Going to the mechanic is like going to the doctor. When something needs to be fixed, for most people there is no easy way to tell if they are being charged the going rate or are being ripped off. Enter RepairPal, a new site launching publicly today where you can get price estimates for different parts and repair jobs for your car. You enter your car year, model, and mileage, and it spits out price ranges for your zip code. For instance, replacing the front brake pads on a BMW in New York City should cost between $158 and $310.
Not sure where to take your car? There is also a directory of 287,000 local mechanics, with each shop placed onto a Google Map. Members can rate each mechanic. Once a repair is completed, you can keep an online service record at RepairPal. It is kind of like keeping your electronic medical record at Google Health, but it’s for your car.
A lot of detailed information is included with each estimate, such as helpful tips, recommendations, and common problems related to that repair. Members can add their own comments and suggestions. But if you need to ask an expert a question, you can pay $9 to have a real mechanic answer your question online. All of these features are designed to help you keep your car healthy.
The startup raised an angel round in the “low millions” last November from James Currier, the founder of Tickle, Stan Chudnovsky, the former CEO of Tickle, Chris Michel from Affinity Labs, and a hedge fund.
The key to the site’s success will be the accuracy of its price estimates. Other sites, like Driverside, which we recently reviewed, also offer repair estimates. But int his case, whoever has the best data will win. DriverSide doesn’t even list the model of my car, much less the particular repairs I need estimates for. When I recently ran RepairPal through the paces with a real list of repairs (Front pads, front rotors, bracket sensor, air filter, spark plugs, fuel filter, marker filter, and oil service) it came up with estimates for all but two items for my model vehicle.
Now multiply 400 different car models X 80 different types of repairs X 17 different model years X 42,000 different zip codes and you get more than 10 billion permutations. It is really a number-crunching problem. The better the underlying data, the better the estimates. RepiarPal gets its pricing data from a variety of sources, including pricing surveys, expert input, car brand data, parts distribution data, labor time data, demographic data, econometric models, and proprietary algorithms. CEO and co-founder David Sturtz, who previously started his own hedge fund, Clear View Capital Management, says:
We want to provide critical information previously only available to mechanics. We can tell you whether to replace or fix your car. For advertisers, they can target by geography, brand of car, or problem. For dealers and local shops, we will send leads. In return, they will be reviewed and rated by members.
Sturtz still has some things he needs to fix himself. Right now, you cannot enter a list of repairs. Each on needs to be entered individually to get an estimate. (Sturtz says that is on his to-do list). And you also can’t get a quote from a mechanic through the site (that too will come later). But overall it is a solid site. The auto repair industry is a $150 billion industry in the U.S. and there are about one billion service visits a year, says Sturtz. All he’s doing is bringing some much-needed transparency to it.
Google health link on the post is not work?
*working oop!!
http://www.repairpal.com - 404, not found. Is there anywhere that will show estimates for fixing websites?
awesome concept. site is down. what’s the cost of replacing a broken server?
wow — i didn’t realize my humor was so obvious
How pathetic. If they realize they’re going to be featured on TechCrunch, they should at least have the site up.
Not a 404 message.
The site is asking me for a password?
Erick Schonfeld said…
proprietary algorithms
I seriously doubt that it is proprietary algorithms. I bet that their algorithms are based on publicly available publications in various computing research journals. They might be the first one to implement & adopt those algorithms for commercial use, since there are a vast number of algorithms that are being published in the literatures that had not been used (untapped) by anyone for commercial use, and if those algorithms come from the literatures, then they’re not proprietary algorithms at all. Proprietary algorithms, in a sense is algorithms that are not published in literatures where no one has ever seen those algorithms except those who developed them.
check their surge tommorow. Tommorow the site will be have its launch. i won’t be suprised if the traffic techcrunch sent to them made their servers explode. these things happen
interesting…
we had this same idea (as others did as well) in the mid 90’s when we realized that there was no real good way to know where to take your vehicle is you moved to a new city…
the idea of having the ability to track/take your auto repair data is even more important now, given the cost of the vehicle, and of fuel!
the newer twist that these guys should incorporate is to take advantage of the local service stations in the various neighborhoods that have the ability to fix/repair minor maintenance issues. as a customer, i’d give alot to be able to take my car to the local service station that serves me gas. given that the avg station is making marginal revenue on the gas, it might turn out that providing service on the vehicle is a great deal more profitable. of course you’d need to run the data to prove/disprove this assertion.
you could easily implement a service quality program for the service stations/technicians. you’d create a revenue sharing approach where you’d have a direct/local marketing strategy, tying the service station to the given local neighborhood (a kind of franchise approach). if the service station screws up, you simply shift the customers to another service station, given that you “own” the repair data in the system, as well as the customer relationship.
the service station gets more customers via the marketing strategies that you create, along with the advanced technology/app/data for the website. the customer gets a (potentially) vastly improved experience with the maintenance of the vehicle. the parent operation creates a scalable/franchise kind of model that prints revenue!
peace..
if this works, great service. site probably went down because of traffic. it’s back up now. they should have a classic car section, too. big market for parts among restoration folks. i finished my 66 mustang a couple years back. that community is always looking for the best places to get parts and the best mechanics to work on their cars.
Great idea! This is a problem not only in the US, this is something that happend worldwide. Watch out for copycats all around the world, there’s a lot of value being added here.
