Introducing The New Car Throttle iOS App

Download Car Throttle on iOS and Android!

We’ve been on quite the journey together since 2009. When I first launched Car Throttle from my University bedroom, we were a simple blog with a poorly-functioning comments system and a handful of regular users who would check us out for content that mattered to us Facebook generation car enthusiasts. But there was a bigger dream; to create the best online car community in the world, where petrolheads like us could truly feel at home.

Over the years we grew the team, moved into our own office in London, raised over $2 million from some amazing investors, scaled to reach 100 million people per month, and changed the way petrolheads consume content online. From initially our own comments system, to a lively UGC section called Discuss, to user posts on the homepage, to points, user following and communities. And then in December, our first official mobile app on Android which shot to the number one trending spot in multiple countries worldwide with (still) glowing reviews.

But along the way, we realised a few things:

1. The traffic that initially made us from Facebook was incredibly spikey, unpredictable and didn’t encourage users to interact with our core product (user discussions around cars!)
2. In order to compete with Instagram and Snapchat for your time, we’d need to build an even better core platform experience
3. The communities we initially setup were too surface-level to encourage deeper interaction - the kind of interaction and quality you’ve been asking for for months

While so many publishers have doubled down on growing content teams and continue to pillage every single distribution source they can get their grubby hands on (FACEBOOK! SNAPCHAT DISCOVER! TELEGRAM! LIVE VIDEO!), we asked ourselves what would happen if we continued to rely on these traffic sources in the long-run. The answer wasn’t pretty.

So we decided to roll up our sleeves and make some significant changes in the hope that more active, mobile, car enthusiasts would know to visit Car Throttle first, before these other huge platforms. In effect, we have become the resistance in a world of clinical, broad-based social networks, and we believe that the future is to create homes for people who share interests in specific verticals. And in the process, bring people together in families. Let’s take a look at the major changes:

What's new?

A new home screen on iOS, Android and the web.

This is your new ‘Inbox’ - a place for you to discover featured communities, latest posts from users you follow and catch up on content from the deeper communities you’re a part of, as well as an easy way to access your notifications.

The editorial posts you’ve come to love from us are now even easier to find, with a view to creating even more original written content around opportunities, cars and events we get access to. Popular posts, essentially All > Hottest means you can still find the best content in reverse chronological order, as it happens throughout the day. And as the ‘Latest’ feed was getting clogged up by low quality, you can now still find the most recent content, but this time within more targeted communities.

We still have a clever Discover page which surfaces trending hashtags, communities and users, as well as deep search so you can always find what you’re looking for. And an easy top navigation means you can swipe between the three screens quickly and also see how many points and comments your own posts have via the profile tab.

New communities

100 brand new communities designed to encourage deeper, more quality discussions.

We’ve introduced 100 new communities, mostly around specific owners’ clubs, designed to get you talking about the things that matter most to you… your own cars! We’ve also removed around 40 generic and existing car communities where we felt the quality of discussion wasn’t great and where there are new communities that fit better, but don’t worry, posts you made in those communities will still exist on your profiles. And (amidst all the confusion this morning, my apologies for that) the Memes community lives on!

You’ll now also receive push notifications when a user you follow creates a post or when there is a new post in a community you’ve joined.

Car Throttle on iOS and Android

You can now download the Car Throttle app on iOS from the App Store and an updated version with the same new features on Android’s Play Store. And if you’re a desktop or mobile user without the app, you’ll get the new experience on the web. We hope that you’ll share the app with other petrolheads who you think would make great CTzens and family members.

What's next for Car Throttle?

Now that we finally have apps across all the major platforms, we can start to roll out more features that will improve your community experience. User mentions will be coming soon and I’m excited to announce that we’ve been working on user-created communities behind-the-scenes, so you can now create public (and later, private) communities that you can control. With the new look Car Throttle, these features become possible, and we can now test features you’ve been asking us for - including looking at how user chat or direct messaging will work, native video and more.

For now, I can’t wait for your feedback on the apps, let’s get this trending again!

Thank you for being part of our family, for supporting us over the years, and here’s to many more hours of daily fun and discussion on Car Throttle.