111–120 of 120 posts
You know, I'm not really one that can take pleasure in the misfortunate of others, but good fucking riddance. I was deeply and incredibly wronged by members of the CarWoo team. It is incredibly gratifying to see this news, when I've done so great at keeping them out of my mind. When the court case is finally settled, I'm sure my appalling tale will be something we can all enjoy together. Hey Tommy and Eric, remember…
Would really like to find out why they're shutting down. I ran a virtual car dealership for a while and then started a similar site to carwoo, before carwoo. It was absolutely crazy. Six months into it, both my cofounder and I decided it was best to shut it down (amid concerns that his employer might just end up getting all or a significant chunk of our work). The auto industry is a very weird one. Entrenched in thei…
I'm going to work on writing this up. Lots of reasons and it deserves a detailed post-mortem.
Cars are commodities, and should not be sold by salesman on commission. I'm not buying another car until mine falls apart.
This. All dealerships should be converted to car delivery and ordering centers (with one of each model for test driving). The middle man cost should be wiped out, and the business should move to an order > build > x days to deliver approach. Save buyers $3,500 on a $30,000 car, let them further and easier customize, and they will wait for delivery. Simply put, replace build car > sell car, with sell car > build car.…
The end result of this system is that inventory is borne by the dealerships, customers can personalize their cars (taken to the extreme with Mini) and the factory is a fascinating place to visit because every single car coming down the line is different to the one in front and the one behind. It is entirely integrated to their JIT systems soma truck full of steering wheels unloads them in the correct build order to match the vehicles progressing down the line already.
Not to speculate, but it seemed like as I went through the process two years ago was one that might not be able to scale out and provide a consistent experience to large numbers of consumers across the country.
Best of luck to all and thanks for aiming high.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I can't wait 21 days for a new car, I have some serious life planning issues.
Quite often people need a new car because their previous one suddenly broke down or was involved in an accident, neither of which are plannable.
I assume that their new work with a competing site means that they wouldn't be interested in trying to sell CarWoo? Otherwise it often surprises me that people abandon their efforts without at least trying to sell the codebase/database as a starting point to someone else.
The TrueCar homepage ( http://www.truecar.com/ ) looks like one of those generic 404/squatter page.
Those generic parked domain pages are heavily A/B tested and iterated to achieve maximum revenue per user. What this tells me is TrueCar probably has a pretty solid layout that gets users to click and start the process.
Trust me, they tried a bunch of different Web 2.0-ish layouts and they all lose to these kinds of generic-looking pages. Sad but true.
Source: previous TrueCar employee.
I assume that their new work with a competing site means that they wouldn't be interested in trying to sell CarWoo? Otherwise it often surprises me that people abandon their efforts without at least trying to sell the codebase/database as a starting point to someone else.
You are making a lot of assumptions here.
Cars are commodities, and should not be sold by salesman on commission. I'm not buying another car until mine falls apart.
Depending on your preference for engaging in negotiation and buying and selling, there is a pretty reasonable model to show you should buy a typical 3 year old used car and then sell it around year 5 or so thus buying a car when it is still reliable has past the fastest part of its depreciation curve and selling it when it's about to fall down the reliability curve and still worth close to what you paid for it.