Ford Aid

Inspiration

With cars becoming more sophisticated as time progresses due to technical innovations, car maintenance also becomes increasingly complex since cars today have various computers that handle various different tasks. Car Maintenance is one of the most crucial aspects of owning a car, and we wanted to make a tool to help make it easier to understand your specific vehicle.

What it does

Ford Aid is a website that helps Ford owners understand the problems within their cars with the goal of demystifying the car maintenance experience. By using Ford Aid, owners can get a personalized maintenance report documenting the car’s mileage and whether or not any of its warning lights are active, allowing them to determine if there are any issues with their car before setting foot inside of it.

How we built it

We built the website using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for making requests to the FordConnect API.

Challenges we ran into

• The access token for the API expired every 20 minutes, which meant that we had to update it every time we made a revision or wanted to test a new feature.
• We had trouble coming up with a coherent color scheme that properly conveyed how we wanted Ford owners to feel while they were using it.
• Getting the form validation on the support page to work properly because at one point it allowed us to submit a form that didn’t have all of its fields filled out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Having the opportunity to experience what it’s like to develop car technology.
• Being able to generate a maintenance report for a car with the push of a button.
• The color scheme we decided on was inspired by the 2017 Ford GT’s launch specification.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the fundamentals of styling and how we have to make our web app accessible across a variety of different devices. We also learned a lot about how to use APIs.

What's next for Ford Aid

We hope to include registration by the car’s VIN number so owners can get a more detailed report on the car’s overall condition. In addition, we would like to have a way for users to communicate with each other on the platform because the website does not have the ability for users to respond to a question that they see in the questions section of the support page. We would also like to make the website more responsive so users can access Ford Aid from their phones.

Built With

• css
• fordconnectapi
• html
• javascript