Hacker News Reader

Comment by khet | Hacker News Reader

The problem there is, I have no idea how to model maintenance costs! The field is basically a hack. If there is a better way, I'd like to do that.

View on HN

Depends on how deep you want to go, but you could set up a table with common considerations and let users set frequency...

Most maintenance is mileage-dependent, so if you base your schedule on their monthly mileage, it could look like:

  Repair           Cost           Frequency
  ------           ----           ---------
  Oil Change        $30             5000 mi
  Tires            $500            45000 mi
  Battery          $150            30000 mi
  Timing Belt     $1500            60000 mi
  Misc             $200            15000 mi

Do the math in impact/year and input that cost into your table...

To complicate matters, some of those items are time or distance items. Oil and battery, for instance, need to be changed after a certain amount of time regardless of the miles driven. Not too hard to work into the pricing algorithm, though.

If you wanted go get even more creative, you could get users to crowdsource scheduled maintenance tables for their vehicles. It's all in the owner's manual and just a matter of transcribing it.

As a short-term stopgap, maybe create a "appreciation" field for maintenance to go up by a certain percent each year?

In any case, thanks for the calculator! I'll probably be using it alongside others to help me buy a car soon.

>'If there is a better way, I'd like to do that.'

I gave this a little thought a few years ago, it's an interesting problem in.

There are lots of variables generated (estimates) and validated (bills) by disparate sources (dealerships / independents) which are not at all inclined to share. Though some vehicle owners do share I'm not sure I've ever seen anything more prone to exaggeration and selective reporting.

Folks like Mitchell [1] surely have loads of great information obtained via the usage of their shop-facing products, but as far as I know they don't offer a data service.

Also, standard maintenance items like brakes, fluids and tires aren't terribly interesting or costly. The really noteworthy maintenance concerns are the brand and model specific time-bombs like plastic cooling system bits in various BMWs.

Coming up with a way to collect or somehow infer these things would be a killer feature for any service of this sort.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_International,_Inc.

I take contention with your first sentence as if you find a good enough mechanic, you'll be able to ask them to see what their cost is with parts. They'll be very level with you & show you what they get as far as dealer pricing. You're right that this is still a variable in & of itself as Joe Schmo might get completely different pricing than STS Tire or (Insert Chain Here).

But, I digress. You can easily look up the cost estimates for a lot of stuff like this, but it still depends on the "skill level" of a given mechanic. I've pulled the time required to do certain jobs on my car saying it's a 1.3 or 4.5 hour job when the mechanic I was talking to said it's double that, or half that given you know some tricks.

Lastly, model specific time-bombs are becoming more obvious as people complain about a given part (see carcomplaints.com) - it's just a shame it's hard to get access to the relevant TSBs for a vehicle unless you have access to the right networks.

>'I take contention with your first sentence as if you find a good enough mechanic, you'll be able to ask them to see what their cost is with parts.'

Sure.

I think we're talking about totally different things.

The question isn't whether you can get one mechanic to share with you or even drive/call around and get dozens to share. It's how to get large numbers of them from all over to share continuously in some hands-off fashion so that you can present recent, accurate data to a site user regardless of their location, year, make and model without loads of legwork.

Obviously, narrowing the scope could help with that.

>'You can easily look up the cost estimates for a lot of stuff like this...'

Again, the issue isn't how to fact-check an estimate or haggle for a deal as an individual with a car or two. It's how build a service out of it in a way that scales for large numbers of people and all manner of vehicles - in the US that's 200-300 models per year.

That implies automation and building any sort of business from it implies using legitimate, reliable, legal sources.

I think that's very very difficult to do to be honest, though. There are variables such as prices based on location, and within that location, what the shop or store wants to charge you. The same person with the same car can go to the same location twice for an oil change & get two different prices.

I know because I've had it happen to me. The price differed by a few dollars, but still. Take it one step further & any shop that's established will have tools built specific to them where they can charge whatever they want on a sliding scale. Go to STS Tire in a nice, fancy area. Ask for a quote on a particular service. Note the price. Ask for the same work to be done in an impoverished area & ask for the same work to be done. The price will be radically different, especially if the shop owner isn't greedy.

I think you're on to something, I just think it would take a substantial amount of work but figuring out how to do that in the most efficient way to collect all those data points makes everything easier. Smells like a project to me. :D

It's also model-contingent and sometimes luck. My SAAB has required about $1,600 a year for repairs and maintenance in the past three years I've owned it, but my wife's Honda Element has required only new tires ($500) and brake rotors and pads ($200, DIY install) since it rolled off the assembly line.

It looks like AAA releases some data about that:

http://newsroom.aaa.com/2013/04/cost-of-owning-and-operating...

That said, I would never endorse AAA to provide money to. They were horrible towards me as a claimant.

What if you were to partner with someone like truedelta.com?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com