Car Buyer Bot - CarGurus.com

Tasks

• Read search criteria from a CSV file
• Search CarGurus.com for vehicle listings matching input file criteria
• Record all matching search results to spreadsheet
• Apply "PricePerRemainingMile" formula to each listing

The CarBuyerBot is a labor of love. This bot was originally written to help my decision making in buying a used car. With so many listings, so many variations of model years, and a potentially huge area to search, I had no way to quickly scan and analyze thousands of cars. I decided that to find the best value, I had to figure out a way to compare cars across mile years and try to make sense of the existing mileage & price equation. I created a data point I call Price per Remaining Mile to sort thousands of vehicle listings by their price relative to the remaining life they have until they hit 150K mileage.

The CarBuyerBot was created for users who are in the market for a used car for the purpose of allowing them to compare vehicle listings across model years by using a formula to determine the price per mile of the expected remaining life of a car. The output of the bot is the creation of a make/model specific csv which includes all relevant information about each matching vehicle listing.

The only input values are made, model, zip code, search radius, expected life of a car (in miles), and page retry count. The bot will read these values from the input directory and execute the corresponding search on CarGurus.com

Example: Honda,Civic,45459,100000,3

(Note: please make sure the make/model are valid via CarGurus.com by performing a manual search before running the bot).

Once the bot starts running its search, it will scrape all the matching listings from CarGurus.com and save them to an excel spreadsheet in the Output Folder directory. The bot will also apply the Price Per Remaining Mile calculation for listing to listing comparisons. Once the bot execution is complete, it will close the Chrome window, and users may review the results.