A day later than we had hoped, but we’re finally here…

On Wednesday I had a bit of a rant about car pricing tools, mysterious valuations and numbers that don't always stand up to scrutiny.

And judging by the response, I'm clearly not the only one who's had enough.

I heard from professional appraisers, auction specialists and people who've spent decades buying and selling cars. Some terrific feedback, including a few fair challenges that I'll come back to shortly.

But today is different. Instead of complaining about what everyone else is doing, I'm finally going to show you what we've been building at GoAskSam.

One small favor first.

Please try not to head over to GoAskSam until you've read what's below. I know that's a strange thing to say when you're launching something, but there's a little I'd like to explain first, including why something might occasionally break.

I've never understood why finding a car online needs to be so complicated.

As many of you know, I love wagons. So imagine I pick up my phone and say:

"Show me all the black wagons with fewer than 10,000 miles."

That's it.

Why shouldn't my phone understand what I'm asking and show me the cars currently available?

Instead, most car-search websites greet you with a seemingly endless collection of dropdown menus. Choose the make, then the model, then the year, body style, mileage, color, location and probably another five things you didn't even realize you needed to specify.

By the time I've finished, I've almost forgotten what I was looking for.

And the funny thing is, I barely type anything these days. Even when I'm using ChatGPT, I generally speak what I want to say and then go back and edit it.

So why couldn't I do exactly the same thing when looking for a car?

That was the original dream. Open my phone, tap a microphone, tell Sam what I'm looking for and have the cars appear.

Well, that now works.

And for the past few weeks, I've actually been doing exactly that.

I've been out walking, phone in hand, talking to GoAskSam. Find me this. Show me that. What about one with fewer miles? And there they are, cars actually available at auction.

I've found myself playing with it far more than I expected. It's incredibly convenient when you're out and about, particularly because you don't have to stop what you're doing and work through a load of filters.

And the bit I particularly love is that if I'm interested in a search, one click turns it into a Task.(more about this further down) Sam keeps looking for me, and I can get on with my day.

That's what I wanted when we started building this. And now I'm actually using it.

But finding the car turned out to be only the beginning.

Because when you find something interesting, what's the next thing you do?

You want to know what similar cars have sold for. Whether that particular car has appeared at auction before. Whether the current bid makes any sense. And if you're selling rather than buying, where you should put your own car.

Before you know it, you've got ten tabs open, three auction platforms, a couple of pricing websites and probably a spreadsheet that doesn't agree with any of them.

Why have ten tabs open when you can just have GoAskSam?

That became the bigger idea.

Actually, some of you have already met part of it.

For the past six weeks, we've had Sell running in beta. Many of you have been using it, pointing out problems, suggesting improvements and finding bugs we somehow hadn't spotted.

We've listened, fixed a lot of them and made Sell considerably better thanks to your feedback.

But Sell was only one part of what we've been building.

Today we're opening up the whole GoAskSam ecosystem. Find, Market Check, Sell and Tasks, all connected and finally tied together with a rather nice bow.

And we've built the whole thing in-house.

Here's how it works.

Open GoAskSam on your phone, tap the microphone and say what you want. Or type it, if that's your preference.

Maybe it's my black wagon with fewer than 10,000 miles. Maybe a manual Porsche 911 under $80,000. Or perhaps you just want to see which BMW M3s are currently available.

Sam searches the live enthusiast car auctions we cover, both online and at live auction houses, and brings the matching cars together in one place.

You'll see the photos, mileage and location where available, the latest bid we've recorded, when we last saw it and how long is left.

And, most importantly, one click takes you straight to the actual auction. We're not trying to keep you trapped on our website.

But there's quite a bit more going on than simply finding listings.

Where we have the history, we'll show you whether that exact car has been listed or sold before. That alone can tell you something rather interesting about the car you're considering.

Then there's See the sales. Click it, and you can explore what comparable cars have actually sold for, with the evidence behind those numbers.

So imagine you've found a Porsche you like. You can look at the current auction, check whether the car has appeared before, then move into the sales evidence for similar Porsches.

And if you're not ready to buy, save the search as a Task and let Sam keep looking.

You're not starting your research again every time you have another question.

That's what I mean by an ecosystem. Everything works together.

This is where yesterday's rant comes into play.

Let's say you've found that Porsche, the bidding is at $65,000 and you're wondering whether that's a sensible number.

Market Check lets you look at what comparable cars have actually sold for. You can also start directly by typing in a car or entering a VIN.

Rather than producing one wonderfully precise number and pretending that's what your particular car is worth, Sam shows you a range based on where the middle half of comparable sales actually landed.

You'll see how many sales support the answer and how far back they go. You can examine the actual cars, their mileage, selling prices, dates and venues, and click through to the original results.

A manual and an automatic aren't necessarily the same market. Neither are a coupe and convertible. When those cars sell for materially different amounts, Sam separates them rather than throwing everything into one big average.

You can narrow your search by mileage, gearbox or body style, and where there's enough comparable evidence, see how prices have moved over time.

And when there isn't enough evidence to give you a meaningful answer, Sam tells you.

Better nothing than a fake number.

This is the part some of you have been testing for six weeks.

Anyone who's been reading The Daily Vroom knows how much time we've spent analyzing auction platforms, reserve versus no reserve, relists and the differences in results from one venue to another.

What we've learned is that there isn't one answer that works for every car.

Sell looks at where comparable cars have actually sold and when, helping you understand the different options before deciding where to list yours.

And now it uses the same underlying sales evidence as Market Check.

So whether you're researching a purchase or thinking about selling, you're working from the same set of facts.

