Technology and the automotive industry have always gone hand in hand, and the latter remains entirely dependent on technology to ensure survival among serious competition in the showroom. But it’s not just cars that have benefited from technology.                                 

If you’re in the car dealership world yourself, you’ll know that your business — the point of sales, the back office, accounting and sales software — could not function as well as your competition without evolving through adopting technological advancements. So where does that stop?

Cadillac recently revealed its strategy for 2018, which involves rolling out virtual-reality technology in showrooms of larger dealerships. While it will initially be a voluntary facility upgrade for participating dealerships, it could also result in the dealers shedding their physical inventories. Suspected to be part of Project Pinnacle, Cadillac’s effort to reinvent its retailer network, the move has created curiosity throughout the industry about the concept of a virtual showroom.

What Are the Advantages of a Virtual Showroom?

For many, buying a car today requires multiple weekends to test-drive the vehicles that have made it onto a customer’s shortlist — or even long list — before painstakingly examining the cars within all competing dealerships. As a car dealership owner, it’s obvious sometimes this routine is entirely unnecessary.

Enter the idea of a virtual showroom. This concept comes to life when a customer puts on a virtual-reality headset that instantly gives them access to experience hundreds of cars that would otherwise not fit in a showroom.

Joel Feder from The Car Connection describes his experience of a virtual-reality world at Cadillac, standing in front of a blue XT5, sitting in it and appreciating the interior and its size. Consumers want to have better access to the cars they’re interested in, and virtual reality allows them to conduct research without taking up hours, fuel and paperwork at showrooms.

Virtual reality is also going to be a fantastic method of advertising for dealerships that could end up being far cheaper in the long term than conventional methods of marketing. In addition to Cadillac, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and Audi are all working toward their own virtual reality technology in the view of aiding the buying experience.

What Are the Disadvantages of a Virtual Showroom?

Certainly, for the near future, the limit of virtual reality will be aiding the buying experience. Currently, there are still far too many frustrating snags and limitations in the technology to create a fully immersive and realistic experience of being in a car, and of course, it will take a couple of years before the industry fully adopts and understands it.

However, even if the technology was flawless and represented the experience of looking for a new car as superbly as possible, it will never beat the real thing. To pose a crude comparison, buying food online removes the sensory experience of buying it in person. Similarly, with such a significant investment as a car, it’s hard to imagine many people being satisfied conducting wholly virtual research.

Secondly, for those who are true car aficionados, the whole passion is about hearing, feeling and even smelling the car. Enjoying the subtleties and nuances of each automotive maker, as well as the quirks and character personal to each individual vehicle and engine, is what makes people so crazy about these machines. Virtual reality is still a long way off from being able to replicate any of these.

Virtual-reality showrooms are creating buzz for a reason — they are exciting, and technology has always been integral to the automotive industry. Furthermore, allowing research via virtual reality — almost independent research of cars — allows dealerships to spend more meaningful, value-adding time with customers with a higher chance of conversion into sales.

However, cars are truly about how they make a person feel, and that is a shortcoming of virtual reality. Yes, virtual reality is an aid to the shopping experience, but perhaps that is where it will stop.