Why FairDrive exists
About FairDrive
I’m Colin and every few years, I have a problem. I love driving cars, but buying them frankly sucks. While some manufacturers are going direct-to-consumer, unfortunately the rest are still selling through dealerships, and in my experience, that generally means having to negotiate back and forth with each one, being pushed extended warranties or fancy air in tires, and ultimately wasting a lot of time figuring out who will sell me the car at the cheapest price.
I built this service (in full transparency, using AI) to solve a problem and then decided to share. If you have comments or questions, please submit some feedback via the feedback form. I’ll do my best to get back to you!
What FairDrive is trying to do
I’m trying to help you determine what’s a good price to pay for your new car purchase by seeing what other people like us paid for their cars.
In my anecdotal experience of buying cars, I found TrueCar, Kelley Blue Book, and Edmunds often underestimated how much I could negotiate with dealers by thousands of dollars. Their pricing ranges weren’t transparent, and even worse, some dealers didn’t adhere to the prices and pushed things like extended warranties and fancy air in my tires.
I found actual OTD buyer reports from Reddit, Facebook groups, and forums to be much more useful when they contained good data. But those buyer reports were scattered across various websites, weren’t easily searchable, and were often missing crucial information. For example, OTD prices include taxes that vary wildly by state, but the buyer might not specify where they bought their car.
This site aims to aggregate those buyer reports and provide clear pricing guidance. The website currently has data gathered from Reddit and car-model-specific forums. The hope is that people like you contribute your own purchase prices and dealer quotes directly, so the data gets better and becomes more useful for everyone.
The more people share their own experiences purchasing cars, the more leverage we have as individual buyers.
If you’re familiar with Levels.fyi, the basic idea is Levels.fyi for car purchases. That site helped me negotiate my salary—hopefully FairDrive can help you figure out what to pay for your next car.
Bought a car or have a dealer quote?
Help the next buyer know what a good deal actually looks like.
Share your price or quotePrivacy is part of the product
A lot of car-shopping websites make money by turning shoppers into sales leads. FairDrive is designed differently. You can browse without an account and submit a buyer report without giving FairDrive your name or email address.
FairDrive does not sell personal information or use advertising trackers. If you upload a quote, screenshot, or purchase document to support a report, the original evidence is never publicly displayed.
The goal is simple: collect information that is useful to other car buyers, not information that is useful to marketers. You can read the full Privacy Policy for details.
Is FairDrive free?
It is free and will remain free for as long as I can keep this website running!
What’s next?
If people actually find FairDrive useful, there are a lot of things I’d like to add. One of the first would be dealer reports.
I’d like buyers to be able to share whether they had a positive or negative experience with a dealership and explain why. For example:
- Did the dealer honor the price they quoted?
- Did they require add-ons?
- Did they aggressively push warranties or financing products?
- Was the buying process straightforward?
- Would you buy from them again?
The idea wouldn’t just be to help people find a good price. It would also help them know what to expect before contacting a particular dealership.
Was this website built with AI?
Yes. Frankly, without AI, I couldn’t have built FairDrive. However, I do hope that this website is better than the AI slop we find everywhere on the internet now. If you have any feature requests, let me know and I'll implement it!