To the RepairPal team: awesome idea, congratulations on making it happen, keep up the hard work and good luck with everything!
This was a good idea.
thank you wery much
check their surge tommorow. Tommorow the site will be have its launch. i won’t be suprised if the traffic techcrunch sent to them made their servers explode. these things happen
My friend is building a similar site, he’s going to be pissed when he sees this.
Here is how you get accurate and valuable data. Provide a place for a user to store their repair invoices. I file my car records in a folder, but it would be interesting to be able to file them electronically in one place. You would physically send the invoices into RepairPal where they would enter them into your personal repair database. In return, you would allow this data to be shared for pricing data. If the cost of data entry is not too high other incentives can be offered like free oil change vouches and other ancillary products and services.
From this there are also many interesting pay services that can be offered to the member uploading these documents- like the $9 review, vehicle history though VIN data, shop history… there are so many interesting things that can be provided with a collection of a few hundred thousand (million?) service invoices.
This type of data is very valuable and can be collected if you give something valuable back to the user.
Very cool site - works pretty well!
I go to try it out… start to enter the details on my Camaro, but the year selection only goes as far back as 1990… WTF? Just leave out a few decades?
Really Internet is now really becoming Irreplacablly Imp. for people in t he
Globe.
http://tekno-world.blogspot.com
Grahm,
Great suggestions, I would gladly hand over all car repair receipts to a site that would track it for me and further more spot trends in repairs. Like the exploding heater core on my 1991 GTI 16V which is almost guaranteed to happen on these cars. This is valuable data that they can then sell as market research.
I also think they should trust their community to expand out the models and years. Like the semantic startups, they can let people add and vote for new model lines and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to ask that any new data be verifiable via footnotes. I bet they would quickly attract a hungry community of car enthusiasts that would be stepping over each other to enter accurate data about their beloved rare car.
Another feature suggestion is to have a set of lists of common repair scenarios and how the community thinks they should be handled:
- the car has been sitting for over a year
- flood damage
- vandalism
- fender benders
- planning a long trip
- maintaining a commuter car (lots of short stop and go trips)
xcelent idea, catchy name, easy to remember , domain name is really important when building a website. i’m pretty sure this site will go all the way long for good.
Nat
http://www.workersinc.com
@everybody - is today national bad grammar day? I feel like I need a translator to read these comments.
Maybe I can work this service into my free used car classifieds website. If you can’t fix it, sell it! =)
good service, but I’m going to guess that they’ll fail. Their prices are way off. And they seem to have way too many employees(experts), so they’ll probably run out of cash before they can get a foothold
What did they gank the logo from the MySQL site??? Geez it looks eerily familiar…
hahah “…in the low millions…” love that phrase. It’ll certainly help me to learn about about the quirks of North-American cars…. hm, maybe I shouldn’t put all my $$ into my startup…. ?
Too bad it’s only for the US… we drive cars up here in Canada, too.
See also http://www.servicebeacon.com which has been up and running for a while now that does many of the same things.
Great service. Video might help improve the service
All industries could benefit. Even for Finding a Plumber you can trust.
I love this idea! I’m not sure about it’s viability in the market, but I think any tool like this has great potential to empower women, in this case those needing car repairs. Better educated consumers get taken advantage of less, no? I wish I had had this last year when I got an estimate I thought was too high but didn’t feel like I had the time or physical capability to find a better shop (it’s hard to shop around when your car is broken down…) And I would have loved to pay the small price of $9 to ask a mechanic-besides the one trying to bill me-if the recommended services were necessary or just up-sells. Genius!
I’m an investor in RepairPal, and it’s really exciting to see the site launch.
David and his team are tackling a difficult but valuable problem. Just a few weeks ago, I needed a brake job, and I wished that the service was available!
They’re missing a few cars, too. I couldn’t find a Ford Aerostar or a Geo or Chevy Metro.
They should have someone go through the list of makes & models at http://kbb.com/ - make sure they have them all.
This is hardly a new idea. Repair cost estimates have been around for ages on Edmunds.com - http://www.edmunds.com/mainten.....er=edmunds and other sites. While RepairPal does have a pretty interface, all it takes to compete in that space is a simple license agreement with MOTOR, Autodata Solutions or Alldata, all of which supply this information. Also, do they actually have a business model? I don’t see any advertising (perhaps because it’s beta?) and I doubt that service facilities would direct potential customers to this site or it would destroy their margins. And for logging service information, there is already Ownersite, ServiceBeacon, myCarPage, etc, etc.
wow
Have a look at http://www.FairRepair.com. Our service will generate an accurate estimate (No ranges) giving you the exact labor time with average labor rates in your area calculated from a 65K record repair facility. Our service also lists out the exact OEM Part # & Price. Our Parts & Labor Data, along with a majority of all repair facilities estimating software is licensed through MOTOR Information Systems. If you want an accurate vehicle repair estimate, check us out.
RepairPal’s data is much more accurate and complete than DriverSide’s.
Can’t say about FairRepair (previous comment) because unlike the others it’s a paid service.
I’ve been talking a bit with David, CEO of RepairPal, and really like the thorough approach he’s taking.
I’m in a slightly different business than the others here, collecting and providing reliability information at http://www.truedelta.com .