This is the first of a series of posts on the statistics of AutoGlance's listing database.
The plot below shows the percentage of cars from each model year contained in AutoGlance's database (gathered from AutoTrader, Cars.com, eBay, Vehix, and web2carz). I didn't include 2012 since the model year isn't nearly through (and AutoGlance only shows used car listings so the number would be invalid anyway).
I'm not going to try and make any detailed analysis on the chart, but a few things do jump out at me:
If you've got a better hypothesis for whats going on between 2008 and 2010, feel free to post it in the comment section below.
If you’ve ever heard that having your tires properly inflated can improve your gas mileage and save you serious cash, you’ve probably been at least slightly dubious of these claims. How much could an under-inflated tire really cost you? The answer may be more than you think…
According to the US Department of Energy, “Under-inflated tires can lower gas mileage by 0.3 percent for every 1 PSI drop in pressure of all four tires.”
So how much money does this work out to be?
I’ve plotted the cost savings below for 3 different PSI intervals. All that you need to do is find your car’s MPG on the horizontal axis and match it up with your annual mileage on the vertical axis.
If your tires are underinflated by 6 PSI:
If your tires are underinflated by 9 PSI:
Note that these plots assume a fuel price of $3.50/gallon.
You can see that even at a modest 6psi, the under-inflation could easily cost you $50 a year. At the extreme, you could be wasting be well over $100 a year.
Note that this doesn’t take into account the reduced life seen by underinflated tires. Manufacturers typically claim that just 5 PSI below the recommended pressure can reduce a tire's life by up to 25%.
Of course, with the money you'll save using AutoGlance, you mite not even have to worry about any of this...
Money saving aside, there's one reason to check your tire pressure that trumps all: properly inflated tires are inherently safer. Underinflated tires lead to longer stopping distances in emergency situations. Additionally, underinflated tires are frequently cited as the cause for a majority of SUV rollover accidents.
So, what are you waiting for? Go check your tire pressure!
Reddit comments on this article here.
The purpose of AutoGlance's 'hiding' feature is very straightforward: we won't show you a car if there is another listing that is better than it.
Of course, "better" is a subjective term. Which is why we've defined it very rigidly:
It's important to note that a listing is only hidden if it meets all three of these criteria.
Let’s see how this plays out in different situations:
This example is as straightforward as it gets. Car A has 20,000 fewer miles, is 3 years newer, and is $5,000 cheaper. It is definitely the better car. Car B would be hidden behind Car A.
This example compares two much more similar cars. However, we see that once again, Car A has both lower mileage and a cheaper price. Once again, it is deemed to be a better car.
Now the comparisons start to get a little tricky. While Car B is $1,000 cheaper, it does have 5,000 more miles. One person might argue that the additional $1,000 is worth the reduced mileage, whereas another person might argue the reverse. This is why AutoGlance would show both of these cars; there is no clear winner.
Now, lets take it to the extreme:
In this case, Car B has 50,000 more miles than Car A, yet is just $100 cheaper. You'd have to be insane to argue that it’s not worth paying $100 more to get a car with half the mileage. However, this would bring subjectivity into the equation, which is exactly what we’re trying to avoid. There may be some lunatic who thinks that the car's mileage is completely irreverent, and thus would buy Car B over Car A. This is why AutoGlance would once again show you both cars in this scenario, because no car is clearly, unquestionably, better than the other.
Of course, the method is not perfect. For example, lets look at this scenario:
While Car A is $100 cheaper, it is in poor exterior condition. Knowing this information, most people would probably purchase Car B (even though it would have been deemed a worse car by AutoGlance). Unfortunately, car condition is rarely something mentioned in any online listing, and there’s no way of knowing this without going to the dealership and checking out the car in person.
The upside is that Car B is more than likely the very first car hidden behind Car A, so hopefully you wouldn’t have had too much trouble finding it. While the cars we choose to display are almost always the best deal you could find given the available information, we certainly recommend checking out the first few cars that are hidden behind it.
If all this looks mighty familiar, it may be because you’ve seen something similar on the flight search engine Hipmunk. Their interface is indeed what inspired us to build this feature, and we certainly owe them some credit.
It’s worth noting that hiding cars is an extremely delicate process, and that AutoGlance has developed an extensive filtering system to make it work. For example, all you need is one listing for a damaged or accident vehicle, and the heavily discounted price would cause hundreds (or even thousands) of listings to be hidden behind it. The same would occur for a listing where the seller fumbled when typing his asking price and wrote $36,000 instead of $63,000. Figuring out how to eliminate these scenarios was by far the most difficult aspect of the system, and we’re glad that we’ve got it working as well as it does.
