i3 - January/February 2021 - 19

Franck Reporter/Getty Images

" The
configurator
should be
a playful
element. "

Its configurator also uses videogame technology to render an animated reproduction of
a car on the customer's screen in real-time.
- CANDIDO PETERLINI
And it also generates a code that the customer
can take to the dealer, to order the vehicle
exactly as configured.
VW has also created what it calls a " Visualizer " being tested in Sweden
that offers a similar 360-degree view. It eventually will be fully animated
like Lucid's, Peterlini says.
" It's ongoing work, " Peterlini says. " We run user tests regularly and we
know what you deliver today is obsolete in three or five months. The car
experience must evolve from a technical point of view but also from an
emotional point of view, and we are working on both sides. "
Likewise Nissan plans to incorporate better, more game-like realtime 3D
rendering and AR experiences while balancing advanced functionality with
fast download speeds that consumers have come to expect, says Allyson
Witherspoon, U.S. chief marketing officer (CMO) at Nissan Group of North
America in Franklin, TN. Work on these features is underway now, and the
advent of 5G wireless communications is expected to help all of it function
better on mobile devices, but for most customers those speeds are still many
months or years away, Witherspoon says. She notes that Nissan's visitor traffic from mobile devices eclipsed traffic from desktop computers in 2017 and
has increased every year since.
That trend, along with the pandemic's impact on sales, led Nissan to
remake its configurator and consolidate it with all other shopping tools
(including inventory search and trade-in value finders) in Nissan Shop@
Home, which launched last May. The revision also brought a major upgrade
to the configurator, which gained a basic level of real-time 3D rendering,
faster load times, and the ability to personalize it for a user based on how
he or she came to it (such as from an online ad), Witherspoon explains.
C TA . t e c h / i 3

i3_0121_16-19_Feature_ConnectedCars.indd 19

For the encore, Nissan is creating full
end-to-end e-commerce that lets consumers truly complete a car purchase
entirely online. " To me, it's about creating
the different paths, depending on how
consumers want to shop, " Witherspoon
says. The automaker anticipates introducing this in conjunction with a new
vehicle in early 2021, she adds.
Witherspoon says, " It's finding the specific ways that we can use [technologies]
that are delivering the most value for consumers and are helpful for dealers as
they're using them, as well. "
Polestar, a spinoff of Volvo Cars, is taking
another approach to bridging online and
in-store sales - by refining the backend
order fulfillment technology used by its
dealerships, which it calls Spaces. " Now it's
becoming a table stake that you must have
an online way of buying a car, " but there has
been wide variability among the backend
systems dealers use for various functions
including factory order and inventory management and financing, notes Kyle
Denlinger, head of IT and Digital at Polestar
USA in Mahwah, NJ. So, to meet its objective of letting consumers configure and purchase one of its new vehicles entirely online
or at one of its retail Spaces, Polestar reproduced all of these sales processes in one
" single, unified retail tool that transitions
the customer from the Polestar website to a
place where the retailer can continue the
transaction, " but it's the same regardless of
retailer, Denlinger says.
" What most other consumer products
industries are doing is leveraging e-commerce and digital marketing to create that
customer journey online, " says Sean Young,
director of business marketing for manufacturing industry at NVIDIA in Fort Collins,
CO - which makes the graphics processing
chips (GPUs) underlying advanced configurators. To-date, car sales have been centered
around dealerships and their personnel, but
only because the auto industry hasn't caught
up with the times, Young asserts. " This is
just getting started. "

2021

Learn about car tech advances
at CES 2021.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

12/10/20 11:49 AM

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i3 - January/February 2021

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