Big Data is your all-knowing best friend. It's used to predict everything from Supreme Court outcomes to Senate races to what you should watch on Netflix tonight. Now it's being used to fuel your classic car Craigslist binges and ensure you don't get fleeced on that Ferrari 288 GTO that's going up for auction.
In the same way that TrueCar uses data from across the U.S. to figure out how much people paid for new cars, The Fuelist is applying big data to the world of classic cars and motorcycles. And it's geektastic.
By culling every classic car sold at auction, eBay or anywhere data is publicly available, you get a bird's eye view of what's being sold for how much and get a sense of which direction prices are headed.
Take this search I did for the Porsche 356. I could've selected a specific body style or year range, but I wanted to know the price and condition of every 356 that's sold in the last year. Average price: $79,024. Median price: $38,578. High: $1,155,850.
Extend that out to the last 10 years and you can see that 356 prices are shooting skyward, particularly in the last two years.
But what makes The Fuelist even more impressive is that each one of those scatter points is linked up to the listing, providing specs, where it was sold, and even the chassis number. And you can overlay your searches with other makes and models to get a sense of larger trends (hint: 993 prices are going through the roof).
The website is in beta for now, and there's an iOS app about to land in Apple's app store, perfect for figuring out if the guy that just dropped $250k on a 1968 Camaro Z28 at Bonhams just got robbed.