If you have any suggestions on how we can further improve the hiding feature, we’d love to hear them. As it stands, we think we’ve done a fine job of taking 1,000’s of search results and presenting them in way that makes it easier for you to find the best deals . It certainly beats sorting them by price, mileage, or an arbitrary deal score, and forcing you to look through them, one by one.
Well, what are you waiting for? Try searching AutoGlance for yourself.
If you’ve ever owned a luxury/performance car (or any vehicle that recommends 91+ octane gas for that matter), you’ve more than likely asked yourself the question, Is it OK to fill my car up with regular (87 octane) gas? Am I going to damage my engine?
You may have heard that if you use regular fuel in a car that requires premium, your engine will begin knocking (that is, the fuel detonates prematurely inside the engine’s cylinders). Others will claim that in any modern car, the ECU will work with your engine’s knock censors to maximize performance for whatever fuel type you’ve put in your tank. Fortunately, that debate is not the purpose of this post.
What I wanted to determine was whether or not using regular fuel in a car that requires premium is even financially advantageous. That is, does using regular fuel take a toll on your gas mileage, and if so, is this difference enough to offset the ~$0.25 that you’re saving on each gallon of gas?
You might say that the definitive way to test this would be to fill up a car using 91 octane for a few weeks, calculate the MPG, and then do the same using 87 octane. Unfortunately, these results wouldn’t bode well as an overall conclusion that could be recommended to anyone, since your Acura TL’s V6 probably isn’t going to respond the same way the W12 in your neighbor’s Audi A8 will. It’s also likely the results will vary depending on whether the engine is naturally aspirated or turbo/supercharged. Not to mention the effects your particular driving style or your split between highway/city miles.
So, I decided to do some googling for people who had independently performed this sort of experiment in their own cars and calculate the overall average of these values. It wasn’t as easy as I thought; there were plenty of people stating things like “I didn't notice much of a difference when using regular gas,” however it was somewhat difficult to find people who had [claimed to] perform the experiment seriously, tabulating their mileage over multiple fill ups for each octane and recording their MPG to at least one decimal place.
Here’s what I found:
Over the 8 cars, we see that on average, gas mileage took a 4.5% hit when regular fuel was used. However, it’s important to note that two of the cars recorded worse gas mileage using premium fuel [go figure]. Overall, the average cost per mile comes out to $0.167 using regular versus $0.172 using premium. In other words, for every 1,000 miles driven, regular gas yielded an average savings of just $5.31.
So, what’s the conclusion? If you want to get an accurate answer, there’s no substitute for performing the experiment in your own car, according to your own driving style. If you’re too lazy to do that, you’re going to have to make do with what we’ve calculated here. Is a $5 or even $10 savings for every 1,000 miles you drive really worth the reduced performance and potential for long term damage to your engine?...You be the judge.
Of course, with the money you'll save using AutoGlance, you mite not even have to worry about any of this...
Reddit comments on this article here.
When you look at the search results on AutoGlance, you will notice that the positioning of the cars usually forms a diagonal line that runs from the bottom left of the screen to the top right of the screen. The reason for this is simple: the cheaper cars at the top of the screen are generally higer mileage cars (hence why they are cheap), whereas the more expensive cars are generally lower mileage cars (hence why they are more expensive).
(Keep in mind that AutoGlance has already hidden a majority of the cars, so even though what your seeing is the best of the best, there are still better and worse deals within).
This positioning makes it real easy to identify the good deals and to ignore the bad deals. Good deals will have an exceptionally low price as well as exceptionally low mileage, and therefore will be ‘outside’ of the diagonal line, at the top left of the screen. Bad deals will have an exceptionally high price as well as exceptionally high mileage, and therefore will be ‘outside’ of the diagonal line, at the bottom right of the screen.
(by Umar, MakeUseOf)
When people look for used cars online, they often jump from one site to another to look for listings. But what if you could use a search engine that gathered listings from various online resources and that let you search them? AutoGlance offers precisely this. AutoGlance is a web service that aggregates used car listings from Cars.com, AutoTrader, etc. You can search for their make and model. You can also specify the seller’s closeness to you by the zip code and searching distance. Your car results are arranged according to price. And each price range has a single car listed in front of it – this is the best offer (...Read More)
AutoGlance’s default setting lets you filter your search results by generation, rather than by year:
For those unfamiliar with the term, a ‘generation’ is a span of about 4-8 years where the car’s body style remains the same. Heres a really cool picture showing the 6 different generations of the BMW 5 Series:
Theres no real rule of thumb for determining when a generation begins or how long it mite last; a manufacturer mite release a new generation after 2 years for one model but wait 10 years before redesigning a different model. Fortunately for you, we’ve done the hard work and mapped all this out so all you have to do is click on the picture for generation and we’ll filter everything else out. Of course, if you do want to set your own year range, we give you the ability to do that as well.
