DriveArabia.com is celebrating its 20th anniversary!

Yes, that’s right. DriveArabia.com is celebrating its 20th anniversary! As one of the pioneers of the Middle East’s internet era, and the longest-standing automotive website in the GCC, it’s hard to believe we were born when the majority of the population were still using dial-up internet, and smartphones weren’t a thing yet.  

I used to dabble in automotive websites from the time I was briefly in a U.S. college during the dot-com bubble of 2000. I later transferred to a college in the UAE. The original portal was conceived and started back when I was still in college, in the midst of an electrical engineering degree. At the time, there were almost no resources related to automotive consumer information, and DriveArabia.com was the first one to introduce transparency in that space. I got DriveArabia.com off the ground with occasional help from friends and family. I was also familiar with basic technical knowledge about HTML and SEO, so I created our first website myself. The first version of the website went live in November 2003 as a collection of brutally honest reviews, while the buyer guide was introduced in 2006. 

I had decided from the beginning that we would be as honest as (legally) possible in our coverage. Our visitors started noticing, and word spread about our website among the college-going crowd. Soon, it was appearing in the top search results on Google, and continues to do so for any car you search for in the UAE. After I graduated from college, I went all in and later expanded the buyer guide to include information on other GCC markets, as much as was possible from a base in Dubai.

Starting from a bedroom in an old Karama apartment where I grew up as a lower middle-class Bangladeshi kid, I was thrown into a world where I test-drive and give my opinions on the latest cars, go on media trips around the world to cover new launches in exotic locations, get tons of free track time and racing instruction, conduct quick photoshoots for cars, and work with big businesses as commercial partners on a day-to-day basis. Nowadays, we have a network of content creators, techies and partners who share the workload of running a media business. The website now serves up to 500,000 unique visitors per month.  

Business start-up expenses were very high in the UAE back then, with sizable requirements for trade licenses, government fees and office space. The operation was very lean at the beginning, using personal laptops and working from a home internet connection, while handling everything from coding to writing in-house. Eventually, advertising money started rolling in and that’s when the site became financially viable enough to become a proper company.

DriveArabia.com came into being when the magazine industry was still going strong. However, things rapidly changed after the 2008 recession, when corporations started looking for a more cost-effective way to promote their products, and online advertising turned out to be both cheaper and more trackable. At the same time, fast internet connections became more affordable, and more people went online.

Earning a reputation in the automotive industry was the hardest part, but it eventually came once DriveArabia.com’s audience numbers grew organically. In the early days, some car company reps used to call us, asking us to take down reviews which they perceived to be even slightly negative, citing “that’s not how things are done here,” but we persevered and kept our integrity. Eventually we changed the automotive media landscape to become more transparent, while also maintaining a healthy profitable business that has inspired many other automotive outlets to start up after us.

Over the years, our team also expanded. While we have had far too many well-wishing contributors to name over the years, our full-time team now consists of Marouf Hussain (who joined DriveArabia as a sub-editor and later became Editor-in-Chief) and Mohamed Naeem (who started as an external tech provider and later became COO), while I myself have stepped away from the day-to-day and just make decisions on the overall operation and writing a few reviews (and also taking an extended break in Canada with my kids).

Our current contributors also include Arabic editor Tammam Rayya, news editor Fazeen Abdeen, car valuations expert Shijil Hashim and international journosaur Gautam Sharma, among others. DriveArabia.com is already one of the last bilingual automotive media outlets still standing in the Middle East, even with the advent of the social media era. We have never taken outside investment, and we have always been profitable, and we will be around for years to come. Over the years, DriveArabia.com has evolved to offer a whole range of features. Alongside the easy-to-browse car buyer guide, it is the first to list out common problems with every used car model older than 3 years; a free resale value calculator that tells you the future worth of your car as well as what a dealer would pay you; and a used car classifieds that only lists top-quality pre-owned cars from a vetted list of dealers.  

DriveArabia.com has also become a well-known supporter of the local start-up scene, with early investments in several ground-breaking companies such as car-subscription startup Carasti, car-services provider MySyara, driver-on-demand app Zofeur, and Al Futtaim Moov’s software-provider Tomorrow’s Journey, as well as used-car platform Carzaty, which recently had a multi-million dollar exit to the Mexican unicorn KAVAK. We are now helping to shape the next generation of consumer mobility tech services in the Middle East, and it will be amazing!