FindAYota

Home Page #1
Home Page #2
Form #1
Form #2
Form #3
Results
Financing
Catalogue

Inspiration

Brought together by our mutual ownership of Toyota cars, we took inspiration from the beloved vehicle brand's front facing website and from TrueCar's Find Your Fit website. We wanted to find a way for potential customers to get familiar with Toyota's products by taking into account their personal preferences and calculating the Toyota vehicle that best fit each person. We also wanted this website easily accessible through Toyota's very own website which we took inspiration from for our UI/UX design. We hope that in the future, Toyota will be able to incorporate this helpful feature into their websites!

What it does

FindAYota has many features that make it unique, namely:

An interactive UI/UX design
Intuitive form design
Smart calculation of car compatability
Customizable financial planning for each car

How we built it

FindAYota was built as a Flask web application using Tailwind, HTML, CSS and Python for frontend and backend, and json files to handle Toyota car information. The calculation of car compatability was done by compiling the user's inputs on the form, and putting "weights" on certain question inputs. For example, body style of the car was given the most weight in determining the compatability of cars with the user's preferences. In the results page after submitting the form, the top 3 cars with the highest compatability points were displayed.

The financial aspect of FindAYota is built on a Python file that calculates the total amount of money someone would need to finance a car. The python file then uses credit score information to roughly estimate APR. The APR, total financed amount, and months financed are used to calculate the estimated monthly pay required. These numbers provided an accurate estimate close to those on the Toyota website.

Challenges we ran into

Developing FindAYota was no easy feat! We encountered many roadblocks mainly in setting up the backend with the frontend especially with the forms feature. There would be many times where data would not get relayed to the backend or, whenever the data did get relayed, the results would somehow show the results for the previous form submitted. However, with hours of debugging and discussion, we were able to smooth out all of the edge cases that may be encountered in the form. Another area where we ran into some trouble was in deciding how compatability would be calculated. There were many ideas suggested such as a branch pathway into different cars or filtering through Toyota's cars, however we decided that using a point system would be the smartest option as we would be able to adjust the weights of each car trait and effectively be able to give some questions on the form more influence than others.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Through the entirety of the 24 hours we have worked on FindAYota, we really put our blood, sweat, and tears into this hackathon project and earned a spot in our hearts as our favorite hackathon challenge yet! We are so proud to have delivered a clean frontend that resembles the Toyota official website and a robust backend that handles all edge cases in the form and returns a precise estimate on financial planning for different vehicles!

What we learned

Through this project, we learned so much about how Flask interacts with the backend and frontend and how everything ties together. We also learned so much about the different ways in how to calculate compatability through a form. FindAYota also helped us learn so much on how to create a UI that people enjoy seeing and interacting with.

What's next for FindAYota

Additional Attributes : Include additional filters such as price range, MPG, color options, and safety features.
User Authentication : Enable user accounts to save preferences and view personalized recommendations.
Brand Expansion : Add support for other car manufacturers and models.