Hey everyone, I'm the same smithers that is behind the C8Tracker website. I had noticed a bit of a jump in traffic to my site coming from Canada and saw this site in the referrer logs so I figured I'd pop in and look around. I can clear up some of the questions around the Canadian data on my site. This might get a little long..lol
When I started writing the code to find and process the window stickers, I was focused on the Z06 and at that time, none of the Canadian Z06 window stickers were available online yet (and some still aren't.. its an odd situation). The US market window stickers have some JSON formatted data in them that include pretty much all the cars info, and a full list of RPO codes for the option it had. Super easy to scoop that data up and drop it in my database. When I had my code start pulling in the Stingray data a few months ago, I saw some Canadian cars in the mix so I basically just went "sweet, my code works with the Canadian cars" and didn't look much deeper into it as everything appeared to work perfect. Eventually I came across some instances where window stickers were making my code choke and as I dug into that I found there are 3-4 different varieties of Canadian window stickers. One has that JSON formatted data.. the rest don't. So most of them just aren't that easy to work with when it comes to 'processing' them with code.
So I will have to do a lot of code work and testing to get my site to be able to process all the different Canadian window stickers to the same level of detail as it can with the US window stickers. Getting it to that point just isn't really a priority. Eventually I will have it done as I want all of this sorted out when MY2024 starts. When I have the new and improved code ready, I plan to go back and pull all the option data and stuff that is missing with the MY2023 Canadian cars, and maybe even add MY2020-2022 to the database just to cover everything.. because why not lol
Now, whats the status of the Canadian cars on C8Tracker? I can easily have it seek out window stickers and add the basic info for the car into my database. So things like the VIN, model, bodystyle, dealer, year, and some other stuff gets added to the database (no options data though). My goal here is just to get the site to a point where you guys can use it to track things like what dealers are getting cars and an idea of the rate of production with a pretty good level of accuracy. I'm sure some of you have noticed that a ton of Canadian cars are getting added to the site over these last few days. I'm basically having my code go thru a months worth of VIN ranges at a time and add those cars to the database. Since the Canadian window stickers largely don't have the "creation date" for the window sticker that the US cars do, I'm just giving them all a creation data for the first day of the month for the VIN range. This is just for the older cars, newly produced cars that don't have this date in the window sticker are getting one that lines up with the day the sticker became available online... so those will be accurate to within a couple of days. The older cars are going to be accurate to the month they were built (based on the VIN range they fall in).
I think I saw a question about how often the site is updated. The data pulling is basically 100% automated and happens 5 days a week. Since the factory runs Monday thru Friday and the window stickers are typically released the next day, the update script runs daily from Tuesday to Saturday. It kicks off at about noon eastern time and takes 3-4 hours to do its thing (it's throttled so it doesn't just relentlessly hammer the GM site).
Just as a side note.. a lot of people around the Corvette corner of the internet have said random things like my site is missing a ton of cars or whatever. Usually they just don't understand that the entire VIN range isn't for the US and Canada. As I pull in the older Canadian 2023 Stingrays, the site is also adding some US market cars that it missed on its first pass to download the bulk of 2023 data (it happens.. to collect all this data I have thrown over 100,000 requests at the GM window sticker site.. some of those requests will fail or the GM site will have random issues). As I have been adding these Canadian Stingrays.. the site has gone thru nearly 16,000 VINs and only found 14 US market cars that it missed on its first attempt a few months ago. So it has only missed 0.0875% of cars. I think that's pretty good lol The newer cars get searched for several times over the course of a month, so if the window sticker exists, it will get found pretty quickly after it becomes available.
Anyone.. happy to handle any questions. I'm not trying to be a spam bot so I'll just stick to this thread haha
c8tracker.com
