Every shop on CarSignal invoices real work on real cars. Similar-vehicle insights turn that shared history into counted facts your advisor can use, without any shop seeing another shop's customers.
What you see today
- Labor reference. Beside a suggested MOTOR book time on the vehicle page, and in the quick estimate's labor header, a note like "similar vehicles bill 2.1h on 2015-2017 Accord 2.0T (n=84)". It appears only when at least 20 of that job have been invoiced on the same platform. It is a reference next to the book time, never a line on the estimate.
- Shop Brain. Ask "what else does this car usually need?" and it answers from the same counts: the jobs most often invoiced on that platform, typical billed hours, and anything commonly paired with the open work. When the data is thin it says so instead of guessing.
- Diagnosis. A deep diagnosis sees which jobs similar vehicles most often needed, as base rates with counts. They rank what to test first; they never confirm a cause.
Where the counts come from is always stated: "similar vehicles across CarSignal" means at least two shops contributed; "in your shop" means only your own history cleared the bar.
Paired-job suggestions
CarSignal also measures whether "cars like this that had X usually also needed Y" would have been right, by replaying past visits. Those suggestions appear on the vehicle page only once that replay clears a fixed accuracy bar, and each one shows its own count when it does. Until then, you see nothing rather than a guess.
Privacy and control
Only counts leave your shop: how many vehicles of a platform had a job, and the hours and parts totals billed. Never customer names, plates, VINs, phone numbers, or your prices. Two switches in Settings, then Features:
- Similar-vehicle insights hides every hint and the Shop Brain answer when off.
- Contribute to network insights is on by default. Turn it off and your invoiced jobs stop feeding the cross-shop counts; your own-shop references keep working.
Nothing here reaches a customer. Insights inform the advisor; anything added to a visit goes through the normal quote and approval flow.