lease it out to potential owners. I have no idea what the legal requirements are to be able to do this, but if it works you'd have a pretty stable source of recurring income.
Overall it's a great idea, I wish you the best of luck with this!
Asking for a phone number made me close the page. People use the web because they want to do things on their time and not to have to deal with people calling them.
To be honest, the phone number made it seem like one of the millions of lead generation services (e.g. limos.com) where your information is forwarded to a bunch of companies who then all spam you and call you for weeks to come. Email should be enough.
I have one right now that I will be selling (2012 Porsche) and my immediate reaction was a) I still have to prep and detail my car - I don't have to do that if I trade it in and b) 5% is to much. c) I don't want strangers driving my car. d) I don't want to be hassled with selling my car which is why I take the hit at the dealer. If you want to call it that.
Remember also that trade in deals are actually negotiable. Like anything else.
Also dealers actually typically try to slant a trade in toward giving you more money (so it gives you an incentive to buy thinking you are selling something valuable).
You might want to alter your % based on price. And also create a way of separating sellers of higher priced cars from more commodity vehicles.
As an engineer, that really bothers me.
That is a lot different than individual sales...which is how this service sells your car. So yeah, you get a better price for your car, but the service still eats a good chunk of the sale price difference between dealer-trade and individual sale.
And "all the paperwork" amounts to downloading a bill of sale form and title transfer online with the DMV. It's not rocket science, nor time consuming. Certainly not worth hundreds of dollars.
1. Cars with Loans on them. This actually is a hassle, especially in states where the loan holder owns the title. You literally can't just sign the title over to them. In most cases, the buyer has to pay for the car, the seller uses that payment to pay off the loan and then they get the title to transfer over. There has to be a ton of trust there. Even with a bill of sale, everyone is afraid of getting screwed. 2. The straight craigslist process is not quite that easy, respond to emails, some of them from people not even really interested in the car. You have to go back and forth scheduling viewing and test drives. Roughly 40% of the time, you have to drive out to meet someone. If they no-show? Or low ball you? Or don't want it? Time is wasted at all of these steps. 3. Some people hate negotiating, and don't know what a fair price is. We help. 4. In Cali at least, you need Reg 262 for vehicle transfers. It's a form you can only get directly from the DMV (can't print it online). I went to the SF DMV the other day to pick some up, the line was over 2 hours, just to get a form. Needless to say, I put it off for another day.
I agree, for some people it makes the most sense to just sell it themselves. But it's not always a straight shot.
When I sold my vehicle in CA, both the buyer and I filled out the transfer of liability online [2] - no appointments needed. The title ("pink slip") contains the bill of sale with the odometer reading that you would otherwise put on REG 262. The buyer and seller both sign the title which also has the paper version of the transfer of liability should you be inclined to mail it. The buyer generally will have to go to the DMV to pay use tax and turn in the old title.
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/reg_hdbk/ch5/ch5_5.htm [2] http://www.dmv.ca.gov/online/nrl/welcome.htm
- Post on craigslist for a few hundred under KBB and few thousand more than what you're willing to sell for
- Get several calls and appointments in the evenings for a solid week
- Within two weeks someone offers you $1k less than what you posted on CL for but still $1k more than your lowest point
- Collect payment from buyer, give them the signed title, and a piece of paper saying how much they paid for the car.
In this situation there are literally two pieces of paper. The bill of sale that you can write on any old computer paper and the title that came with the car. Signing up for this service may be even more work than just selling the car yourself.
1) Appointments for a week is a lot of time sunk. Easily worth a few hundred bucks to Valley people who think of their lives by the hourly rate. Especially when buyers drag out the process by not showing, having trouble finding a location, or trying to "negotiate" past an agreed-upon price when picking the car up.
2) Very cheap, economical cars (like old Civics/Accords) and very specific enthusiast's cars are extremely frustrating to sell. With economy cars buyer expectations seem to be higher than is realistic (did you really expect your $2500 car to have flawless paint?) and with enthusiast cars many buyers aren't serious. Tire-kickers, thrill-seekers, and picky people who "just want to try this one out, but really were looking for another color and options package or extra rare year xxxx" abound.
3) Loans and paperwork differ by state, but at least here in Colorado the paperwork is trivial and loans are painful. I've never gone to a bank, paid off the car, and had the title available in a timely manner, which leaves both parties with frustrating hanging obligations even after the sale is made.