Automotive journalist Keith Griffin contacted us to do an email Q&A to be featured on About.com.
Below is the text from the interview section; you can check out the full article here.
Q. What is AutoGlance? What was the impetus for starting it? How long did it take to develop it?
A. AutoGlance is a very different approach to used car search. First off, we aggregate listings from a number of sites (like AutoTrader and Cars.com) so that you don't have to perform the same search multiple times. Second, we have a unique interface where we graphically display things like the car's color, mileage, and price so that you don't have to go reading through a blob of text. Third, we have a really neat feature that can hide dozens of cars if they are determined to be worse deals than a similar listing. It sounds like something obvious, but it's an important feature that's missing from all other car search sites, and it can easily save you from looking through 50+ cars that you most likely have no intention of buying. We've even applied for a patent on the algorithm we use to do this.
We began work on AutoGlance about 4 months ago and just launched publically last week. Read more about buying a used car online to protect yourself.
Q. Who is behind AutoGlance? What are your backgrounds?
A. AutoGlance is just myself and my co-founder, Khine Lin. I take care of everything that's car-related and he takes care of all the coding. He built the front and back ends of the site from the ground up which is no small feat; we went through at least a dozen iterations before reaching an interface that we felt was ready to launch.
Q. Does the Internet need another car-search service like AutoGlance? What sets you apart from all of the other choices out there?
A. We really feel that AutoGlance is fundamentally different from any other car-search site that currently exists. Other sites give you a long list of hundreds of cars that match your search criteria, and you're forced to sit there looking through them one by one, page by page.
AutoGlance shows you every result on a single page, and we use icons to visually represent the most important features of each listing. You don't have to read anything; you can just look at the screen and quickly identify which cars are most appealing to you. We think that we've taken the tedious process of searching for a used car and made it into something enjoyable.
Q. How did you pick the websites you did? What made you want to associate with Vehix, AutoTrader and Cars.com? Why use AutoGlance to search all of these sites?
A. We decided to start off with the bigger sites that most people are already familiar with. Expanding our aggregating reach is definitely a top priority at this point. Next on the list iseBay. There's also a bunch of lesser-known sites that have really large listing databases as well; you can expect those to start showing up on AutoGlance within a few weeks.
Q. How do you make money from this website? What is its revenue source?
A. Making money is at the very bottom of our priorities at this point. There's a number of really cool features that we're working on at the moment; we'd much rather spend our time developing them before we spend any time looking for revenue. We're really committed to keeping our interface clean and uncluttered; you certainly won't see any banner-style advertisements showing up on AutoGlance. Whatever revenue stream we ultimately decide on will be unintrusive and perhaps even invisible to our users.
Q. One feature I really like is the graph that shows the cars ranked by mileage and age. It's a clean, simple way to spot what you want. What's the thinking behind the chart?
It's pretty simple: The greater the car's mileage, the further the car is positioned to the right. This setup makes it real easy to spot the good deals (lower price and off the left) and to ignore the bad deals (higher priced and off to the right). There's not much thinking required from the user, your eyes kind of just gravitate towards the better deals!
Q. What are the future plans for AutoGlance? Where does expansion come from?
A. We really want to focus on expanding the breadth of our aggregation. There's dozens of lesser known sites that we're working with to get their listings displayed on AutoGlance. We don't care if a site only has a few hundred listings; we still want them to include them in our aggregation.
The AutoGlance twitter account is now active. Follow Us!
We’ll be posting a lot of things on Twitter like general automotive news and advice on car buying cars, but the majority of our tweets are simply going to be hetty car pics… like these:
(by KillerStartup Staff, killerstartups.com)
If you want to buy a used car online, you could complain about many things but you could never say there are few sites where you could find such vehicles. Autotrader.com, UsedCars.com, CarDomain.com, Cars.com... the list can run for as long as you want. If you've got the time, you'll find a car in the shape you want, and for the right price. But what happens when you don't have the time? (...Read More)
This is the official AutoGlance blog. We blog about new features added to the website, general news, etc. Please stay updated! And, thanks for visiting.
