Carjojo’s latest update brings some big changes to its Edge2Edge machine learning technology. The service has allowed users to search for and buy a new car since going live in November 2016, but new features make it easier to search every. single. car. on dealership lots right now — about 4 million on any given day, according to the Carjojo press release.
The first improvement is natural language processing, which allows users to search via voice recognition or typing in text. Carjojo will autocomplete the search with makes and models then show you every match in your area. Carjojo doesn’t rely on dealers to input their inventory into its system — it just searches the entire internet, Google style. So you see every relevant car, not just the vehicles dealers pay to put into a proprietary system.
Carjojo adds color coding to each car in the search results so the user can see how long the car has been on the lot, how many similar cars are available in the area, and more — all things that will affect negotiations for the lowest price. It also calculates anything that could cut the price, from special offers to military rebates. If those apply to you, all the better.
All of this results in Carjojo’s Guaranteed Best Price, which you can walk into a dealership and negotiate. If that’s not your thing, though, you can pay Carjojo $199 to negotiate with the dealership for that Guaranteed Best Price. Then you just have to sign the interminable stacks of paper required for buying a car at the dealership. (Why, dealerships, why, in the twenty-first century, are you still so paper-based?) If you use Carjojo to find a car and do all the negotiating on your own, the service is free.
Carjojo is not the only car-buying app on the block. Wype launched in spring 2016, bringing Tinder-style swiping to car searches. Deliver My Ride builds a $500 per transaction fee into its car buying service, but users never have to set foot in a dealership. It doesn’t always work out, though, as peer-to-peer car-buying app Beepi found out last fall.
Carjojo, which is based in Silicon Valley, was founded by Peter Levy, who is no stranger to automotive metrics. In the dark ages of the 1980s, he founded IntelliChoice, which in 1987 began handing out the Best Overall Value of the Year awards to vehicles. IntelliChoice is now part of Motor Trend Automotive Group.