I lived with someone for a few years who bought and sold several cars a month and I still pay him a few hundred bucks to broker the deal each time I want a car gone - I actually find the sales process quite enjoyable as it involves meeting a lot of people from a lot of backgrounds, but the time sink and general flakiness gets old fast.
Apparently you need to add these tags? https://developers.facebook.com/docs/web/tutorials/scrumptio...
edit: I updated the header but still no update on Facebook. I'm assuming it must be cached. I will try to create a Facebook page to see if that clears it.
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/
Still no image though. I think the link is the wrong URL? It's currently http://www.instamotor.com/instamotor_illustration.png
Thank you for all your help!!
Questions that immediately come to mind - how do you handle negotiations, and how do buyers pay? How do you pay the seller afterward? (cash, verifying a cashier's check - other comments point out the common scams etc.) (Or is Instamotor just a transaction facilitator)? Where is the vehicle listed? Do you handle smog checks as well (for California)? <- Those are the most common things I go through the used vehicle process.
Also, how do you filter out non-serious buyers, especially for performance vehicles? A lot of sellers ask for some sort of proof of payment or cash ready before a test drive. It seems like you're mainly handling high-end cars where the 5% commission will pay off too, how does the model change for say a $5K vehicle?
Finally as a buy I would want to do my own inspection unless the inspection is at a mechanic I already trust - there is way too much conflict of interest having the selling side do an inspection.
Some ways to get it more buyer-friendly would be to offer a CARFAX as well.
I cannot emphasize the importance of this. I have a 2005 Lotus Elise that I would love to part with, but I'm really, really nervous about an inexperienced driver blowing the clutch or just coming over for a joyride.
What I would propose is letting people ride with a trust local mechanic with the mechanic driving. That way they can make sure a professional is driving the car, can pick up on any issues, and can be honest with the potential buyer.
1. How do we handle negotiations: We talk to you, the seller and work to find a fair market price for the car. We have dealership level tools available for this. We come to an agreement on the minimum price you'd take. From there, we negotiate with the potential buyer and can take an offer up to the minimum we agreed upon. Anything lower we'd need explicit permission from you.
2. The Buyer makes a cashiers check out directly to the the seller. We deliver it to them.
3. The vehicles are listed everywhere we can, including some of the traditional places like Cars.com and autotrader. For certain cars, we also do very specialized listings (e.g. for Porsches we list or Porsche enthusiast forums, etc...).
4. We handle it all, including smog checks.
5. We get paid at the time of the transaction usually directly with proceeds from the sale.
6. With performance vehicles we are very very diligent about this, currently doing it manually. We represent a few very high value Porsches. We research all of the buyers (again manually, but we'll work on that) to see if they're legitimate and also work to get commitments from them. If we see an 18YO kid that wants to test drive a Porsche, we won't necessarily disallow it, but we'll make sure that he has the financial resources and intent to purchase the vehicle. It's not perfect, we're still working on this, but I can tell you all of our owners have been very very happy with the people test driving so far.
--Edit-- We currently offer CarFax. One thing we have to improve is enumerating the depth of service that we provide.
last thing I thought of - how is the communication facilitated? ex: asking questions about the vehicle's history
1. 90% of questions asked about a car are standard (e.g. what's the history, what's the mechanical, is it a clean carfax). We can pre-empt this by having the answer ready.
2. For answers we don't have, it's the standard "let me get back to you" and ask the seller.
As seller to protect yourself you need to e.g. meet the buyer at his bank and get cash or a certified check that the bank prepares at that time. Or use some kind of insured escrow service.
It isn't gone. You are in the minority.
But that being said, maybe there is an argument that the OP needs to cater to the new things.
Edit: Great idea, by the way. I would love to use this service here in Phoenix.
While we're on the subject of cars and improving the car buying/selling process, I just wanted to say that Edmunds.com has opened up its car data to the world in a sane, RESTful API. Check it out at http://developer.edmunds.com and let me know if you have any questions: mbock @ edmunds . com.
We also just finished Hackomotive, a $35k hackathon focused on startups improving the car shopping experience. You can see the winners here: http://www.hackomotive.com/. We'd obviusly love to see InstaMotor apply for next year!
Thanks for the feedback. We have added this to our todo list. We are still in the process of finalizing the flow of the site.
