RIT on TV News: College Driver (2nd segment)

There's a Web site created to help people under 25 years old find a car for under $25,000 called College Driver. 13WHAM-TV interviews the Web site's founders, Rochester Institute of Technology students Corey Mack and Zeid Nasser.

Anchor: If people weren't up an hour ago when we first talked to you, how did this whole thing get started? Was this a class assignment for you?

For us it started in the summer of 2008 with idea we had and shelved, decided to put it off for a little while, and we pretty much took this idea and developed it into a blog and we just expanded it, wrote a business plan around it, got 2nd place in RIT's 2009 Business Plan competition.

Anchor: And the rest is history now since you are sitting here with us today. So tell us about the site a little bit. We said for people under 25, anyone can use this, but why di you specifically gear it for people under 25 and the figure was under $25,000.

Well because the younger demographic really doesn't have a resource when it comes to car shopping. They're always going to other sites like Edmond's, Car & Driver and Motor Trends, and there was never really that young perspective on a car. So we wanted to give that spin and make that resource available to our demographic just because we feel like we've been left out.

Anchor: So you have some cars that are $24,000 and a little bit below that, how low do you go?

I think the lowest is Kia Rio, which I think is $9,000 or $10,000, and that's for new cars. We're going back slowly and back filling with used cars. It just takes some time because there's only two of us doing the writing here, so it take some time, but we're just trying to get a lot of the cheaper cars, so we're getting in all of the Nissans, we're just wrapping up all of the Sions reviews because that's a very popular brand among young people.

Okay, taking us through. I know you want to show us one feature of it, that is if I'm looking for a specific car. What do I do?

Well, here on the home page you would scroll down. This is the home page, if you visit College Driver.com, you'll see this. In the bottom left-hand corner, let's just say you want to pick this car you saw on the road you hit 'go.' You don't have to know the name. It was created for people who don't know that much about cars. And you see here we give you a list of logos, so you may not remember the name of the car but you're definitely going to remember what the logo was. In this case, let's just pick Nissan for example. There we go. And here what we also do is- what most sites don't do is they just give you a list of the car names but they don't give you a picture of the vehicle. So here we go from, oh, you remember what the logo looks like. Here you might remember the names or the names listed and we also have a picture of the cars, so we'll go with Nissan Centra. There we go. And then here we have a larger picture of the Nissan Centra- the first picture is going to be the current vehicle, the newest one. And these are the only two reviews we have written, so we go to 2010 and give you the big picture. Most car websites don't give you pictures this big. We give you 940 pixels wide, that's about 3 times larger than the average car website will give you.

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