Yet another Rails prototype for managing my own records. This time, I’ve started doing some car shopping and I want to organize the cars I’m interested in. My primary sources are Autotrader and the IIHS website. But I’m looking around local dealers inventory too. It seems like they end up with some cars that don’t end up on Autotrader.
The primary goal of setting up my own solution to manage this data, rather than just Autotrader’s saved car list, is basically just customized views of the available cars, stats I’m interested in, and IIHS data. Depending on how long I’m looking for cars, I might be able to gather some pricing statistics.
It looks like there is an API for AutoTrader, but I can’t find any details on how to use it. So I’ll need to make sure the app is easy enough to do manual entry with. Looks like I just missed a chance to make use of an Edmunds API. They’re shutting it down next month.
Hopefully this project will help me learn a little more about cars and the car market. I’ve already got a good start. As I’ve mentioned before, Rails is great for rapid prototyping. I’ll look at other frameworks for this app if I ever get to a point where it becomes marketable or particularly complex.