Show HN: InstaMotor – Taking the pain out of selling your car

Ultimately, I want to know how much I could sell my car for before bothering to sign up.

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'm in the process of buying a used car and wrote a note to my business partner about how I wish a service like this existed.

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.

Thoughts:

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?

I hate selling cars. It's troublesome and time consuming, so you I'd gladly pay for the service. The pricing turns me off though. Selling a 50K car, the commission would turn out to 2.5K. That's net. So with 50% income tax rate, I'd have to earn 5K to pay the commission.

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.