Matching parts

Dear Start My Car,

I believe that matching car parts is 90% science, 5% art and 5% luck.

Last week, in the newsletter, I mentioned the complexity of matching the right part to the right car. The discussion that followed was awesome which is why today I will expand a bit on it. 

Car parc (yes, pronounced park but spelled with a “C”) in essence is the collection of all the different makes and models of cars that are found on our roads. This car parc is unique to South Africa as it is every country. Often the same car will have a different name in South Africa to the name used in Europe. This means that it is often difficult to piggy back off a car parc or an existing catalogue program from a different country. 

This means that to be accurate and useful, we needed to create it from scratch.

At Start My Car We’ve come a long way with this, and we’ve built up a local parc based on catalogue and vehicle data that was and is supplied to us by the various OEMs that we’ve partnered with.

Our current car parc is growing brilliantly each month.

The data that we receive, while it may be clean for the OEM and their purposes, has to go through quite a journey before it can be incorporated into our car parc. 

We have also built an AI (artificial intelligence) matching engine that does most of the “heavy lifting”. It’s a work in progress, but a process that took us weeks in the early days now takes a few hours.

Next week we’ll discuss a specific example of how 2 identical vehicles can have a different part solely due to the car parc it belongs too. 

Give it a try. And while you are there, take advantage of our awesome offers and deals. More important is for you to have a fantastic and safe weekend. 

Regards, 

Baruch