cars.compare

Inspiration

Texas has "power to choose" and I love how it takes all the marketing BS out of picking an electricity provider. I like the idea of getting down to brass tacks and comparing real facts in one convenient place.

What it does

Compares Toyota vehicles to competition and highlights Toyota's strengths with real-world data scraped from reliable sources (mostly government). Since everything has to have genAI in it, I added an LLM API call to generate a verbal argument from the input parameters.

How we built it

I found public APIs hosted by various government and quasi-governmental entities like DOT, NHTSA, IIHS. A small python script pulls from various external sources, but some resources need to be buffered because they can't be accessed directly.

Challenges we ran into

APIs are not well documented and need to be discovered by trial and error. Network latency can be an issue so caching was needed. Not every resource can be accessed directly (e.g. I cannot get a list of cars of a certain body style. I would need to get the body style of every car and then filter). There was a lack of APIs and lots of sites started blocking me, so I used the wayback machine as a proxy, but that's very slow and unreliable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting all the APIs to cooperate despite their disparate designs. Using wayback as a proxy, and writing it myself. I consulted with ChaGPT for things like finding API endpoints and brainstorming, but I wrote everything myself.