Auto Tempest Review: New Car Buying Sites

Auto Tempest offers a comprehensive car search by aggregating listings from major used car sites like eBay, Cars.com, True Car, Carvana, Hemmings, and Cars & Bids. It combines millions of listings from dealers and private sellers into a single search. For sites without partnerships, it provides comparison links where all results are covered. Auto Tempest aims to save time and help find your ideal car with extensive search filters for attributes like fuel type and interior color. Since 2008, Auto Tempest has remained reliable, providing millions of listings from various sources, all in one place with extensive sorting options.

Build and price your dream car

To get started searching for cars, you just have to put in a make to start browsing. If you're familiar with True Car, which is one of the sites Auto Tempest pulls from, the new car listings are very similar. You'll be guided to a page where you can choose to see a "standard model" of your chosen make and model or choose to build and price your car like you would when shopping at a dealership. Unfortunately, unlike True Car, you can't freely browse the inventory on Auto Tempest; you can only build out the prices for specific vehicles, which can be limiting for customers who prefer to search through more options. There is a standard browsing page if you choose to buy used cars, though.

Only view the car you build

Since you can't browse long scrolling lists of new cars, you're a little limited on how much of the inventory you can see at one time. However, you can see a range of incentives in your area for particular vehicles. For one search, we found incentives like $1,000 off your purchase price if you work for the AMA in any capacity or a loyalty bonus of $3,500. The terms and conditions of the offers are included on the page when you're building out your car, which is super helpful. Once you're done building out your car, you'll see some basic inventory near you that matches the car you designed. If you want to see more options, you can make an account that just asks for an email and password.

Important details at a glance

On the listing pages, Auto Tempest provides research and comparison tools like photos, vehicle pricing with seller specials and dealer discounts, safety information, vehicle history reports, and help with finance, insurance, and warranty programs. Listings also display estimated car payments at the top, to avoid wasting time on cars outside your budget. You can also see important features of the car and details about the gas mileage and drivetrain.

Prices depend on what you build

The prices for new cars depend on how you build out your dream car. Since the Mitsubishi Mirage was regularly the most budget-friendly car, we looked that up on Auto Tempest and found prices for their inventory starting at $16,496 (with the Mirage as the lowest cost option). To show you how the pricing works, we'll take our three example cars and look at the base model price and the top trim price. Here's what we found for the Toyota Corolla, Nissan Rogue, and Tesla Model 3:

• Toyota Corolla: $22,265 to $30,469
• Nissan Rogue: $30,240 to $43,580
• Tesla Model 3: Not offered by Auto Tempest

Delivery and returns managed by dealerships

In terms of things like delivery and returns, Auto Tempest leaves that up to the dealerships. Since you can't search for cars directly, not being able to narrow your results by those that can be shipped to your home doesn't impact your shopping much on Auto Tempest. And if you want extra answers about those policies, you'll be reaching out to the dealerships anyway if you want to buy a car that matches your build.

Too new to have much buzz

At the time of this review, neither Auto Tempest nor its parent company Tempest Systems Inc. has a page on the Better Business Bureau. The company is simply too new at this point to have much presence online. This is the same for reviews. The only reviews we could find were the 3.6-star average rating found on the mobile app version of Auto Tempest. Customers love the easy browsing in particular, but we wish there was more buzz about the buying process. Hopefully, Auto Tempest can continue to grow in the future.

See cars from every website

At the end of the day, what Auto Tempest is trying to do is incredibly impressive. It's collecting all of the databases of different car sales places and putting them all in one place at your fingertips. Using similar technology to True Car to allow you to build your ideal car and search for similar models in your area, you can find the perfect match for the car you've always wanted. While it doesn't have a great system for just free browsing for new cars yet, we hope Auto Tempest will add that feature in the future. For now, it earns a solid rating as a place where you can look through one of the largest collective databases of cars online today.

On the Auto Tempest website