The same reason that asking prices for cars vary is the same reason you can't expect to get a set of valid sales comps for a 2009 Toyota in Los Angeles. Different trim levels, mileage, condition.

It's not as hard as you imagine. Being part of multiple accidents with each one totaling my '94 civic, I have seen multiple comps. It just gets tiring after a while doing the same search every time.

The data is all out there. It's just that for a single person, it's extremely exhausting collecting this data and removing the noise.

Comping my '94 civic is easier than comping 1 - 3 different models across 5 different years, which is what a used car buyer usually ends up doing I guess.

Here I was hoping someone had done the searches before and saved their results.

I think you have unrealistic expectations of strangers on the internet.

I am very new here, so you are perhaps right. My assumptions were that this being PF, people would have spreadsheets for almost everything and of the thousands here, someone probably bought a car in the last 10 years.

Thus I was expecting atleast one or two spreadsheets saying: here's what I got when I was shopping around, or atleast some input like I mentioned here:

Instead I see all these condescending links to websites any 8 year old that can google can find. NONE of those websites give any true indication of what people are actually paying for a car (except TrueCar from what I read) and are only a stepping stone for the utterly clueless who have no idea what the prices should be like to begin with.

It's as if people don't realize that the biggest challenge is, there is not way for you to to tell me how much the dealer offered you for the same car. So dealers benefit off this information asymmetry.