I've tried another service but due to a small dent in the car I couldn't sell it - the car's actually in the shop right now getting that fixed, because using a service to sell is so much better than the alternatives. My current plan is to go back to them when it's repaired.
I would suggest making the sell price in the big red letters instead of the "youll earn" part. That whole section is a little confusing and I thought it was telling me I would only get 2k for my 20k car. I only really care about how much I would be getting for my car, the comparison to the dealership is important but secondary, and oh by the way I will have already probably looked that up on kbb.com.
Thanks for the feedback, it looks like a lot of people are confused by that. We'll make changes and update it tonight.
Thanks again guys, really appreciate it!
Thanks for the feedback. We are focusing on the bay area for now but are looking forward to expanding. As far as the wording goes, we've gotten several comments about it and will be changing it soon.
Wish it was more prominent that this is Bay Area only for now. I doubted that it would be in my area, since it sounded like something that required local personnel and nobody seems to do startups in Houston, but you have to scroll to the bottom to see it stated.
Some of the text looks terrible on my Windows 7 - Chrome environment. Especially everything in How It Works.
The website is all about the sell side, and you say the buy side is ebay, craigslist, autotrader, etc. Why not post the cars in a store on your site too? Last time I checked those sites, they had a terrible UI.
In fact, that idea expands the business from a seller's assistant kind of thing to more of an online-focused CarMax. I think that could be really useful to everyone. I'm thinking kind of a cross between AutoTrader and CarMax. On the buyer's side, it could be like the existing online sites, except that the photos and details are collected by your people, so they're consistent and high-quality. Maybe you take the car for a few hours, have a mechanic check it out, wash it, and take high-quality high-res photos in a controlled environment. The buyers can know and trust that you've done all this, and that they're getting a good representation of what they're thinking of buying.
The sellers get pretty much what you're already doing, all of the legwork done for them, a better price, and hopefully buyers who know what they're getting, and are vetted as serious buyers before a test-drive is set up.
I suppose the main difference between you and Carmax, then, is that you are all online, thus have a much better online presence, and don't need to maintain a car lot. Does that translate into enough of a cost savings to offer a better deal to the customers than the current incumbents, though?
Part 2 is adding that selling side, and we will do it, but we're not there yet.
1. Redundant content: I felt like you repeated the same value proposition in nearly every section of your website. However, each section had one small tidbit that wasn't addressed anywhere else (e.g. only available in bay area).
2. Excessive calls to action: Although it's great that you have placed many calls to action (various buttons, sliders, etc.), it really confuses the user. Having one consistent message and/or placement might improve conversion. Just a hypothesis and one you should definitely A/B test.
3. Poor navigation: The "home" button in the footer navigates the user to an awkward anchor tag on the home page. The About page has a large image that makes it seem like a homepage rather than getting in to the actual content of the page. The Contact page is an overlay modal and may not even be worth creating as a separate page. Perhaps placing it in the footer is sufficient.
4. Commas: In your slider showing the different amounts you can save, you should be sure to a comma as a thousands separator or a decimal point + "k" or "thousand". This will increase impact and hopefully conversion as well.
5. Reposition: Seeing this on "Show HN" and seeing lots of copy/images in the beginning made your site seem like it was a just placeholders. It wasn't until I scrolled to the bottom did I see there were testimonials and cars that were actually sold. This content should be placed further up since it demonstrates some form of validation/social traction. It would be great to have a ticker or some other indicator of cars sold at some point when it gets bigger.
Best of luck and feel free to reach out for any clarifications.
Awesome feedback. We'll eat this up and spit something improved this weekend. We really appreciate it!
Instead I am getting this error: Sorry, we're not able to save your info at this time. And the div with that error is added each time I submit the form so you can get them to start stacking on each other.
<div class="alert ng-isolate-scope alert-danger" ng-class=""alert-" + (type || "warning")" ng-repeat="alert in alerts" type="alert.type" close="closeAlert($index)"> <button ng-show="closeable" type="button" class="close" ng-click="close()">×</button> <div ng-transclude=""><span class="ng-scope ng-binding">Sorry, we're not able to save your info at this time.</span></div> </div>
I like the idea of the service but I'm wondering what the difference is between dealer trade in pricing and market pricing. Even if I have to sacrifice a couple grand to not have to do the whole process, I'm ok with that but I'd rather know pricing from that point of view.
