Oh, snap! If you have a smartphone, a new app from Carousell could find you your next car. Or find your car its next home

SINGAPORE — Your next car could be in the palm of your hand. That’s if the brains behind Carousell Motors have their way.

A spin-off from popular online classifieds app Carousell, the new portal is being officially launched today.

Its creators call Carousell Motors a place for “serious” car buyers and sellers.

“Our goal is to make it the largest classifieds marketplace for cars in Singapore, and already I think we are essentially the fastest-growing one,” says Quek Siu Rui, a co-founder of Carousell and its chief executive.

The new app grew out of Carousell’s acquisition of Caarly, a classifieds site that brought car dealers and individual sellers together with buyers.

Carousell co-founder Siu Rui Quek has a few thousand cars to sell you…

Carousell users already put cars up for sale on the platform — the site has more than 10,000 car listings — but Quek says that car buyers were looking for more information than the Carousell format typically provides.

“One of the things we do is to spend a lot of time just hanging out with the community, understanding how we can do better,” says Quek. Car buyers were one group his team started to track.

“These guys started telling us things like, ‘Hey dude, I want to buy a car but I need to look at things like depreciation.’ Carousell listings are just a title, a price and a photo,” says Quek. “Car buyers were looking for more information, a dedicated car buying experience.”

That’s where Caarly made a difference. Sanjay Shivkumar, who founded the site, now heads Carousell Motors. “We spent a lot of time on the user experience to make car buying and selling very easy, especially on mobile,” he says. “Mobile allows us to be very personal.”

From Caarly to Carousell Motors: Sanjay Shivkumar is driving Carousell’s push into the online car mart space

One of the innovations the app brings to the market is the ability to connect buyers and sellers through text chats. Phone calls, apparently, are too last decade.

“Carousell Motors allows car buyers and sellers to chat amongst themselves instead of directly calling,” says Shivkumar. “You know the young generation. They don’t like to call.”

That’s not the only feature to differentiate the app from competitors. It has a ‘Shortlist’ function that lets users track a particular car and receive a notification if its price changes.

Users can search for their cars through filters like affordability (in terms of a budget for monthly loan payments) and annual depreciation (the amount of value the car loses every year as an asset, which is the true cost of owning a car).

Don’t quite know what you’re looking for exactly? Use a filter

There are quirky filters, too. One lists “Malaysia Friendly” cars, meaning those that “won’t go ‘missing’ like 1MDB’s billions.’”

Individual sellers currently pay a promotional price of $9 for a listing that stays up until their car is sold, while car dealers can purchase packages for multiple ads.

“Going forward, depending on market conditions, we will tweak the pricing structure,” says Shivkumar.

The promo price undercuts that listing fees on SG CarMart, the current market leader. It costs $58 to post an ad there for six weeks.

But the Carousell Motors team believes that there is more to the app than lower pricing. It has a neat, slimmed-down interface, and feels like something designed by people who have a genuine enthusiasm for cars, and who understand what buyers look for.

“We are car buyers ourselves. We approached building the product from the buyer point of view,” says Shivkumar. On that first point, he isn’t kidding. He bought his current car, a Subaru Impreza WRX, on Carousell.