A year ago, I covered DriverSide, then in beta, a site designed to help people own cars--not buy new ones or fetishize the ones they can't afford. Since then, with the crisis in the U.S. economy, the automobile market has changed dramatically, making the boring utility of DriverSide likely even more attractive than it was when it launched.
The site is coming out of beta now and it has a few new features designed for people who don't feel their cars are disposable items. "Car awareness is different today," founder Trevor Traina says. He quotes a statistic: 82 percent of people now intend to keep their cars longer than they did before the recession hit. So DriverSide's mission--"teaching people to maintain and own cars"--seems to be right for the time.
DriverSide isn't quite the WebMD of car sites, but its diagnostic tool does give you a sense of what's likely wrong with your car.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)As the site leaves beta, it's getting a few new features. There's a diagnostic utility: you answer a series of questions and it will give you a diagnosis as well as a list of repair shops nearby, with reviews from DriverSide users (integration with Yelp's reviews may come in the future). As before, you can get a price estimate on DriverSide if you know exactly what work you need.
Sadly, the feature I want--the ability to just hold an iPhone up to a car making a strange noise to get a diagnosis--has yet to be developed. However, I did recommend that Traina call the team over audio recognition company Melodis, so maybe we'll get that eventually.
DriverSide also now employs its own panel of mechanics to answer questions from users. I found this feature more useful than the rather broad diagnostic utility, since in the questions I read, the mechanics seemed not only to know cars but know what particular repairs should cost. It's nice to take a car into a shop with that information.
DriverSide's mechanics answer user questions.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)DriverSide makes money from referrals and leads (to repair shops and auto parts stores) as well as from advertising. The site will also contract with repair chains to give them co-branded versions of the site. This could be a good way for dealers and shops to stay engaged with their customers, and that's important for the auto dealers. As new car sales slow, it's going to be their repair arms that keep them in business.
The biggest challenge for DriverSide is that it's just not very sexy, nor is it a site that most users will visit frequently. People who have used the site in the past (I'm one), and who could take advantage of it when they have an issue with their car may simply forget it's there when it could be of the most help to them.
Some clever features, like the service's new specific Twitter feeds for ownership news related to the top 50 cars its users own, could help users to remember the site when they need it. And if Traina can keep DriverSide front of mind when it's needed, it could capture enough of what Traina says is the $34 billion annual "ownership" market for the car industry--for service, parts, insurance, and so on. It's a good model for the times.
There's a rich market for Web sites and services on automotive topics. There are general content and community sites (for example, Edmunds, Autoblog, and CNET's Car Tech), marque-specific sites (AudiWorld), sites for car show-offs (Car Domain), and utility services (RepairPal; review).
And now there's DriverSide, whose CEO wants to take them all on with a single site.
DriverSide founder Trevor Traina ran down the things that car owners have to worry about: "repairs, insurance, recalls, resale..." He maintains that there is no good site that actually makes car ownership easy in all of the categories where it matters. DriverSide is his attempt to rectify that--and pick up a piece of the massive automotive advertising economy in the process.
Take this to your mechanic. Good luck.
DriverSide has been out for about two months, and the current beta shows the ambition, but not yet the realization, of Traina's vision. Like RepairPal, it's a good helper when you need service. It will show you the cost of a repair or maintenance item, based on a database of repair jobs and information about repair rates in your town. Unlike RepairPal, it doesn't give you a range, but rather a precise dollar amount, and it lets you print out your own repair order to take to your shop. Whether this will help you get a fair rate from your mechanic I don't know, but I think it's a good way to begin the conversation about a repair task.
On Tuesday, the company is announcing that it's acquiring FairBenjamin, an online service that anonymously shops repair tasks out to local mechanics and connects them with car owners. It should add to DriverSide's service offerings. Of course, if your car requires diagnosis of an odd or intermittent symptom, neither DriverSide nor any other online tool can reliably deliver it (yet), but for common jobs like oil changes or simple part swaps, it's a big help.
If you put cars in your "garage" on DriverSide, the system can alert you when scheduled service is due, and when recalls are issued for your car. Other features are getting layered in to DriverSide over time. There's a resale value estimator that, Traina asserts, is more accurate and fair than the Kelly Blue Book. (DriverSide uses the competing Black Book service.) DriverSide's estimator will show you the price curve of your car over time; if you're leasing and want to wiggle out of your contract, it can help you identify the best time to do so.
Currently, DriverSide displays classified ads from partner sites, but it may launch its own ad network. Other services to round out DriverSide include professional and community content: reviews, advice, message boards, Q&A, and so on. You can also buy Terrapass carbon credits through the site.
I would also expect to see insurance shopping layered into the mix, and perhaps a deeper integration into the auto repair market. Given Traina's ambitions, an OpenTable of car repair may come along at some point.
Traina wanted me (and you) to know that the current version of the site is being reviewed and redesigned. That's a good thing. I found the navigation confusing, and some of the data incomplete. I hope, for DriverSide's sake, that the team can make the service easier to use before it layers in too many of the new features. But even though the service is not yet a serious threat to other auto sites, Traina's vision of what an auto site should be is the most comprehensive I have heard, and I do believe that users and the advertising market will reward him if his company can deliver on it.
The site has a ton of resources for car owners, including the most depressing one: your depreciation curve.
Gratuitous car link:
Trevor Traina covered his participation in the 2008 Gumball rally on his company blog.
- prev
- 1
- next
