TrueCar, an information service launched at TechCrunch50 that aims to give potential new car buyers an idea of what the price tag of the vehicle they’re considering purchasing should really be reading, is officially launching its free consumer-focused website today by taking the beta label off.
In essence, the service allows car buyers to check if the price for their next car is on par with the price others have paid for the same vehicle in the past, hopefully bringing some transparency to the automotive retail industry.
So how does it work? When a new car buyer visits the TrueCar website, they are asked to enter their zip code and all vehicle details down to the specific options. TrueCar then generates a complete Price Report with nifty graphs, displaying the full distribution of prices paid by other people for the exact same vehicle in a given market area. In addition, the web service calculates the actual dealer cost structure of a particular vehicle.
TrueCar claims it holds data for more than 25% of all new vehicles sold throughout the United States, which is quite impressive and a high enough percentage for comparisons to be made, although we noted in our coverage from the TC50 event that the company was going to try and hold off from launching publicly when they actually reached 50%.
And where exactly does all that data come from anyway? The company says it currently processes thousands of transactions on a daily basis, from a variety of sources across the U.S., ranging from financial institutions to vehicle registration organizations that collect and store new car transactional data, to generate its Price Reports. Using this data, TrueCar is able to tell you if you’re getting a good, a great or an over-priced deal on a new car based on actual sales data and not estimates.
For the occasion, TrueCar is taking the wraps of its blog, called The Truth, where it aims to regularly report car pricing facts and trends backed by real market data. In their latest blog post, TrueCar gives some insight in the top 10 deals on new cars at this moment:
I’d say considering a Ford is probably a good start to getting a good deal.
On a sidenote: TrueCar isn’t founder and CEO Scott Painter’s only venture: the man is also co-founder of both Pricelock and BrightHouse, and also acts as founder and CEO of Zag, which recently raised $32.4 million in venture capital. One wonders where he finds time for all this.
You can see the video of his presentation of TrueCar at TC50 right here.
Looks good. Should try it! I appreciate the CEO. That guy is really made of worthy business stuff.
Site looks good but I am not sure if their story about their data sources is credible.
This is a very fragemented market and I find it very hard to believe that they can get accurate model level actual transactional data on 50% of all cars sold in the U.S.
OMG … I think that’s the best idea I’ve ever seen. I’m never comfortable buying a car because I’m 99% sure the guy is ripping me off.
Agreed most car salesman’s behavior does little to dissuade this perception either such as hiding customer car keys, giving deceptive quotes on the number and the rate of monthly payments, etc.
They messed up their grammar in the screenshot, in the box where it says “Great Price: Less Than $2,373 below invoice” — they mean “More Than $2,373 below invoice”. Same for the Good Price box.
For example, because this annoys me
“Purchasing this car for less than $2,373 below invoice means you only got a good deal.”
“Purchasing this car for more than $2,373 below invoice means you got a great deal”
And just to be perfectly clear:
Less Than $47,978 = More Than $2,373 below invoice.
So many ventures.. whats the mantra?
the numbers seem to be made up.
this is useless data, because without knowing what the customer had in the way of the financing, trade-in, and/or accessories, this data is useless.
Dealers don’t make money off of the car, they make it off all the other things. They could sell you a car for $10k less than everybody else if you are willing to trade your car in for $10k less than its worth.
How is this different from edmunds.com, which has been around for a long time? They show you the invoice price, msrp and what others pay for the vehicle. Sometimes that value is lower than the invoice or msrp, other times (like when the nissan 350Z came out, it was much higher, because it was so in demand)
This seems to be just another version of edmunds.com
How on earth did they get $2.8 for this?
I can see value in this, but i think the better idea is in pricing for auto maintenance; where there’s a great deal more variance, lack of consumer knowledge, and need for transparency. Look at RepairPal and Driverside. I think they’ve both been covered by TC in the past. Same concept but they crunch data and tell you how much you should be paying for repairs — based on the car, parts, labor, etc. and where you live.
More on RepairPal – http://tinyurl.com/clo9eb
The real opportunity here could be to combine repair data with new car pricing to create some sort of “buy or repair” calculator. I think a lot of people find themselves in that boat these days — auto repair is doing well overall as more people are opting to fix rather than buy.
The president of TrueCar is the founder of Shazam: Philip Inghelbrecht. Not sure which service i’ll use more!
RealCarTips.com has been doing something similar for awhile…
http://www.realcartips.com
If you believe that car dealerships are sharing their sales numbers with this website I have some swamp land I would like to sell you. So where to they get their data? If it is from the buyer, you must add about 30% to these numbers. People always tell others the paid less for their cars than they actually did.