Need a quick ballpark valuation on your car without any hassle? The Motorist app now features a new Vehicle Price Predictor tool that uses machine learning to give you a very good estimate for you to work with.
How it works is primarily through a combination of recent valuation and machine learning to deliver accurate estimates. Having to constantly track prices manually and evaluate the numbers for a favourable sale can be exhausting, so this is where the Vehicle Price Predictor can save you some time.
All you need to do is to add information about your vehicle and you will be able to view estimated valuation and depreciation reports daily. The best part? It’s free to use.
How it works
The predictor is made possible by over seven years of proprietary valuation data collected by Motorist. In pure numbers, that’s over $900m worth of vehicle transactions. The app uses 270,000 valuations to calibrate and adjust valuation based on 21 attributes, and the figures are updated once a day.
With historical data and the company’s comprehensive database with over 150,000 app users (roughly 10% of the car population), the company can accurately predict the final bid price that dealers will offer, which is a fair indicator to users as to how much the car will sell for.
The numbers are provided in an easy to view interface, with graphs by the month and a birds’ eye view of valuation and depreciation per year.
Of course, the tool does have limitations, and Motorist has been careful to place disclaimers. Motorist says that the margin of error for 90-95 per cent of vehicles is within the range of 5%. Which means that if you own a vehicle that’s relatively ‘conventional’ you can expect to see enough data that will translate into more accurate results. As you move towards newer cars, vintage cars, exotic cars, motorbikes and so on – essentially the remaining 5-10 per cent, you will have a slightly higher margin of error because of the lack of numbers necessary to achieve greater precision.
So if you own a Bentley and are looking to move it on because you forgot you had it sitting in the garage and you need to make space for a new Bugatti, then apologies, you have to keep in mind that there’s a little more room of error for your valuation, because the machine learning algorithm doesn’t have enough transactions of Bugattis to work with. Maybe if we get to a point where we see hundreds of them changing hands every month?
The other factor that might be worth noting is that Motorist draws on valuation data instead of dealer listings on car portals as they deem this to be a more accurate benchmark. Arguably peer to peer sale prices would be lower, but that adds another layer of complication because you have to make your own arrangements and deal with an unknown party.
From what we understand, Motorist will eventually release this feature to other countries (Motorist Malaysia and Motorist Thailand) when they feel confident that they have a robust enough data pool to deliver accurate predictions.
What makes this Vehicle Price Predictor tool really useful are the custom alerts and prompts, most notably a handy notification when the depreciation value corresponds to the user’s targeted figure, ensuring that you can get the best value out of your sale.
In addition to price data, there’s plenty of useful information about key dates and rebates of the vehicle at a glance: road tax expiry date, inspection due date, PARF eligibility, COE rebate amount and more to help owners know when to sell their vehicles for the best price.
And if you have any questions, there’s always the option to reach out to service staff in-app, so the feature pretty much has all bases covered. Motorist is available for web , iOS and Android .
