I used the Cars Piki to buy a car and it was awesome.

As you’d probably guess about someone whose life-long ambition is to create a site that allows users to use facts to make decisions, I’m a bit of a nut about decision-making.  I like to understand everything that makes something good, look at everything in that field, and then choose based on the merits. I like to seek out experts, read the latest reviews, and find out the questions that I hadn’t known I should have been asking and do it all over again. I’m that rare nut who looks forward to having to buy a car because it’s a chance to go and learn everything I can about it.

I’ve been so surrounded by Pikis, that I actually set out to try to use a different site for my car hunt to see what other folks have been doing.  I found a few sites which had the data split out into different pages, a huge amount of reviews, a lot of top 10 lists, and a couple newer recommendation engines which told me what they thought was the best.  Since starting a company is hard enough, I don’t want to single out any of these companies to point out where they lost me, but the summary is just that every other approach was just either a lot of work or I didn’t trust the results.

When I came back to Pikimal it was extremely easy.  I knew that I wanted a car to drive in the snow, so I started with the Top 10 Cars for Snow.  This filtered me back to the 17 cars in the current model year with All-wheel drive, pre-sorted for safety, performance, and price.  The first thing I did was to actually try sorting by something other than my preferences: I asked myself, “If price was no object what would I end up preferring” and indulged in prioritizing performance.  Then I looked to see what I’d get if I re-defined performance to just be speed, and ignored handling, fuel economy, and suspension.

After fooling around for a bit, I went back to the original template to get to work.  Though I thought that the initial results looked promising (there were a couple cars in the top 3 that I could afford that had good reputations) I wanted to make sure that the recommendations were really targeting me.  I went through almost every slider to learn about all of the pieces that make up a car and to try to understand the differences between them.  The biggest change I made, though, was to lower the importance of everything but price — between being newly engaged and starting a company, it’s a good time to save money.

After finishing with the sliders, my top two were the Subaru Legacy and the Subaru Impreza – extremely similar cars!  What finally made the difference for me is that the Impreza is a lot more like the car my fiancée drives and so, very much in the vein of trying to have a different tool for each job, I took the #1 pick and am now the proud owner of a 2011 Subaru Legacy!

There’s a really nice feeling to knowing that the car that you’ve chosen is factually the right one for you – as friends and family ask about how I chose it, I’m able to talk about how I considered over a hundred factors to make the decision. And even though I wouldn’t recommend the car for everyone – in fact, there are very few people who will share the same preferences I did – I’m certain that it was the right choice for me.

Happy Piki’ing!