

Carsabi Opens Access To Car Data (Apparently Green Cars Are Cheaper?) - raccoonone
http://carsabi.com/car-data-explorer/

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cjzhang
Is it possible to get a view that shows average price AND the number of
samples (maybe if you mouse over a column) at the same time? Or maybe some
info about stuff like variance, stdev, median, etc?

Trying to figure out why green cars are cheaper:

It looks like green cars are mostly from 97 to 2003 in a roughly normal curve,
while most other colors are exponential (so mostly from the last couple years
instead, and dropping off dramatically once you reach 2005 and older). Not
counting purple, which has 8 samples and is therefore mostly useless, hah.

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raccoonone
Ya, I'll add that to our list of feature requests. Would definitely like to
put some more features in, to help people with blog posts or other research in
the car space.

Ah yes, I would seem that green cars are going out of fashion, dunno who would
want a purple car =P

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WiseWeasel
If you're buying a Benz, it's a good way to save a few bucks...

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MiguelHudnandez
Green cars aren't cheaper, but people that choose the color green also choose
cheaper cars on average when compared to people that buy any other color.

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Estragon
Since the price of a use car is to a large extent determined by what the
market will bear, doesn't that amount to the same thing?

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MiguelHudnandez
Not necessarily. If you say "I will only buy a car that's green," and money is
no object, you are likely to spend less money than if you buy a car of any
other color. However, if you want a 2009 Honda Civic, a green one may not
necessarily be cheaper than a blue or black one.

My theory is that there aren't many green luxury cars out there (think
black!), but plenty of cheap commuter cars that are green. Another theory:
younger people want green and younger people happen to spend a lot less on
cars on average.

I went looking through the categories and the only time green is not the
cheapest is when it's a station wagon. In that case, red is cheaper than
green, but not by much.

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tigrank
How do you get the car data? I see you have data from cars.com do you have
custom code that scrapes the data or do you use some known tools?

Thanks

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ecolak
They used to get it from Craigslist. The listings were directly linked to
Craigslist listings. I see that they don't do click-outs any more so I'm
curious as to where they are getting them from too. By the way, I had done the
same thing about 2 years ago but had to stop after realizing that scraping
Craiglist was against their terms of use.

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quandrum
The uniformity of buying recommendations makes this seemingly useless. I
looked up 4 very different make and model combinations and every
recommendation was "Buy a 2009-2011 for the best value"

But it's neat that greens are cheap.

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dw5ight
oh yeah, this has nothing to do with what you should buy - we just built the
tool after a few beers this weekend because it seemed like it would be cool to
easily visualize every car for sale in SF... hope its enjoyable!

also - we are building a comprehensive recommendation engine for the top
50-100 models by collecting everything from EPA & NHTSA safety data to style
awards and max lifetime mileage. this is probably a month out and has required
getting pretty creative about crawling a number of heterogeneous data sources

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AUmrysh
Awesome, I'm looking at getting a car and a resource like this would help a
lot.

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su9aradd1ct
Interesting. Apparently for Hyundai cars green is the most expensive. :p

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WiseWeasel
For Volvo, red is slightly less expensive than green. Benz and Honda cheapest
in purple. A couple others have black, silver, grey and white. Not sure why
this is so interesting.

