Inspiration
After receiving my drivers license in the Fall of 2021, I began to do my own research into electric vehicles to look for a future car to buy. However, I noticed that a lot of the websites used to conduct my research did not have a lot of data for the electric vehicles I was interested in, and the data on the car manufacturer websites was very hard to read and obtain. Therefore I created EV Car Compare, the new way to compare and analyze electric vehicles.
What it does
EV Car Compare has a search engine where users can search for cars of their interest with filters such as car make, model, and price. There is also a favorites tab in which the user can select and favorite certain cars that they like. These favorited cars also appear even after closing and opening the app again. There is also a calculator in which the user can calculate the average monthly cost of a car and the maximum car budget the user can have after entering certain fields. After selecting a car, the user can view the car description, in which it displays up-to-date data in a user-friendly way. Lastly, after selecting 2 cars, the user can choose to compare them to see which car is the better of the two
How I built it
EV Car Compare is built using Android Studio, a Java IDE used to create Android applications. All of the data for the cars is web scraped using a library called JSoup. The web scraped data is then sent to a Firebase database, which keeps track and assigns the data to the selected car.
What's next for EV Car Compare
In the future, I plan on adding more car entries that the user can search for. After that, EV Car Compares plans to release 2 major updates after its initial release on the app store.
The first major update will be a location feature that can allow the user to check for available electric vehicles around their area. This will be a lot more convenient for users who want to purchase a car, instead of just using our app for research purposes only. This feature can be built into our search engine where an option will be given to users who only want to search for electric vehicles within a certain radius of their current location or zip code. In this feature, we can work with car dealerships (and possibly sponsorships with them) to check for availability, price drops, and sales.
The second major update will be a feature that allows users to sell their electric cars and interact with other car buyers. This will help to build a sense of community around electric cars and increase user retention on our app. First, a verification process will be implemented to ensure the safety of our customers and the reliability of their cars. Second, a forums page can be developed in which users can interact with each other and help to make car purchase decisions, provide feedback on our app, and talk amongst each other about electric cars, as car enthusiasts usually do.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.