During my exchange in Berkeley, my friends and I decided to share a few cars amongst ourselves. Car shopping was fun at first, until you realize how tedious it is to have to constantly look up the fair valuation with a price advisor like Kelley Blue Books (KBB) for every single car (easily >30% of the time spent shopping).
We were also novices when it came to cars and didn’t know what to look out for. As a result, after less than a month of use, one of our car’s engines completely stopped while I was on the way home from school on the highway. Thankfully there were no accidents or injuries, but it was a harrowing experience nonetheless and the administrative headaches that followed were a huge pain.
These experiences and pains is what led me to create Car Buddy, an AI-powered chrome extension that gives you the fair value of the car in-page on the car listing itself, but also lets you “talk to the car”. It gives you insights and warnings of common issues faced and acts as a personalized chatbot where you can ask questions about the specific car, not just based on its model/make but its mileage, condition and more. It is contextualized with data from the specific car listing fed to an LLM, Gemini 1.5. I hope this tool will help make the experience of used car shopping better than it was for me.
There are some improvements I hope to make, and perhaps some bugs I have yet to catch. But I hope you’ll check it out and appreciate any and all feedback and suggestions on how to make it better!
You can read more about it on my site: https://www.matthiaslee.dev/
Github: https://github.com/matteolee72/carbuddy
P.S. searching for summer 2025 internships :) or work I can do as a final year student
just came to hn this morning to search for this specific thing because I'm in the middle of car shopping and thought someone here must've made a tool.