TrueCar joins GoodGuide in helping consumers obtain more information about the products they buy – information that sellers don’t necessarily want them to have. In TrueCar’s case, that information is simple yet elusive: just how much you should pay for a new car.
TrueCar aggregates data from a variety of (mostly unnamed) sources to determine how much money other people have paid for new cars around the country. It then places its findings at your disposal so you can determine whether or not that dealership down the street is offering you a good deal. The outcome, hopefully, is that you save not only hundreds and possibly thousands on your new car but the time it would have taken to comparison shop as well.
To use TrueCar, you just have to enter your zip code and the model you’re interested in buying. The price data is offered to you in a variety of visual formats such as bar graphs and charts. And it can be narrowed down to a local, regional, or national level. You can also view the history of how a car’s price has changed over time.
The site currently accounts for only about 25% of all relevant transactions. The founders want to hold off from launching it publicly until they’ve reached at least 50% and they are confident that one day they will hit 75%.
The expert panelists were concerned in particular about the sources of TrueCar’s information and its uniqueness. Jeff Weiner asked where the company got its information and why the pricing information offered by other sites like Edmunds didn’t stack up. The founders insisted that all of the data was out there and publicly available; it was just hard to tie it all together and make sense of it. And since they had built a sophisticated system to synthesize it all, their pricing insights were deeper and more informative.
Don Dodge and Sean Parker were also skeptical that the provision of this pricing knowledge would actually change consumer behavior, since people are lazy and subject to price discrimination, even when it comes to commodities.
Watch TrueCar’s TechCrunch50 presentation here.
i just used their site and it seems like the data is exactly the same as KBB and Edmunds.com. they claim to have actual sales data, but all of their stuff is a bunch of estimates, just like KBB. they make a big promise, but ultimately, they are just re-displaying info that is already out there. i can’t believe they got $2.5M to regurgitate existing information. much of that existing info favors car dealers too.
I like this idea – expose actual data and let the consumer decide. It’s not cluttered with a bunch of ad crap. Why do people believe KBB or Edmunds are good data sources? Everybody knows Kelley is always inflated for the dealer. You ALWAYS beat the kelley prices. I like the idea of real data – it just remains to be seen if this is for real… it seems too good to be true. A lot like Zillow when it came out.
What a total crock of shit. I feel like they just scraped edmunds or some other legitimate provider of real content. This proves how worthless and totally irrelevant the TechCrunch 50 is.
Ummm… I don’t think it is scraped data. It actually shows the number of transactions of buyers. Take a look at the actual data. The data is interesting. They will have one heck of a time trying to get over consumers perceptions that KBB is not a good depiction of pricing, but this is exactly what consumers want. The problem is it shows people what idiots they are for overpaying. It will have many people love and hate it. The truth can be a b*itch!
well, it’s an aggregator – so what do you expect?
(linkback) Thrive or Fail? TrueCar- Tells you how much people have paid for the car you want [VOTE] – http://www.thri...rfail.com/c6016
Sounds great, but traders in the UK pay for the Glass’s (spelling?) guide, and would swear by it. Would be brilliant to see these guys disrupt that market.
Kelley Blue Book has been doing this well in the US since 1918, and they cover used and new cars, and private/dealer sales. Remember that the mass-produced car was invented here. Nice try though.
i use another car site that has actual selling prices for cars, not the re-purposed dealer estimates on truecar.
http://www.pric...om/price/BMW/X5
i am looking to buy a X5 and was happy to see that pricehub has real data – the data comes from other consumers.
Knowing the price of what people have paid for a car is short-sighted.
Most car buyers are financed. So the key is knowing your interest rate for your credit rating. Dealers make more money on financing and insurance.
So great, you know the price of the vehicle others paid, but how much are you paying in F&I?
@Steven – Good point.
Also, it would seem like a concept that could backfire. Once the word spreads about which dealerships will offer good rates on a specific car, other dealers would all have to match it, meaning they’ll set more rigid guidelines for offering deals and you won’t get the value going forward.
Dealers could use the platform as a guide and could use it to push deals up, rather than down.
As others have noted, data like this has been available elsewhere for quite some time, but I do believe that there is a core group of consumers looking to buy a new vehicle that will “do their homework” and be as prepared as possible to negotiate and get the best price they can. TrueCar will be added to the bookmark list that already includes Edmunds, KBB, CarsDirect.com and brand-specific enthusiast sites.
But, in the end, what is the true value or differentiation to this data for the other 80% (my estimate) of the people that go into a dealership and get wowed into a buying a vehicle by a talented salesman and F&I guy. No dealership I am aware of will accept a printout from any site and honor a third party price estimate found on the Internet.
RealCarTips.com also provides actual prices from real car buyers. In addition to the price, it ranks each buyer compared to other buyers of the same make and model, so you can see whether they got a good deal or not. Buyers also submit comments and tips on what they did to get a good deal.
http://www.realcartips.com
steven – good point about car dealers. they may never accept a printout from a site, but the nice thing is that a customer can go to another dealer (at least for new cars). if the dealer wants the business, they’ll have to be competitive on price. educated consumers have the power here. for used cars, it can be a different story, which i think makes it even more valuable to get some real car selling prices… mileage, condition, etc… can really affect a car’s value. more importantly, this is where car dealers make their money – the used car lot.
check out http://www.disc...tnewcars.com.au it gives the consumer the disounts they want and actually negotiates for the conusumer by way of competition
The real interesting site is http://cars.overstock.com these guys really have it right. You get the dealer’s lowest prices. Why not get the actual dealers price? I don’t know what historical prices are going to get you. I used this. not the best dealer experience, but the price was super low (I got a new Camry). And after looking at Truecar, it was a Great price. Phew.
Jared,
the funny thing is the Overstock Car Buying service you linked to is run by Zag (the company that spun off TrueCar). Zag is simply licensing their product to Overstock.
I guess you really have to treat these car pricing sites’ results as a guideline.
Neil
Yet another fa bolus website http://www.nort...torgroup.com.au where you can get the latest news and views about new and old cars.
While I think this info is useful, I still can’t really find out where they get their data from. Who is actually collecting/reporting this data? If it’s the dealers, could they skew the numbers?