

Showroom - New-car research - nicksergeant
http://showroom.is

======
tghw
I hate to say it, but it does suck, quite a bit. The interface is nice and
clean, but the functionality isn't there.

I tried redoing my recent search for a good SUV-like vehicle. I started off in
SUV, hoping I could pick models to compare between. I headed straight for the
Subaru section, since I ended up buying an Outback. But the Outback was not
there. The CrossTrek, Forester, and Tribeca were there. The Outback ended up
being under Cars, even though it is, arguably, more of an SUV than the
Tribeca.

Okay, so I found one of the cars I was wanting to compare. How do I choose
others? Oh, no way to do that. Okay. Well, let's at least look at the Outback.

I have tabs, that shows me different model years, not much else there. Down
the left side are some, but not all of the engine and trim options. Clicking
them does...nothing. The main content is a bunch of pretty marketing photos.
Finally, at the very bottom is the first actual information about the car. The
price and the MPG. I would also say that it has the "Category", but seeing as
it says the Outback is a "Car", when it is either an "SUV", "Crossover", or
"Wagon", I can't really count it.

Oh, but look, they have an affiliate link that takes me to Edmunds! Finally, a
site where researching new cars doesn't suck!

------
jxf
Right now, one searches for a car type and a car model. But that's not really
the way I've searched for my last few cars.

Most importantly, I want to be able to:

1\. Require a minimum fuel efficiency (e.g. at least 20 mi/gal)

2\. Specify a drivetrain (e.g. AWD, FWD, ...)

3\. Specify features (e.g. Bluetooth, A/C, ...)

4\. Specify a price range (e.g. $20,000 to $45,000)

~~~
nicksergeant
There's a ton of stuff we can / want to do. The first step is getting the data
/ photos in the UI, and then we'll innovate in the research space.

~~~
jxf
Understood. I'm just saying that as an MVP I'm not sure it demonstrates as
much value as I'd like. (That's just to me, personally, of course -- I'm sure
different people search differently.)

~~~
nicksergeant
Definitely agree, but we wanted to get this in front of people to garner
feedback and reinforce the things we should work on next.

------
samwillis
You need more filtering on the main lists. Let me filter by price range,
high/low brand, size of vehicle, number of seats, engine size, petrol/diesel,
air con, sat nav, cruise control... So rather than filtering the cars also
filter the model of each car. Help me find the exact model I want.

Then let me create a collection of cars to compare, show a table of data about
each car side by side.

Take a look a [https://www.google.com/fonts](https://www.google.com/fonts) and
take some insparation from that for the "comparison" system.

EDIT:

What you want to be aiming for is becoming the Hipmunk of car shopping. show
me prices from all the dealers, where can I get a model of car that matches
what I want the cheapest

~~~
nicksergeant
Yep, I actually originally had this in the first version of this app, when it
was Auto Swatch:
[http://i.imgur.com/vvUHt85.png](http://i.imgur.com/vvUHt85.png)

Those filtering options will be coming soon.

~~~
nicksergeant
And comparison will be the root of the app once we get rolling. Boiling down
your options to a handful of vehicles and then helping you make an informed
(and engaging) decision is the point of the app.

------
alphakappa
It's a good exercise, but it's not something I would use as my starting point
for car research.

\- The landing page feels unfinished because most of the page is filled with
greyed out icons.

\- Once you pick the type of vehicle (cars), you have to navigate through 9
pages of car models. I know that there's a search bar, but it's not what users
will see first. Why am I being given an alphabetic listing of cars? You may
want to allow users to drill down further by car types, make the search more
prominent, and if you have to provide a list of cars, order them by what you
think the user will be likely to look at, instead of an alphabetic listing. At
the very least, group them by manufacturer.

\- Once you pick a car, the information is very sparse. Some pictures, some
info about mileage, cost, and then an affiliate link to Edmunds.

The amount of information you get about a car after all that trouble is not
even close to what car buyers are looking for. In the end, the only way to do
research is to follow the link to Edmunds, so this entire website feels like a
way to get affiliate revenue. If you are serious about the website, you may
want to provide enough value of your own (Edmunds already makes it fairly easy
to browse to the car you want, so that's not a differentiator)

------
rzt
This seems like a good opportunity as the process of researching and buying a
car can be so onerous.

I recently helped a non-car savvy friend with his purchase of a Mazda3 and he
was overwhelmed by the choices and the process of shopping for a car. Feature
research was a primary interest with pricing next.

Feature research will be huge, same with pricing info. If only features
weren't grouped into packages and if car pricing wasn't so murky.

------
xtreme
Of course, there is a lot of room for improvement as you mentioned. Some
suggestions:

\- Please focus on the data part, I would want the relevant i nformation
presented well, not a bunch of images.

\- The default alphabetical sorting is not very useful, sort it by
popular/cost/mpg etc.

\- Many people don't know what car they want, are you planning to cater to
them?

\- The icons for van and minivan are identical.

------
tptacek
I need something like this, but I don't think this is it.

I don't care at all about photos of cars. I would at some point, but I'm not
sure when.

What I need is:

* Each model broken out by every trim (this is 80% of what I need right there) so I don't have to dig through flash-heavy car company websites to figure out what my engine options are

* Comparisons across cars/trims on BHP, torque, and displacement, city/hwy MPG, cabin & trunk space, &c. These are all stats that are readily available but annoying to track down

* Aggregation and summary of existing reviews

* Some notion of the "maturity" of the current model year (what's the last model year that had a major refresh)

* A metric of what the used market for each car looks like for the past couple years

* Some notion of availability and price variability across regions

If this already exists, please someone tell me, because I'm driving a car
whose engine is at any moment going to fall out of its compartment and onto
the street below, almost entirely because of what a galactic pain it is to
narrow down my options.

