Search New BMW Inventory Nationwide with Exact Specs

Tech Lounge
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Alright everyone, it’s here.

There might be a few little bugs and kinks to work out here and there, but for the most part, we’re good to go. If you happen to notice a color or feature missing, or find something else wrong, feel free to shoot me a PM.

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How to use:

Note the fields available, the only required fields are your ZIP code and a range.

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
YOU MUST SELECT COLORS AND OPTIONS THAT ARE ACTUALLY AVAILABLE ON THE CAR YOU ARE SEARCHING!!! - What I mean by this is that if you pick a model or series, the options you can select, as well as the colors, do not get limited to only things available on that car. That takes a lot of work and is something we might be able to do in the future. So if you pick, for example, Competition Package on a 330i, that is not going to return you any results. If you pick Portimao Blue on an X3, that isn’t going to work. You must know that the color or option you want is actually available on that particular model.

Series: Lets you pick an entire series instead of just a model if you want to do a broad search. If you pick a specific model you do not have to pick a series.

Models: Lets you search by the exact model you’re looking for.

Exteriors: You pick the exterior paint color here. Be sure to pick a color that is available on that model.

Interiors: You pick the interior leather or vinyl color here. Be sure to pick a color that is available on that model.

Features: Arguably the best part of this, you can filter packages and options here. You can start typing to see all of the options and packages available. If you want an X3 M40i with Executive Package and Ventilated front seats, you can do that. You can search any combination you want. It will only show you cars with at least the options that you select.

Lastly, we also kindly ask that you consider donating to the project, as all of the upkeep, server costs, and development is on us. You can do that here:

You can either donate monthly, or click the Screen Shot 2020-12-18 at 4.51.42 PM button and specify a one time, individual donation.

Without anything further, here is, Carfindr:

https://carfindr.co

Screen Shot 2020-12-18 at 2.58.12 PM

31 Likes
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1st! Congrats man on your launch. Gonna check it out

1 Like
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Thanks! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

4

Don’t see price range, any plans to add that in the future or am I blind?

5

Didn’t really think about it since we added filter by option, I guess we never really saw this as a tool to browse within a certain budget and see what came up, but more so to find a specific car with the options that you wanted. I’m sure we could add a filter for that.

6

That makes sense. Loving your UX, sleek and modern. Performance is great.

2 Likes
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Thanks! I don’t know if the images are stacking for you, but they should be 3 across, if they aren’t it’ll be fixed soon.

8

I mean they are not

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Still looks awesome, i don’t mind it

9

Played around with it and love the idea and how sleek it is.

Few questions: Is it setup to where you can just search a 2019 4 series without picking other options? From what I gathered, everything had to be selected. Performance is also great, super quick when searching “All” and quite frankly impressive.

Definitely looking forward to the progress and updates!

10

How about an option for wheels?

This tool is awesome by the way!

11

Thank you!

It does work that way, there are just no 2019 4 series in the database. If you just select 2019 and put the range to all, you can see there are only 9, new, 2019 vehicles in the database.

12

Very cool! :clap:

Maybe you could just exclude auto-complete for any options that don’t exist with the current filters?

1 Like
13

We can, it’s just a lot of work to specify to the system which options and colors go with which vehicles, given that this is a free tool, it’s not something we think we needed for launch.

2 Likes
14

That would make sense lol! I played with it some more and I do see other cars coming up.

15

I guess I was saying if you just search over the vehicles it wouldn’t be that much work to do dynamically?

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I don’t know what you mean by that, but I can tell you that the way we decode options on these cars is a huge pain, but we did it to be more accurate.

17

Take your example. I select a 330i. I then go to autocomplete the package field. This would send an ajax request to your server. If you filter by 330i and query over all matching cars for packages, the competition package would not be present so you would not include that in the autocomplete list. This is data you already have. I’m not saying you would exclude it because 330i cars cannot have the competition package. That type of knowledge would take modeling and manual input which would be a lot of work. But rather you would exclude it because once you filter by 330i, there is no point in filtering by the competition package because there would be no results.

Ebay does something similar. It only show options that further refine the results based on the filters you’ve already selected.

2 Likes
18

This is super cool! Thank you for sharing!

A minor observation: by “Range” you mean “Radius in miles?” I know this is obvious to everyone on LH, but might not be immediately obvious to some other folks.

1 Like
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Odd but important question: how do you think this is going to affect brokers? We literally, in some instances, cannot post a car with options or colors, because it would be pretty easy to find a rare car and have someone go around us. For instance, if someone has an M8 in a particular color, there aren’t a lot of those around in general so it would be pretty easy for someone to find the dealership, especially since it’s listed right on the car.

So if we just say, for example, “I have a 330i with M sport, but you have to pay me to know the options and colors to avoid people going around me” (not the exact wording but you get my point), don’t you think that will harm us? I’m not exactly looking to increase the number of people who try to skirt a fee nor am I looking to not get responses from people because I’m not listing the specifics of a car.

20

I suspect this will be disruptive (much like many new technologies are ) so existing entities will necessarily get creative to compete.

I just did a quick test with it, this tool is pretty powerful. I can see how this could be affecting to brokers if they were not careful with their listings.