For car clubs

Your club knows things no archive does

Which car came from where. Who owned it before. What happened to the one that left in 2004. It lives in the people who show up on Wednesdays, and it goes when they do.

Most clubs keep a roster of members. Almost none keep a record of the cars — and the cars are what the club is about. A newsletter documents a season. A website documents this year’s officers. Neither survives a member selling up and moving to Florida.

Garage Chronicle gives every car a permanent page for its history, written by the person who owns it. This is what that looks like when a whole club is on it.

The short version

What the club actually gets

A roster of the cars. One page listing every member car on the site, with who has claimed theirs and who hasn’t. It’s the club’s view, not a public directory.

A printable sheet for events. One page to drop on a table at a meeting, a concours or a corral. Every car, its owner, and a code beside each one that opens its full history on a phone. At the bottom, a second code for anybody whose car isn’t on it yet — they scan, add their car, and it’s tagged to the club automatically. No typing a web address off a printed page.

A short link, for everything that isn’t a table. garagechronicle.com/c/yourclub — the same destination as the code on the sheet, for a newsletter, an email blast or a post.

A curator. Somebody from the club, chosen by the club, who can see the roster and chase the gaps — a person who can tell at a glance who’s missing.

What it isn’t

It isn’t a membership system. It won’t take dues, manage a mailing list, or replace whatever you already use for that. It doesn’t know who is a paid-up member and doesn’t want to.

It isn’t a marketplace. Cars aren’t listed for sale, there are no valuations, and no dealer pays to appear.

It’s a record of the cars, kept by the people who own them.

The questions clubs ask

So how does this pay for itself?

Honestly: I haven’t worked that out yet. This is one person in Kalamazoo, it’s a few months old, and I’d rather say that than invent a business model to sound established.

What I can tell you is what it won’t be. Your members’ details aren’t a product — they aren’t sold, shared or rented, and there’s no advertising on a car’s page. Whatever this eventually becomes, it won’t be paid for by the people in it becoming the thing that’s sold.

What happens to our members’ information?

A member’s email address is used to send them their page and nothing else. It is never published, never shared, and never sold. Their name appears on their own car page because they put it there, and they can change or remove it whenever they like. Anything in the private documentation vault — titles, receipts, build sheets — is visible only to them.

What happens if the club stops using it?

Nothing happens to the cars. A club stepping back doesn’t take anyone’s record with it — each member keeps their own page, and can download the whole thing at any time as a single file that opens in any browser.

Starting it

Realistically, a handful of members with cars they’re proud of. Five or six pages is enough for a roster to be worth looking at, and one of them being good is worth more than twenty being started.

The usual way it begins: somebody at a meeting says yes, tells the story standing next to the car, and the page gets built for them from a few photos and ten minutes of talking. They claim it afterwards and take it over. Nobody has to fill in a form to get started.