Many people envisage their ideal car online by using a manufacturers’ ‘configurator’ -even if they sometimes have no way to actually buy the car in question.
Today’s invention takes the data from these online tools and uses them in different ways. This is especially aimed at companies who are attempted to sell cars without dealerships.
1. The manufacturer gets to understand what features many people like and which ones are almost never adopted. This helps prioritisation with future designs.
2. If someone has configured a new car, but then left the website, they could be sent a link automatically to a secondhand or lower-price model, which they might consider buying…with a specification as close as possible to the one they set up.
3. For each choice made, the design interface could say eg ‘98% of people choose this’ or ‘2% choose that’. In this way, the manufacturer could influence, using ‘nudge’ techniques, which variants actually get bought, since it’s in their interests to be selling many examples of a smaller range of elective components.
4. When someone selects eg a carbon fibre wing mirror housing, some celebrity influencer could pop up on screen and say ‘good choice, I went for that too…have you also thought about…?’
