Need a Car Buying Map Service?

**G.Irish** · 07-02-2009, 11:18 AM

I was just thinking yesterday that it'd be rather convenient if I could search for cars or bikes on a map. Sure, most of the big vehicle classifieds sites will tell you what city the vehicle is in, but if it's a city I don't know I have to go look it up anyway.

I was thinking it would be fairly easy to make a mashup like that for MM's site for shits and giggles. At the very least one could use the Ebay API to map out stuff on Ebay motors. With a little more work one could scrape cars.com and autotrader and map that stuff too.

Any interest?

Evan · 07-02-2009, 11:19 AM

zillow for cars, I like the idea! :thumbup:

***Jake*** · 07-02-2009, 11:28 AM

If someone else will do all the hard work, I'll happily add a link to it somewhere on the home page!

That would definitely be a cool service to have as we are all in search of cheap E30s, Miatae, Merkurs, and Supras.

WRXtranceformed · 07-02-2009, 11:37 AM

Jake Wrote:Merkurs

Burn them all

**G.Irish** · 07-02-2009, 11:52 AM

Evan Wrote:zillow for cars, I like the idea! :thumbup:

I hadn't thought about Zillow but that's the perfect analogy. You could even have some sort of average price calculator that would track what cars go for in a given region. It wouldn't work very well for normal car listings because it could only give you list price but you could be fairly accurate with Ebay auction end prices.

I was also thinking that if you could get some way to pull for sale posts from auto forums that could be huge. It might be a bit difficult to get something other than gibberish from the first post and the thread title though.

HAULN-SS · 07-02-2009, 12:36 PM

This is actually a good idea, and I've had an idea of making a car buying classified site that was worth a shit for a while now. It also pisses me off that most car sites don't go into sub-models for a car, so it's hard to search for a GT, an SS, a TL-S, etc etc.

If this gets off the ground I can contribute some leet perl skillz to scavenge info off other sites

**G.Irish** · 07-02-2009, 02:26 PM

Any ideas for a name?

***ViPER1313*** · 07-02-2009, 03:14 PM

Only problem I see is that I doubt most people would want to give a street level address for their cars (theft risk.) The most refined the map could safely be would be by zip code.

**Mike** · 07-02-2009, 03:25 PM

ViPER1313 Wrote:Only problem I see is that I doubt most people would want to give a street level address for their cars (theft risk.) The most refined the map could safely be would be by zip code.

which the other sites already pretty much do. i think you're trying to reinvent the wheel, but the other guys already thought of your idea. when i go searching for a car i don't want to list 27 cities i'd be willing to travel to or even browse a map. i'm willing to travel x miles away from where i live.

**Goodspeed** · 07-02-2009, 03:29 PM

I think this is a pretty good idea. I can't tell you how many times I've had another tab open for google maps while browsing autotrader or cars.com. I know autotrader says stuff like "2289 miles away" from your zip code, but I still think a map feature could be very useful to most people.

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