Car Vibes

form overview

Inspiration

This is inspired by our team's own lack of financial knowledge, especially regarding leases and the vehicle-buying process.

What it does

This web application simplifies the online car-buying process by reducing the complexity of finding a vehicle to match your needs. We inquire users for their "vibe" and recommend Toyota vehicles that most align to their personality. We use token embedding using Google Gemini's API.

How we built it

To begin designing/brainstorming, we used Figma to create a template to adhere when creating the homepage. As per the programming technologies that were used for our project we used React, TailwindCSS, and ShadCN to simplify the design process of the site; and MongoDB with Express was used to handle the API calls for car information while also handling API calls for Google Gemini to provide insights on the car a user has selected.

Challenges we ran into

Backend had issues due to Postman being unreliable and sometimes unable to refresh the data provided; as per the frontend, the styling would not format properly because of a root CSS class or programmer error.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Setting up a backend to connect with both the form and Google Gemini, specifically being able to get feedback regarding cars that could fit the user's inputs.

What we learned

How to set up a backend with MongoDB, Express, and Google Gemini while also learning how to design a form that can get the most insights from users to meet their standards, or find the car they didn't even imagine of being interested in.