EMERYVILLE, Calif. – A new online company called RepairPal.com hopes to become the “most accurate, relevant and impartial source for auto care and repair available to consumers.” A free service, RepairPal promises to delivers objective, fair service price estimates, an extensive auto shop directory and expert insights from certified mechanics.

According to the company, for the first time, consumers will benefit from proprietary industry data previously available only to professional automobile technicians. “This new service gives consumers critical, unbiased information about specific repairs so they can make informed, timely, and cost-effective repair and maintenance decisions throughout the entire ownership cycle of their vehicle,” the company stated in a press release.

“We’re bringing transparency to a huge industry, an industry that affects nearly every adult consumer,” said David Sturtz, CEO and co-founder of RepairPal. “Auto repair is fairly unique in that it remains completely non-transparent for consumers, even in the Internet age. The result of this information asymmetry is that pricing for almost all repair jobs varies widely, even for the same brand within the same city. Our goal is to minimize the anxiety and uncertainty consumers typically confront when they service their cars.”

RepairPal leverages a unique, patent-pending system that relies on multiple sources of difficult-to-acquire proprietary data to provide accurate repair price estimates for more than 20 billion unique estimates on 94 percent of passenger vehicles. RepairPal’s patent-pending RepairPrice Estimates are driven by multiple sources of expert and proprietary data on cars, parts, procedures and problems. The goal is to eliminate the two major risks consumers confront when they repair their cars: pricing risk and diagnostic risk.

“We’ve conducted extensive real-world repair pricing surveys, including intensive studies of actual repair invoices, and have run statistical analyses to determine pricing patterns across geographies, brands and service channels,” said Sturtz. “Our model forecasts labor rates for every brand, geography and service channel in the U.S., and generates a labor charge for each procedure using our proprietary database of the actual labor repair times used by the professionals.”

For more information, visit: www.repairpal.com.