I'm also curious how you plan on doing the legal paperwork as I've done a lot of this too and it's not easy getting setup to handle all the paperwork especially if it's between two parties.
I don't think selling a car is really that difficult of a process, for me anyway. I don't know what California paperwork is like, but in Ohio, all you need to do is sign your title over in front of a notary. Besides that, it's just a matter of listing it on Craiglist and scheduling times to look at it.
For as well me I've had a decent experience on Craigslist - just some due diligence and research on best practices and you're good to go. But it does take some time and patience and dealing with flaky buyers. Just ignore the lowballers and the non-serious. However I'm sure a lot of people would love this type of service, especially in common scenarios where the actual seller is busy so they try to proxy it to a family member who really isn't interested in selling it. Or when they've moved out of state and buyers don't want to deal with that
Dealer trade-in pricing generally uses a standard called "black book". They base the pricing on the type of car the the condition of the vehilce. The discount of retail to black book varies, but can be huge (4k+). When dealers buy a car off trade-in, they have to price in the fact that they have a lot of overhead to get the car sold. Dealers also price risk into the car value, if it's not a desirable car, they will sell it at auction. They have to make sure they stay under the auction value.
Individual buyers don't have that. That spread is pretty large and we can take advantage of that.
The paperwork is actually pretty straight forward if you have a notary public available (we do). We can pull up all the paperwork necessary and generally get it done at each persons convenience. The biggest issue is actually trust between the parties and us. That's what we have to work on.
I actually came in the thread to post the same thing because I saw that on your web site and chuckled.
It would also help to list prices you guys sold cars at, not just 'X' over 'trade-in' price.
The way numbers are presented and compared makes you look a bit sketchy to somebody who knows a thing or two about vehicles.
I think the idea is excellent and would use it when I decide to sell my car.
In California, CarMax and other dealers don’t need to register a purchased vehicle in the company name. So even with her release of liability, the DMV considered the former owner to the registered owner of the ticketed vehicle.
http://consumerist.com/2013/04/19/woman-hit-with-traffic-tic...
I am pretty confident that California law is advanced enough to handle the case of selling a car to someone. Carmax doesn't have anything new in that realm.
What stops someone from taking a 1 hour test-drive? (and wasting you gas on their errands)
If someone gets in an accident during a test-drive who is liable? Do all insurance plans cover this?
What does remote-key access mean? "We verify all buyers and schedule flexible test-drives with remote key access."
How quickly do you plan on expanding to other states?
Your site has a 1px left margin which is making a horizontal scrollbar which is annoying me.
@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 0) html { margin-left: 1px; }
Lol, Only on HN :)
Some dealer called me and left a message saying that they would sell my car for me for $200. Are they lying? Are there other hidden fees? Why should I pay InstaMotor $1000 instead of $200 to this other guy?
One advantage, I see is that I get to keep and drive my car. Except my car is parked in a lot, and I only have 1 keyfob to get it out.
That's much too steep for me. If there was a cap of say 1K, I'd be a customer in a heartbeat. But 5K gross is certainly worth the inconvenience of selling it myself.
I think TrueCar is mostly for newer cars, but is it possible they apply the same method to used cars in the future and try to take money off your increased price? Do you think
The way it says "you earn" I can't help but think that that is the total amount you will get. I would prefer it to say "you earn $95,000. $10,000 more than you would have with a dealership". Or something similar.
ps: was everything ok and clear enough?
Who's too stupid to not figure this out and needs a service?
Okay, so they pay you more than the dealership. That's a selling point. But I could find someone on Craigslist and sell it to them for more.
I would write blog posts on interesting success stories with different types of cars and seller stories -- often cars are hard to sell for various reasons.
Offering to take a professional picture is your ultimate in.
Ofc, you'll be awesome, so then the Seattle Government will issue legislation banning your awesome idea because Used Car Dealerships won't be able to compete, and they'll use their Good Ol' Boy network to shut it down.
Do you guys have a geographic limit that you are restricting service to?
Actually Sy and I (2 of the 3 co-founders) met on HN after a similar post (like 6 months ago?). It wasn't the one you're talking about, but had a similar theme.
The sheer number of resources one dealership consumes boggles my mind: all the people, the mechanics, the land, the land, the land, oh, and the other acres of land.
Disclaimer: I have bought/sold over 10 cars with Carmax over the last decade.
Care to explain. I've found it extremely straight forward.
What are the challenges of expanding to different locations?