After a year in stealth, CarWoo (YC S09) launches today

Closed your website the second I saw I needed an account to continue.<p>edit: I'll expand so you don't get confused by my comment. I drop by auto sites every now and again and customize a car to my liking, as a game. The idea of getting a car is playful. Most of the time I'm not seriously thinking of buying the vehicle.<p>Now on your site, I can't customize a car. I can't even see what your site does. I could see myself playing around with models and brands and see a button at the end "We'll have 5 auto dealers bid on your dream car, $50. You'll save way more than $50 thanks to our competitive bidding process."<p>Or you can alienate all the random drop-ins forcing them to sign in, or associate their real life facebook profiles with some random site on the nets.<p>The value of your site appears to be in the bidding process. Not the customization process.

I will admit that I did not do any research beyond reading the article, but have you thought about how you will tackle the problem of the customer not test-driving the vehicle before purchase?<p>The article makes me think the entire streamlined process can result in a signed contract in a relatively short period of time, without the customer ever seeing the vehicle that s/he had already into a legally binding agreement for. This could obviously result in all kinds of problems. Perhaps the article has simply left out a few steps...?

Seems like a pretty cool service and the intro video was pretty informative. I'd use it to buy my next car, because I'm terrible at negotiating face to face. A minor nitpick on the intro: I found it odd that they said "Follow us on twitter dot com slash carwoo". If the end user is savy enough to know what twitter is and want to use it, is the "dot com" necessary? It seems the phrase "follow us on twitter at [company name]" is used almost universally.<p>Congrats to the CarWoo team for launching!

A couple of comments:<p>1) I know there are other companies that do something somewhat like this. My auto insurance company has a car buying service and I'm pretty sure it is run by a 3rd party. The business model is presumably different though (sell to auto clubs, etc).<p>2) The dealers it lists for me are mostly <i>really</i> far away. And I mean "I've never heard of that town, let's google maps it, wow, it's 5 hours of driving away!" far away.

Your other CarWoo business partner already submitted a link about CarWoo to HN: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1787451" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1787451</a>

I've never bought a car, but why do dealers keep inventory at all? Seems like it's the cause of all their headaches. Just have one of each model for test drives, then let people custom-order. I know people like to be able to drive off the lot with a new car, but we're talking about the biggest non-home purchase of their life. They're not willing to wait a few weeks to optimize it? Especially if the inventoryless dealer's lower costs mean they get a much better deal?

Neat service. Something I would use. Has some similarities to <a href="http://truecar.com" rel="nofollow">http://truecar.com</a><p>I'd like to see the specific options package listed (checkbox form maybe?) vs. having to write the features I'd like. That way there is really no negotiation that could go on.

It certainly seems like an easy to understand value prop. I've done ok on negotiating cars, but only after a lot of research and through a lot of frustration. I've told a friend of mine (an aggressive attorney) that I'd gladly pay her to go negotiate a car for me.<p>One of my worst experiences was trying to play the "let dealers compete" game online. I'd get 4 to 24 hour turnaround times on emails, which just wasn't going to work. As a bonus, I still get several emails a week from dealers still trying to get my business. (Thankfully on my semi-throwaway account.)

It's like CarsDirect, but paid for by the buyer instead of seller. Hard to judge its usefulness without buying a car, but there's room for a lot of players in this space.

The team pictures have obvious heavy shadows from a single flash. Otherwise, looks promising, I might give them a try next time round.

If the site has been running for over a year, how can it be said to "launch" today?