~~~
nicksergeant
Hey Thomas,

Thanks for the comment. Some great insights here.

Honestly what we have on Showroom right now is not useful. We put this on HN
to generate exactly what has happened here: opinionated discussions about what
people really want / need from a shopping experience. It's clear (to us) that
there can be innovation in this space, and there are a ton of ways to do it.

The thoughts you have are similar to what we've been planning for a while. We
want a visual representation of trims for a model - how do they relate to each
other, and how do they relate to similar vehicles?

On top of digesting the data that we have (which is a lot), we're going to
aggregate stuff from around the web - YouTube reviews, blog post reviews, etc.

Anyways, thanks again for your comment (and not just saying stuff like "this
is shit", like other commenters). This is exactly what we posted here for.

Stay tuned :)

------
declan
I like the idea, but I'd rather have a less glossy and more data-focused
approach. How about searching for 0-60 times, limit by 4 seats, limit by
price, sort by aggregated reviews, etc.?

I'm pretty familiar with Porsche's lineup (I own one) and the 911 listing is
pretty useless
([http://showroom.is/porsche/911/](http://showroom.is/porsche/911/)). When I
click on a 911 Turbo S, I see photos for a Carrera 4 that costs half as much,
etc.

A frontend to a MySQL instance where I can fire off queries would be far more
useful, frankly. Just remember to sanitize input. :)

------
resu
Instead of sorting by name, you need to find a better way to order the cars in
each category (and allow several sorts, price, mpg, popularity, etc)

There is very little value in showing me 300k Bentleys next to 30k BMWs. It
makes navigating the site a real chore, unless I know exactly the model I'm
looking for, but then why would I use showroom.is in the first place, right?

------
nicksergeant
This is just our "MVP". We have a lot more planned:

\- Better trim organization.

\- Actual data on trims (MSRP, major trim features, etc).

\- Proper galleries.

\- Aggregation of YouTube video reviews, blog reviews from around the web,
Edmunds reviews, etc.

\- Aggregation of user-submitted photos of models / trims from Flickr, etc.

~~~
mikesilvis
I would hardly call this an MVP. The site isn't really useable in it's current
state. It's a list of cars, with a price and no sorting, filtering, really
anything...

Even after i click on a car all it does is show me pictures of it... Not even
correlated pictures but it looks like you took the first 5 images off Google.
Most of them don't even have pictures of the interior.

~~~
nicksergeant
If you knew how much work went into getting it to this point, you'd probably
have a different opinion.

~~~
kungfooey
I hate to break it to you, but the amount of work that goes into a product is
completely irrelevant. It's all about the usefulness to the end-user.

If the amount of work mattered, we would be digging holes with spoons instead
of backhoes.

------
jonahx
I like the clean, simple UI.

One improvement suggestion: There's a lot of whitespace because the pics and
the text (which is only two small lines) are given equal space for each entry.
I'd consider letting the pics take up the full square, putting the title above
them, and putting the two bullet points side by side under them.

------
n00j
Other than the pretty interface, what is the added value of using this over
just going directly to edmunds.com? Its seems they have much better filters,
sorting, etc. edmunds.com may not be the absolution best interface, but its
functional, and doesn't seem to difficult.

------
jedanbik
Right now, your website allows me to browse for pictures of new cars in
alphabetical order, or search for pictures of new cars. That's it. Why would I
bookmark this site? Why would I recommend this site to others? It doesn't yet
serve a purpose.

You have data that you can use to boost your site's functionality. If you gave
people sliders for base cost, city MPG and highway MPG, your website would be
more useful.

People could look for pictures of new cars on google image search. Maybe you
want people to look for pictures of new cars on your site by MPG or price.
These are things that your website can leverage right now, all by changing the
front end.

Until then, your website is a splash page for Edmunds.

------
nicksergeant
Lesson learned on the tagline. We've killed the "doesn't suck" part. Thanks,
HN!

