Our Inspiration
Buying a car is hard, especially for first-time buyers. Surely those statistics are important, but it's hard to feel that way when the majority of them don't even make sense. Being first-time buyers ourselves, several of us owning Toyota vehicles, we are sympathetic to these struggles, and we aim to allow others to ease their way into purchasing their vehicles: without information overload.
What it does
CarMatch's guiding principle is that users should need to focus on as little information as possible at a time.
After logging in, users are treated to a modest set of filters---necessities, such as pricing, vehicle type, and payment plan---to eliminate irrelevant recommendations.
After choosing, they are shown one car at a time and prompted to "swipe" left or right to decide whether they want to continue deliberating on the particular car or not. This encourages users to focus on one vehicle at a time, and as a result, they feel less stressed about the process.
When they find they have swiped right on enough cars, users can begin to choose between "this or that": out of two vehicles, which would they rather purchase? Through this process, users make manageable decisions, and they are eventually left with one car remaining.
This remaining vehicle is their match! From here, they can safely and securely purchase it on the Toyota website, or they can decide to try again for another match. In the end, users are left as proud car-owners, without the stress that typically comes with it.
How we built it
In order to build CarMatch, our team split our responsibilities. While Charvisree and Devika were responsible for the implementation of an AI-powered sorting system for match recommendations, Natalie worked to bring a comprehensive experience to users on the frontend, and Sreeja set up the backend and an authentication system through Auth0.
Challenges we ran into
We had several challenges with finding the right API that is both reliable and free to get the car data. There were limited options so we made a mock data set instead. Additionally, we had a lot of ambition but due to time constraints, we were not able to implement as many features as we would have wanted to.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud to have come up with an innovative solution for helping people decide which car to purchase whether its first time buyers or returning customers.
What we learned
We learned to scale our ideas down and implement our ideas using technologies we haven't used before.
What's next for CarMatch
The future features for CarMatch are making info bubbles where the user can click and explore other technical terms, clearer comparisons to differentiate the pros and cons of each car, and an implementation of maps to locate nearby dealerships and car mechanics.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.