One of the big ticket items we purchase in our lives is our car. And when that starts having a problem, most of us are nervous about taking our car to a mechanic just like we are about getting our tooth pulled out at a dentist. Unless, we have a relative or friend who is knowledgeable and helpful with cars, that eases things a little bit.
What if you had a friend online, who can track all your services on your car(s), tell you how much your car is worth as well as tell you how much you can expect to pay when something breaks down?
DriverSide (beta) aims to be all that and more. DriverSide lets you create a virtual garage with your cars. It is not just aimed at car owners but also aimed at helping in buying and selling your car as well.
Garage for your Car
- Create a home for your car – select year, model, trim & color
- Instantly get technical specifications for your car
- Read reviews or write one yourself (My first car review)
- Get annual cost of ownership (to register, insure and operate)
- Links to other resources for your car
- Finally a list of similar cars for you to browse through
Service Your Car
DriverSide have collected a lot of data from auto mechanics around the country for various cars, the repairs and what they would cost. This is invaluable information.
- Ask other drivers questions about the car
- Read tips on servicing
- Find the best local mechanic
- Print a Pre-Service Report – an estimate for the repair based that includes labor and parts in your area
- Look at Recalls and Complaints for your car
- Check manufacturer’s Service schedule to see what’s coming up at that 50,000 miles mark
What It’s Worth
- Find out what your car is worth by DriverSide estimate or black book value for a trade-in or private sell.
- Also, a very cool feature is a value forecast. It’s a graph that shows what your car is worth at different mileage based on previous sales data in your area.
Parts & Accesories
- Browse popular parts & accesories for your car
- Parts for exterioir, interior, ebay listings, tires & rims, etc.
For Sale
- Lists cars for sale and has a nice interface to refine your search to find the car you need
- You could also put your car for sale by adding pictures, videos, descriptions and features of your car
With car bigwigs like Cars.com, AutoTrader.com, Edmunds.com, etc DriverSide is entering a heavily saturated market of car websites. But, the features it offers and the user-friendly & intuitive interface is very welcoming. Plus, it has some unique features like getting a pre-service report & value forecast definitely makes me want to come back to this site.
Right now, it looks a little less active but as it gains traction and the word gets out, DriverSide is set to be come a car owner’s best friend.
One thing that would add even more traction to Driverside, would be the ability to track mileage along with the service and maintenance records in the car profile. A chart showing mileage history and the ability to map it with the oil changes, air filter changes, cheap tyres etc would be very insightful.
If you create an account for yourself and upload pictures of your car, share your garage in the comments. You can see K’s garage here.
It’s a pretty cool idea – I wonder if it will take off?
I can certainly relate to worrying about taking a car to a garage. Often a small problem can be very costly. To have some feature to see if you are being charged fairly would be pretty useful in these situations.
olly, I hope so too. That feature to see whats a fair price for a repair is what you get with the ‘Pre-service’ report. It shows you what you can expect to pay for a repair in your area! That’s priceless, IMHO.
I went to look at their site and I like it a lot. I can definitely see that I’ll be using it just to track important things. I just had an alternator and tires put on my car. If I put that in the system now, I can know if someone tells me a year from now that I need an alternator. Without that bookmark and printout to show them, I would have to find the receipts or try to remember when the work was done. This idea is LONG OVERDUE!
Christopher, I’m totally with you on this one. I had a starter put in for $400 in my Eclipse last year and I could have really used some information like this which states I should have only paid between $200-$300 including labor in my area. And now I’d could put my service records in and look it up later. And yes it’s hard to imagine that no one else has done this and that hasn’t caught on either. Atleast we are spreading the word one person at a time.
This is the greatest idea ever. Imagine going to any dealer and be able to pull all the service logs for the car. Carfax isn’t enough when buying a car since we do not know what is the mechanical history of the car. It would be a great addition if the city tries to make it mendatory.
Have a look at http://www.FairRepair.com. Our service will generate an accurate estimate (No ranges) giving you the exact labor time with average labor rates in your area calculated from a 65K record repair facility. Our service also lists out the exact OEM Part # & Price. Our system uses MOTOR Information Systems Parts & Labor data, the same data used by a majority of repair facilities in the US.
techie.. not sure if that’s practical to make it mandatory but it could definitely add to the value of the car if Kelly Blue Book and such start giving some kind of monetary value for ranks based on maintenance history.
FairRepair, thanks for sharing that information. I guess I can live with the range for free but definitely bookmarking your site for expensive repairs when it will definitely be worth it to get that data for $9.99.
actually sounds really useful. sort of a one stop shop for many of your car needs. it’s unfortunate we don’t have something like that over here. when it comes to many car decisions, having all that information available would be a significant advantage.
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Definitely a great site. This reminds me of the new web 2.0 realty sites, except for cars. Most sites are just plain difficult to navigate, but this one is one of my new favorites.
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This is weird I just entered what car I drive, a 2004 Nissan 350Z, and its saying the cost of ownership for this car is $10,000 per year… I don’t know about that lol I think that’s an over-estimate.
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For a person like me, who is very lazy to take my car to the garage, your tips added new life and care for my car. Thanks.