This summer dealers have regularly been offering more than the traditional trade values. 1-2 year old used cars are even selling above MSRP when the vehicle was new.
This is due to the new car supply shortage which is one of the reasons used car pricing is (temporarily) cranked up. Agree worth is based on actual sell price vs. listings and valuation can't solely be based on listings. The challenge is right now many vehicles are selling at list price or above (but starting to cool off in the last few weeks).
In the past few months dealers have been making record revenue and profits in this sellers market by holding firm on asking price and negotiating less especially when they have added online purchase tools to their websites that use a one price model (eg you can't negotiate).
Our valuations are a work in progress but they already do leverage several variables tied to the overall market & supply so when used car prices normalize our valuations will adjust accordingly (and to your point lots of people who bought this summer could be underwater on their used cars a few years down the road).
appreciate the input. we have several products focused on vehicle discovery and purchase but wanted to help drivers leverage the sellers market especially for extra vehicles that don't have to be replaced since it's not the best time to buy a replacement car.
we will fix the trim issue and block dealership entered trims from showing alongside our standardized trims (which makes it impossible to find the "right" one)
we are adding a better warning when we can't provide a valuation and also improving our fallback logic to prevent this outcome entirely. thanks for sharing.
in our next update we will be improving trim support and adding condition specific values.
we pushed out this initial version that collects this information but we are finding some specific trims don't have enough data yet so we fallback to a year make model zip code estimate.
i have seen both cases where trim provides a more specific price but also where we don't have enough trim specific information yet and we have to ignore trim.
condition will be factored in in our next update but we are hearing from our dealership customers that they want some more details on "condition" including damage.
one of the reasons we initially had VIN in the user flow is because we can generate a lot of vehicle condition/history information in the background and not have to require a user enter vehicle history manually however collecting VIN was clearly a deal breaker especially for privacy focused communities like hacker news.
nice catch. we will add a more friendly message and improve our fallback logic if we cant provide a specific valuation for your vehicle maybe show a range. the XKR is legit... don't sell!