DriveArabia.com introduces ultimate car buyer guide

Already the first automotive website in the Middle East region to introduce a professional auto blog, the first online price guide, and the first to offer tightly-edited original video clips, DriveArabia.com is set to revolutionise the GCC auto market, with an upgraded car-buyer guide section that includes long-term reliability and resale value ratings for all car models.

Dubbed the Ultimate Car Buyer Guide, the new section now offers data on new as well as older cars, to help buyers of both new and pre-owned vehicles. Cars older than three years include reliability and resale value star-ratings, as well as a complete list of common problems that owners have experienced. Even buyers of new cars can use the historical ratings to determine the future reliability and resale value of various brands.

With listings for engine specs, performance data and fuel economy ratings for every car and 4WD sold in GCC showrooms, the new guide is quite possibly the most comprehensive automotive resource ever created for this region.

'I personally researched, edited and entered the data for each and every listed vehicle, to maintain a certain degree of uniformity in the ratings. It took about three months of intense work to detail as many as 300 new and some 50 used models. The next step is to add data on more used cars,' said Editor-in-Chief Mashfique H. Chowdhury. 'Even the pages were completely designed and customised by me, with back-end programming graciously done by Sharjah-based web-design firm AQLWorld.com for free, as we continue to run on a non-profit basis with minimal sponsorships so far. Thanks to our low running costs, money has never been an issue.'

New additions to the website alongside the upgraded buyer guide include a new feature to compare car specs side-by-side, as well as a new homepage, a letters-to-the-editor section, a revamped future-preview segment, and a new classifieds section. Even more sections are in the pipeline.

Response to the new features has been overwhelming. 'The new features were soft-launched on June 22, and within three days, our daily page-views have doubled,' said Diego Martins, PR & Marketing Manager. 'We won't go around making empty claims about being the leading automotive resource around. Instead, we do our thing and let the people decide what they want to read. We already know we have an influence on what people buy, as witnessed in our letters section, and we will continue our consumer-driven approach rather than get side-tracked by revenue targets or corporate pandering.'

DriveArabia.com continues to experience unprecedented growth, more than doubling visitor numbers since last summer. The growth in traffic is being attributed largely to word-of-mouth and search engines, with more than 75% of all visitors coming from GCC countries.