Inspiration
Purchasing a car can be tedious. From choosing your very first car to finding that perfect daily driver, it can take a lot of dealership visits and website hopping before you find the car that suits you.
What it does
That's why we created autobahn. Acting as the highway to your first car with no limits, we get rid of all of the hassle for you! We've managed to accumulate car listings from every major retailer in the United States just to make everyone's life a little bit easier.
How we built it
We utilized web scraping to gather data from websites you already know, such as CarMax or Autotrader, and compiled all into one website. We set up our front-end using technologies like React, Javascript, and CSS to create a minimalistic design where customers can simply search for results using year, make, and model! With the input from the user, we used Selenium to automate the process of searching up the exact same car onto other car sales websites. Then, BeautifulSoup webscraped all of the appropriate data to send back to the front-end, all in the blink of an eye!
Challenges we ran into
Our most difficult challenges were inexperience and time constraint. None of us had previously utilized webscraping applications, nor had we touched automation to asynchronously browse the internet and utilize user inputs to obtain data. With just 36 hours, we definitely had an ambitious goal, but we were set on doing our best.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We still managed to create our web application! We decided to leave out some options for the sake of time, such as showing fuel economy or exterior color, but since we offer direct links to each listing, you'll be able to find out every specification and feature in no time!
What we learned
We gained a lot of hands-on experience with webscraping and automation, and this knowledge opened our insight into manually finetuning automatic applications.
What's next for autobahn
Our next step is to add what we couldn't today; extra terms to narrow down search would speed up the search process, and since our goal is to cut down time as much as possible, we plan to continue optimizing our application.
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