This is one of my favorite parts of GoAskSam, particularly after spending the past few weeks using it while out walking.

Most car websites let you set up alerts, but you're usually restricted to whatever filters they've decided to give you. With Tasks, you simply tell Sam what you're looking for, in your own words.

Maybe it's a black BMW M3 Touring with fewer than 20,000 miles, under $80,000. Or a Mercedes E63 AMG wagon, preferably in blue, with fewer than 30,000 miles.

You can be as detailed as you like, just as if you were explaining what you wanted to a friend. And the clever bit is that you don't have to keep asking.

Sam understands your request, turns it into a Task and keeps looking for matching cars even when you've closed the website. You can create a Task directly by speaking or typing, or turn any search you've made in Find into a Task with one click.

When matching cars appear, Sam emails you the details and a link directly to the auction. And where there's enough comparable sales evidence, he'll also tell you whether the current bid sits below, inside or above the recent sold range.

No need to repeat the same search every morning or remember which sites you've checked. Sam does the looking while you get on with your day, and groups the results into one email rather than bombarding you with separate notifications.

We've also added something called Watching, which works a little differently. See a car you're interested in? Tell Sam to watch it, and he'll let you know when the next one like it sells. You can also watch an entire market, such as 2014 Porsche 911s.

And if you're following a live auction, you can ask for a reminder about two hours before bidding ends, including where the bidding stands.

Tasks and Watching are managed together in one place, and you can stop either whenever you like.

Tasks keep looking for what you want. Watching keeps you informed about cars you're interested in.

And both are free 😃

One of yesterday's professional appraisers made an excellent point about people using AI without understanding what makes one car different from another.

I couldn't agree more, and there's something important I want to make clear about GoAskSam.

We use AI to understand what you're asking for. Not to invent the answer.

When I ask my phone to find a black wagon with fewer than 10,000 miles, AI helps Sam understand what I mean.

But AI doesn't calculate the sold range, decide which sales should be excluded or determine where you should sell.

Those results come from our data and rules which powers our proprietary algorithm applied consistently every time.

We've even published those rules on the site under How Sam decides, so anyone interested can see how the answers are put together.

And that brings me to another thoughtful response from yesterday, this time from someone in the valuation industry.

The collector car market is considerably bigger than online auctions. Absolutely true.

Cars change hands privately every day. Dealers sell cars. Plenty of legitimate transactions happen without anyone publishing a final price.

But if somebody tells a valuation company they sold a car privately for $120,000, how can the next person reading that number verify it?

Maybe that's exactly what happened. Maybe there was a trade involved, or the condition wasn't as described. We simply don't know.

And I don't want GoAskSam building an answer around numbers nobody can check.

That's why we've made a deliberate choice.

The sales Sam uses as pricing evidence come from completed live and online auctions with publicly recorded results you can check for yourself.

We don't count dealer asking prices as completed sales. We don't treat unsuccessful bids as sales. And we don't pretend that a heavily modified car belongs in the same group as a completely original one.

Does that capture every transaction in the market? Of course not.

But I'd rather show you verifiable evidence from part of the market than pretend we can see the whole thing.

We're always looking at additional data sources, and more will come as they meet those standards.

As several readers quite rightly pointed out yesterday, cars aren't commodities. Condition, history, specification, mileage and even color can make an enormous difference. More on that to come…

That's precisely why we show you the actual cars behind the numbers.

AI understands the question. Real sales provide the evidence.

GoAskSam is still in beta. And I really do mean beta.

We've spent an enormous amount of time building and testing it, and your feedback during the six-week Sell beta has helped us fix plenty of problems.

But we're now opening up considerably more of the platform, and I'm under no illusion that we've found every bug.

Some searches might produce odd results. Pages might load more slowly than we'd like. Something that worked perfectly yesterday might decide not to work today.

It might even crash. In fact, during the Sell beta, we managed to overload the server and bring the whole thing down.

Not exactly our finest moment.

We're increasing capacity as needed, but with more people using GoAskSam, things may occasionally be a little slow while we catch up. Please give us a little grace.

This is exactly why we're opening it up to The Daily Vroom community before taking it to a much wider audience.

I want you to use it the way you'd genuinely use it when buying, researching or selling a car. And if something looks wrong, please tell us.

For bugs, problems or ideas for future features, email [email protected].

We've already got a substantial roadmap of things we want to build, but some of the best improvements to Sell came directly from your suggestions.

So if you've got a good idea, I'd love to hear it. We might already be working on it, but there's every chance you've thought of something we haven't.

The Daily Vroom has been free since the day we started.

We've spent years researching auction results, analyzing the market and sharing information because I've always believed that enthusiasts should have access to as much useful information as possible.

GoAskSam follows exactly the same philosophy.

Everything we're launching today is free.

Find, Market Check, Sell, Tasks and Watching.

No paying to unlock another comparable sale. No subscription to discover where a number came from. No mysterious Pro upgrade just to access the information you were looking for in the first place.

We're building a business, of course, and we've got plenty of plans for what comes next. But right now I want people to use what we've built and, hopefully, find it genuinely useful.

What started as me wanting to pick up my phone and find a wagon without working through twenty dropdown menus has turned into something considerably bigger.

It's taken a huge amount of work to get here, and I'm genuinely excited to finally put it in your hands.

GOASKSAM.COM - GO AND GIVE IT A TRY

Find something you've always wanted. Check what cars like yours have actually sold for. Or have Sam keep an eye out for your next purchase.

And please let me know what you think. For bugs, problems or ideas for future features, email [email protected].

You've helped make The Daily Vroom what it is today, and I'd love you to help us do the same with GoAskSam.