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

CC, it's actually a little more insidious than that; dealerships have always survived on the asymmetry of information between dealer and buyer. Not to sensationalize, this happens in roughly 30% of sales, (usually by the sales person without actually thinking about it)... 1. A person has seen a car online that they want. They may do the legwork and research the car. 2. The walk into the dealership looking to buy the car. The 1 thing people don't think about (generally) is the financing. 3. They find out that they don't have the credit, income, etc... to actually finance that car. 4. The sales person "places" them on a new car, one that they haven't researched. 5. The buyer gets caught up in the moment, falls in love with a car etc... They buy the car for way more than its worth.

This is why Dealers hate companies like TrueCar. It destroys the asymmetry. It's also why dealerships are getting squeezed; the average deal takes a few hours, in that time, people can use their phones to check the car they're buying.

It's an interesting dynamic.

The average dealership doesn't know if they're going to keep a car for their own inventory or going to sell it at auction/wholesale until they own it. Standard procedure is to purchase a car (purchase = take it on trade-in/buy it) and then have the mechanics inspect it to see what it needs done on it to get it back out to sell. If it's too expensive, they wholesale/auction it. This means, 90% of the time, they default to offering you the lowest value.

Nicholas here. I started Carlypso.com last summer when Chris (my co-founder) and I had helped a number of our classmates sell their used cars after graduation.

About 9 months ago, I had the pleasure of dealing with Instamotor founder Sy when he bought his Audi A4 with our help. His feedback over email was really encouraging:

"About your idea:

1. I was looking a bit at ways to remotely unlock a car over a network connection. It seems to me that the technology story around that is a bit weak, but not completely infeasible. First, there's automatic (http://www.automatic.com/) though i don't know if they'll ever ship a product, but in theory it's really what you guys want. Second, there is a myriad of small stuff like this http://www.text2car.com/

2. I really liked the concept of being able to take the car for a drive, free of any awkward conversation with the owner. It's really pleasant actually, and it gave me the time to think about the purchase and inspect the car. The user psychology is really nailed on that one. That's the way I want to buy every used car from now on."

Long story short, Sy and Val liked our service so much that they decided to just copy it. I'm all for competition and welcome Val and Sy into the used car market. It is sorely in need of a better solution, one which will make buyers and sellers happier and eliminate the inefficiencies and scamming of the dealer model.

I'm not a big fan of plagiarism but different people are different I guess.

If you'd like to stop by our offices, meet our team and see how we're doing, just PM me and we'll hook it up. Chris might even let you drive his 500 hp formula car, which he's been building over the last couple of years! :)

Cheers,

Nicky and the Carlypso team Nicholas@carlypso.com

While we're on the subject of cars and improving the car buying/selling process, I just wanted to say that Edmunds.com has opened up its car data to the world in a sane, RESTful API. Check it out at http://developer.edmunds.com and let me know if you have any questions: mbock @ edmunds . com.

We also just finished Hackomotive, a $35k hackathon focused on startups improving the car shopping experience. You can see the winners here: http://www.hackomotive.com/. We'd obviusly love to see InstaMotor apply for next year!