Showroom - New-car research

I hate to say it, but it does suck, quite a bit. The interface is nice and clean, but the functionality isn&#x27;t there.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s at least look at the Outback.<p>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 &quot;Category&quot;, but seeing as it says the Outback is a &quot;Car&quot;, when it is either an &quot;SUV&quot;, &quot;Crossover&quot;, or &quot;Wagon&quot;, I can&#x27;t really count it.<p>Oh, but look, they have an affiliate link that takes me to Edmunds! Finally, a site where researching new cars doesn&#x27;t suck!

Right now, one searches for a car type and a car model. But that&#x27;s not really the way I&#x27;ve searched for my last few cars.<p>Most importantly, I want to be able to:<p>1. Require a minimum fuel efficiency (e.g. at least 20 mi&#x2F;gal)<p>2. Specify a drivetrain (e.g. AWD, FWD, ...)<p>3. Specify features (e.g. Bluetooth, A&#x2F;C, ...)<p>4. Specify a price range (e.g. $20,000 to $45,000)

You need more filtering on the main lists. Let me filter by price range, high&#x2F;low brand, size of vehicle, number of seats, engine size, petrol&#x2F;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.<p>Then let me create a collection of cars to compare, show a table of data about each car side by side.<p>Take a look a <a href="https://www.google.com/fonts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;fonts</a> and take some insparation from that for the &quot;comparison&quot; system.<p>EDIT:<p>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

It&#x27;s a good exercise, but it&#x27;s not something I would use as my starting point for car research.<p>- The landing page feels unfinished because most of the page is filled with greyed out icons.<p>- Once you pick the type of vehicle (cars), you have to navigate through 9 pages of car models. I know that there&#x27;s a search bar, but it&#x27;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.<p>- Once you pick a car, the information is very sparse. Some pictures, some info about mileage, cost, and then an affiliate link to Edmunds.<p>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&#x27;s not a differentiator)

This seems like a good opportunity as the process of researching and buying a car can be so onerous.<p>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.<p>Feature research will be huge, same with pricing info. If only features weren&#x27;t grouped into packages and if car pricing wasn&#x27;t so murky.

Of course, there is a lot of room for improvement as you mentioned. Some suggestions:<p>- Please focus on the data part, I would want the relevant i nformation presented well, not a bunch of images.<p>- The default alphabetical sorting is not very useful, sort it by popular&#x2F;cost&#x2F;mpg etc.<p>- Many people don&#x27;t know what car they want, are you planning to cater to them?<p>- The icons for van and minivan are identical.

I need something like this, but I don&#x27;t think this is it.<p>I don&#x27;t care at all about photos of cars. I would at some point, but I&#x27;m not sure when.<p>What I need is:<p>* Each model broken out by every trim (this is 80% of what I need right there) so I don&#x27;t have to dig through flash-heavy car company websites to figure out what my engine options are<p>* Comparisons across cars&#x2F;trims on BHP, torque, and displacement, city&#x2F;hwy MPG, cabin &amp; trunk space, &amp;c. These are all stats that are readily available but annoying to track down<p>* Aggregation and summary of existing reviews<p>* Some notion of the &quot;maturity&quot; of the current model year (what&#x27;s the last model year that had a major refresh)<p>* A metric of what the used market for each car looks like for the past couple years<p>* Some notion of availability and price variability across regions<p>If this already exists, please someone tell me, because I&#x27;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.

I like the idea, but I&#x27;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.?<p>I&#x27;m pretty familiar with Porsche&#x27;s lineup (I own one) and the 911 listing is pretty useless (<a href="http://showroom.is/porsche/911/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;showroom.is&#x2F;porsche&#x2F;911&#x2F;</a>). When I click on a 911 Turbo S, I see photos for a Carrera 4 that costs half as much, etc.<p>A frontend to a MySQL instance where I can fire off queries would be far more useful, frankly. Just remember to sanitize input. :)

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)<p>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&#x27;m looking for, but then why would I use showroom.is in the first place, right?

This is just our &quot;MVP&quot;. We have a lot more planned:<p>- Better trim organization.<p>- Actual data on trims (MSRP, major trim features, etc).<p>- Proper galleries.<p>- Aggregation of YouTube video reviews, blog reviews from around the web, Edmunds reviews, etc.<p>- Aggregation of user-submitted photos of models &#x2F; trims from Flickr, etc.

I like the clean, simple UI.<p>One improvement suggestion: There&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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&#x27;t seem to difficult.

Right now, your website allows me to browse for pictures of new cars in alphabetical order, or search for pictures of new cars. That&#x27;s it. Why would I bookmark this site? Why would I recommend this site to others? It doesn&#x27;t yet serve a purpose.<p>You have data that you can use to boost your site&#x27;s functionality. If you gave people sliders for base cost, city MPG and highway MPG, your website would be more useful.<p>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.<p>Until then, your website is a splash page for Edmunds.

Lesson learned on the tagline. We&#x27;ve killed the &quot;doesn&#x27;t suck&quot; part. Thanks, HN!

Model&#x2F;Price&#x2F;Mileage is practically useless.<p>Give me a comparison site that allows me compare pricing with similar common options. I don&#x27;t care if the car is priced &quot;from $20k&quot; if adding an automatic and A&#x2F;C means $25k.

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.

I wanted to research the following:<p>(manual transmission OR automatic w&#x2F; paddle shift) AND (rear-wheel drive OR all-wheel drive) AND (sedan OR coupe)<p>Sort by options: power to weight ratio OR 1&#x2F;4th mile time OR price<p>For a very specific shopper like myself, this sucks. Can&#x27;t even compare two cars.

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&#x27;t get in the US.

The pictures and UI are pretty cool, but right now, there&#x27;s almost no functionality besides seeing some nice pictures of a particular model that you&#x27;re interested in.

astonished that the first page of &quot;cars&quot; has only one or two that push 30mpg. Anything short of 50mpg just isn&#x27;t <i>trying</i> surely?!<p>(of the 20 cars listed here[1] that are except from the London congestion charge, none are lower than 134mpg.)<p>[1] <a href="http://www.nextgreencar.com/congestion-charge-exempt/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nextgreencar.com&#x2F;congestion-charge-exempt&#x2F;</a>

Message to the site owner: Congratulations on fail<p>I tried to think of something positive to say, but really... if you&#x27;re marketing yourself as something that doesn&#x27;t suck and within 2 seconds I think &quot;this site sucks due to lack of understanding about car research&quot;, you&#x27;ve failed.<p>Now you have the challenge of recouping credibility. You launched too soon, you didn&#x27;t say beta, or even better, alpha which could have saved you.

I love the idea, but I want it for used cars. I don&#x27;t by new cars as I think they&#x27;re a waste of money.

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

One thing you may want to add, if you&#x27;re willing, is a link to a virtual test drive such as the ones done by winding road magazine on youtube. I&#x27;m sure they wouldn&#x27;t mind the traffic, and it gives you a good first impression of how it drives.<p>But it&#x27;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&#x27;ve ended up having multiple tabs open with the manufacturer websites.