If you don’t have a fast Internet connection, stop reading. This doesn’t apply to you. Everyone else, rejoice – driverTV.com, “the only automotive destination designed from the ground up for broadband subscribers” is here; as you might imagine, it’s rather good-looking.
High-quality videos abound, with clips of smooth, 360-degree exterior pans serving as the landing page for every vehicle. Interior tours are also available, and so are HD movies (“driverTV.com will have the largest catalogue of high definition content on the web,” declared an official press release).
Navigating driverTV.com can be a bit of a task; you often have to work your way through half-hidden menus with yellow sliders, when many other car sites would simply display all the information at once. Compared to some of those sites, driverTV.com is also lacking in information – things like cars’ hip room, shoulder room, and fuel tank capacities all go unmentioned.
From a business perspective, driverTV.com’s list of partners is both impressive and puzzling. “BMW, Buick, Cadillac . . .” and the list goes on; driverTV befriended just about every major car company there is. Yet there are some huge gaps in content: the site would have you believe, for example, that Toyota’s only current models are the Corolla and the Avalon (the official Toyota site, by comparison, lists 16 cars, trucks, SUVs, and vans).
Still, driverTV.com is young, so these holes may be filled in time. And, even in the site’s current state, its high-quality videos are a huge draw. CEO Jan Renner stated that “driverTV.com represents the next evolutionary step in the buying, selling and marketing of cars to consumers.” I’m inclined to believe he’s right.
