

Discuss HN: Crowdsourcing Open Car Maintience Startup Idea? - diminium

Ok, I'll spill one of my ideas here and see if it goes anywhere here.  I wished I had the resources to build this but, meh.  Hopefully someone interesting happens here.  So here I go....<p>Have you ever been to a mechanic for routine maintenance?  You'll notice they will say you'll need to do this or that or this for your car.  Then you'll go to another mechanic and they'll say something completely different.  So you then go to your car manufacturer website for the final authority.  I mean, they did build it, right?  Until you hit a wall.<p>Look at this for example: http://www.honda.com/ or http://www.bmw.com<p>Tell me, you need information on maintaining the $30,000 car you just bought.  Where do you get it?  Apparently you don't.  Even Dell has a better site than this.<p>It's not unless you use your master search engine expertise to end up well, here http://techinfo.honda.com/Rjanisis/logon.asp?Region=US or here http://www.bmwtechinfo.com/.<p>So the car manufacturers are keeping their mouths shut.  Where do you go next?  I'm guessing Google and forums, right?  Congratulations, by doing so, you entered Anecdotal Evidence Hell which ends up being just as bad as where you first started.<p>What I propose next is this.  The creation of a car website with the equal authority of Wikipedia except for car ownership.  It is a website where if a mechanic is saying you need a $600 car repair, you can quickly look it up on your smartphone and see if they are bluffing or might be on to something.  For the fun of it, it will also allow you to compare costs of different car maintenance in your area as well as link to some DIY wiki page should you try to do it yourself.  It will be the ultimate second opinion for your car.<p>So what do you guys think?
======
jamesmcn
Cool idea, but I see some problems:

* Car dealers make a lot of money on servicing their customers' cars. They don't have much incentive to make DIY easy, and may work actively to sabotage a project like this. Unless you build relationships with dealers and manufacturers into your business plan from the beginning.

* DIY car seems to be dead or dying. In the 1970s, everyone knew how to change their oil. I'm not sure how many people in 2012 even know that oil is a thing that their cars consume. It might be very hard to achieve critical mass for a project like this.

* There are a lot of forums dedicated to various makes and models of cars. When information is available, it is usually easy to find there.

* Since this could be readily perceived as cutting in to the income stream of mechanics, you'd want to find some reason for them to buy into the project as well.

------
jobu
As a person that likes to DIY, I feel your pain. I really wish auto companies
would put their repair manuals online for free!

It's still pretty sparse, but one option is the Stack Exchange site for
mechanics: <http://mechanics.stackexchange.com/>

------
taurussai
Good idea but to differentiate yourself from becoming one of the all to
familiar discussion forum would take some effort. Ofcourse, using facebook,
twitter etc to crowdsource would help.

