Even though General Motors Corp. (www.gm.com) knows it doesn’t have a car to suit everyone, companies aren’t exactly known for admitting such things. Yet GM has set up a Web service that often recommends that customers buy from competitors.

What gives?

The service, Auto Choice Advisor (www.autochoiceadvisor.com), is designed to attract users by promising to simplify car selection by providing smart, impartial advice. The Web site asks potential customers a few minutes of questions about what they want from a car and about the relative importance of those desires. The site then offers a handful of possibilities—often without a GM car among them—and provides detailed, unbiased information, including independent reports such as the J.D. Power & Associates quality ratings.

The key for GM is that the site gets to sit back and watch as people sift through information and make comparisons. GM says that, by steering people to what they really want, it finds out, well, what people really want.

“On the surface, you would say, why on Earth would they ever do” something that educates customers about competitors’ vehicles? says Joyce Salisbury, manager of what GM refers to as its “trusted advisor” project. Salisbury says GM’s response is: “I’m going to win more than I lose. And, if I lose, I’m at least going to learn.”

The information GM receives is more trustworthy than its traditional surveys and focus groups, in which people merely say what they want rather than show what they want. The information from Auto Choice Advisor also is richer and more immediate than the customer reactions that filter back to GM through dealers.

GM already has begun feeding data about customer preferences back to designers. If people start losing interest in sport-utility vehicles or start caring more about fuel economy and less about acceleration, GM will get an early inkling and be able to adjust its car designs. Or—to use a less plausible example—if lots of people who said they were interested in convertibles also wanted pickups, GM could be the first out with such a hybrid vehicle.

GM also uses the site to pinpoint problems, and not just with design. For instance, when GM sees that visitors to the Web site feel that one of its cars matches a competitor’s features and quality, yet still buy the competing car, GM deduces that the vehicle has an image problem, not a design problem.

What GM learns could be very valuable, as long as the company makes good use of the information and it doesn’t “end up in the file cabinets of their statisticians,” says Hiro Mori, an analyst with Automotive Consulting Group Inc. (www.autoconsulting.com).

In the past, Mori says, GM might poll consumers about a design and find that “one-third of the people want it round, one-third want it square, one-third want a triangle. They’d make a hexagon. That’s been their idea of consumer research.”

Mori is more hopeful that GM will make better use of the data it collects from consumers now that former Chrysler executive Bob Lutz has joined GM’s senior management team. Lutz is known for designing cars that people become passionate about, such as the PT Cruiser, even if they end up appealing only to a niche market. Mori says: “What General Motors needs is good products” and “bold, take-it-or-leave-it design.”

Vince Barabba, general manager of corporate strategy at GM, says the auto maker initially wondered whether it could get customers to trust it as an unbiased source. Research found that people mostly distrusted Web sites that did one of three things: sell information about customers and their purchases, sell advertising, or sell the right to get favored placement. Barabba says the work convinced him that GM was, in fact, better positioned than independent services when it came to perceptions of bias. The reason: The only way to make a site such as Auto Choice Advisor into an independent business was to sell ads, information, or placement. GM doesn’t need the site to be a money-maker, so it can afford to be trustworthy.

To ensure customers believe in its lack of bias, GM not only pledges not to sell ads, information, or placement, but it also promises it can’t track a purchase to a specific individual. GM also has arranged for independent services such as J.D. Power to post their logos on the Auto Choice Advisor site. In addition, GM has set up links to its site from such well-known services as Kelley Blue Book (www.kbb.com).

Barabba says initial results are encouraging. Just three months after Auto Choice Advisor was launched, quietly, last October, the site was receiving 10,000 visits a week.

Most people who visit the site wind up primarily educating themselves about GM cars, Salisbury says.

There are, of course, limits to GM’s lack of bias. GM doesn’t send people to its Auto Choice site if they already are hunting for information on GM’s other Web sites. At the GM BuyPower site and at the GM Vehicle Advisor service that is accessible from GM’s main Web site, only GM cars show up in the recommendations, because the people using the sites presumably already are in the market for a GM vehicle.

Still, GM sees enough benefits from its impartial approach with Auto Choice Advisor that it may try to extend the “trusted advisor” concept to other parts of its business, such as mortgages or insurance. “If you create this relationship and do it in a trustworthy way, you can expand the service,” Salisbury says.