~~~
nicksergeant
And a note on us calling this an MVP: we've probably used that too loosely.
This is more of a proof of concept to see if there's demand in this space. We
believe there is, and wanted to show what we are starting with.

~~~
adrianpike
There's definite and obvious demand for making the car shopping (and
purchasing, especially) experience less painful. It's a sad state of affairs
when getting a loan was the easiest part of the experience.

I don't think you've fully decided on the problem you're trying to solve
though. Is it comparing my new car options across manufacturers? What are the
key deciding factors for someone getting a new car? Who are your customers?
Who _aren't_ your customers?

At this point, what you've built is providing no insight into any of those
questions for you, except that what you've got so far is not the product for
the HN market. :)

I'd focus on those before going further down this road, but that's just one
man's unsolicited opinion. I am fairly involved in the automotive industry,
however, so I've got some insight.

~~~
nicksergeant
Appreciate the insight. We definitely are in a super-alpha state where we
don't really know what we're targeting yet. And by "we" I mean me and two
others, doing this on the side :-p

Hopefully after a few iterations, we can get a better grasp on what we're
trying to do and who we're doing it for.

------
johngalt
Model/Price/Mileage is practically useless.

Give me a comparison site that allows me compare pricing with similar common
options. I don't care if the car is priced "from $20k" if adding an automatic
and A/C means $25k.

------
bane
A good start with lots of promise. I hope this eventually ends up with a full
faceted filter system so I can dive down on any category in any order and
combination I want and have it offer me a couple options.

~~~
nicksergeant
It will, thanks!

------
fsckin
I wanted to research the following:

(manual transmission OR automatic w/ paddle shift) AND (rear-wheel drive OR
all-wheel drive) AND (sedan OR coupe)

Sort by options: power to weight ratio OR 1/4th mile time OR price

For a very specific shopper like myself, this sucks. Can't even compare two
cars.

~~~
adrianpike
If the OP started integrating more data sources for some of that information,
things could get interesting:
[http://www.albeedigital.com/supercoupe/articles/0-60times.ht...](http://www.albeedigital.com/supercoupe/articles/0-60times.html)

The downside is whether or not the enthusiast market would really want
something like this - I know that review after review told me the new CTS was
whooping on the german sport sedans, but after actually test driving all of
them, there was an obvious winner on feel alone. I used a ton of online
comparison tools, read through dozens of reviews, and still wound up buying
against all their advice.

------
TylerE
Some of your data is bad. For instance, your pics of the VW Golf (Also NB -
synonyms...searching VW results in 0 matches) shows a leather interior...which
you can't get in the US.

------
ufmace
The pictures and UI are pretty cool, but right now, there's almost no
functionality besides seeing some nice pictures of a particular model that
you're interested in.

------
tehwalrus
astonished that the first page of "cars" has only one or two that push 30mpg.
Anything short of 50mpg just isn't _trying_ surely?!

(of the 20 cars listed here[1] that are except from the London congestion
charge, none are lower than 134mpg.)

[1] [http://www.nextgreencar.com/congestion-charge-
exempt/](http://www.nextgreencar.com/congestion-charge-exempt/)

------
LightThatPours
Message to the site owner: Congratulations on fail

I tried to think of something positive to say, but really... if you're
marketing yourself as something that doesn't suck and within 2 seconds I think
"this site sucks due to lack of understanding about car research", you've
failed.

Now you have the challenge of recouping credibility. You launched too soon,
you didn't say beta, or even better, alpha which could have saved you.

------
larrywright
I love the idea, but I want it for used cars. I don't by new cars as I think
they're a waste of money.

~~~
nicksergeant
We'll have data for older-model vehicles in the future.

~~~
larrywright
That's great news.

------
closetgeekshow
it looks nice but completely lacking in functionality. at a bare minimum you
should be providing some level of filtering to narrow down the results beyond
the vehicle category

------
ianstallings
One thing you may want to add, if you're willing, is a link to a virtual test
drive such as the ones done by winding road magazine on youtube. I'm sure they
wouldn't mind the traffic, and it gives you a good first impression of how it
drives.

But it's a good start. I would love to see something besides car.com, edmunds,
or kbb to do a little research. All the info is all over the place and I've
ended up having multiple tabs open with the manufacturer websites.

