If you remember my past blog posts, I told you that I’m a software engineer by profession. It was last week when I sat down for lunch with a friend from work, and we had a little chat. I told him that I wanted to buy a new car as the current one is old, and in pretty bad shape.
As we were talking about different cars, it hit me. This great new idea, that just came to my head from a simple conversation with a friend about day to day stuff.
When you buy a used car from a person, not a dealership, usually one of 4 things happen, rated 1-4 in their frequency – 1 being the most frequent:
1) If the car is worth less than 10K – you don’t even bother with a garage checkup
2) You will take it to a checkup at a garage (at your expense)
3) You will trust the person and won’t even take it to a garage checkup (the difference from number 1 is the price of the car)
4) The owner will present a garage checkup as requested by himself\other previous potential buyer
Take note that if the result from number 4 is bad, he probably won’t show it to you even if the checkup was already performed.
A test can cost from around 100$ up to 250$, and since the cost is so high, some people might choose not to do it considering the cost of the car.
After taking the car for a test, and deciding not to buy the car, the test and the money paid for it are useless to you… Or is it?
My idea is to create a website where you could upload the test, and allow other people to have access to the test results for a percentage of the cost. The more people that ask to look at the results, the more money you make back (and possibly even make profit).
That way, a person that interested in the car, will check the website first to see if there’s an available and current test results for the car, and will more than likely pay a small amount of money to view it, instead of go through the hustle of taking the car for a test, and that even without contacting the owner.
As the website gains popularity, it will become a standard to have the test results ready prior to even talking about money. It will also encourage the owner to perform the test himself in order to sell the car faster if people are usually checking the website first, because some people will skip the car if it won’t have test results on the site.
This idea is one of those things that as they take off, it will grow exponentially, since it is something that the used cars market is missing, it will increase the comfort of the process for people, and will assure them that what they’re buying is in fact, what they intended to buy and not a piece of crap.
Remember where you got this idea if you create it without me 🙂
More on this in the next post,
Dekel
