pb
Jul 6, 2010
2:05 PM

Great ideas, we'll think about it!

We have a fine line to walk between making data available in an easy-to-consume way, and not providing incentives to game the system once that data is easy-to-consume. I completely agree with you that for the purposes of shopping, Fuelly could be much, much better. But we also have to look at Fuelly as a method of gathering data. Sometimes those two ways of using the site are at odds with each other. We refer to this FAQ entry more than just about any other because listing things by fuel economy is our top request.

We also often say that if everyone reporting via Fuelly had to enter 20 different data points about their vehicle before they started tracking, we wouldn't have any data to look at. We definitely made some hard choices erring on the side of keeping things extremely simple when we built the site. I'd like to be able to compare trim levels of various models to see how it affects fuel economy, but we assume a large swath of people reporting at Fuelly don't know what a "trim level" is, and we think that's spectacular. We didn't build Fuelly for car enthusiasts, we built it for anyone to use, and that's a hard balance to strike.

These are things that we are constantly thinking about, and there are probably ways to improve "pre-sale browsing" without compromising reporting, but we need to think carefully about it.

srellim234
Jul 15, 2010
10:55 PM

People may not know a trim level but everyone knows whether they have a manual, automatic or continuously variable transmission. Perhaps only putting in only one parameter asking which transmission someone has wouldn't be too complicated or sour them to the site.

pb
Jul 16, 2010
8:46 AM

Absolutely. Transmission didn't make the cut when we built the site, but it's something we're planning to add down the road.