VIRTUAL REALITY PERSONALIZES THE LUXURY CAR BUYING EXPERIENCE

AUDI Business Innovation embraces VR to give life to their customers’ dream cars.

Audi is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of luxury cars with nine global production facilities and more than 80,000 employees. The virtual reality development team is located at Audi Business Innovation GmbH in Munich, Germany where a team of 20 people work on VR for marketing and sales. Audi employs more than 100 people across all of its VR initiatives. Audi manufactures more than 50 models, and each model is available in many different configurations. For example, the Q3 alone can be produced in over 3,000,000 different combinations. This means that no dealership can stock a truly representative sample of each model. Each purchase, therefore, requires a detailed walkthrough of each customer’s unique requirements from the engine type and exterior colour to the wheels, interior colour, decorative inlays, steering wheel, and accessories.

Audi began exploring virtual reality for sales in 2014. The process used the original models created in Dassault Systèmes CATIA and then prepared and finished in 3DEXCITE Deltagen. Two NVIDIA Quadro GPUs in SLI mode rendered the final experience. Audi debuted the first VR sales experience at three dealerships in Brazil to test the visualization, interaction, and overall value of this approach.

LUXURY CAR BUYING EXPERIENCE