Driveway.com

How our partnership with Lithia Motors launched a new, world-class platform for buying, leasing, and selling cars online.

Driveway is a leader in online auto sales and part of one of the largest automotive retailers in the nation, Lithia Motors. Driveway.com allows drivers to buy, sell, finance, or schedule service for almost any car, anywhere, at any time. In 2018, Lithia Motors wanted to grow and convert the in-person car buying experience to digital. While their automotive roots ran deep, they had yet to build an internal product team to make it happen. Our early work focused on identifying and launching an initial feature set and was followed by a multi-year journey of growing the platform into a fully-featured buying and selling platform.

Less than three years later, our work together would launch Driveway.com and lead to the growth of Lithia’s internal software organization employing more than 100 talented product managers, designers, and engineers.

Getting Started

Detroit Labs kicked the engagement off with a design sprint. The sprint focused on exploring opportunities throughout the car buying experience and ultimately narrowing the team’s focus around a particular step: people selling their cars.

Lithia Motors’ team then collaborated closely with our team to design and build a web app that allowed consumers to get instant cash offers — online — for their vehicle, schedule inspections for in-person appraisals, and ultimately get paid for their car on the spot. This initial web app interfaced with several third-party services and Lithia Motors dealership systems to enable dealerships to adopt the process more efficiently. We supported Lithia Motors by creating the infrastructure and managing the hosting of the application and custom backend services.

After the interest in the seller web app in pilot markets, Lithia Motors asked Detroit Labs to partner with them on developing an iPad app that dealership employees could use to perform digital appraisals at sellers’ homes. Together, our teams delivered an app that lead to the expansion of the program throughout the dealership network.

A sample of the early wireframes outlining the selling experience. These would evolve through discussion and user tests before informing the final design deliverables.

A sample of early design mockups.

Introducing Driveway.com

Following the success of the complete seller experience in multiple pilot markets, Lithia Motors was ready to take the next step and build a product for customers to buy used vehicles entirely online. Detroit Labs interviewed users, evaluated competitors, and worked closely with the Lithia Team to define the best online car shopping experience. In late 2020, Driveway launched and quickly made a name for itself in an extremely competitive space.

Because of the project’s scale, we organized over half a dozen engineering teams to handle individual components of the customer journey. With Lithia Motors’ product team at the helm, we lent our support to expanding the platform through the implementation of a content management system, buying and selling features, and developing interfaces for third-party APIs to handle taxes, fees, and financial transactions.

Branding

The team at Driveway cares deeply about helping their customers find what they want, the way they want it. Driveway’s approach is designed to give customers the tools and information they need to make decisions based on what’s best for them. We worked with the Driveway team to define their brand themes of flexible, empowering, simple, and transparent (FEST). From there we married a modern, luxe aesthetic with these themes to craft a bespoke logo and logomark for the Driveway brand.

Visual Language

With the new Driveway branding in place, we developed a holistic design system for Driveway’s digital channels. The component-based system we created considers both web and native apps, providing a scalable foundation for all future Driveway products and touchpoints.

Engineering

Throughout the platform’s evolution, our teams have contributed in a number of ways, including but not limited to the architecture surrounding buying and selling, integration of a content management system, and interfacing with multiple third parties to implement tax and fee handling, and financial transactions.

We developed for a multitude of platforms, including the flagship web application, Driveway.com (Javascript/React), the iPad app (iOS) used by dealership employees to inspect vehicles, and the backend services (Kotlin/Spring) for making many of the platform’s features possible.