Discovery

The reality of visiting a dealership can diminish what should be the excitement of buying a car.

High-pressure sales tactics. Uncomfortable chairs in the finance manager’s office. Mountains of paperwork. These are just a few things that come to mind when we think about car shopping. 

While the internet has supercharged our ability to research new car specifications, crowdsource reviews, and secure information on pricing and availability, there’s no getting around the fact that the current buying experience leaves much to be desired. We’re limited to 2D images, the occasional 360-degree interactive execution and videos of professional drivers zooming across spectacular vistas. To truly connect with our potential new purchase, we are compelled to visit the dealer.

Only recently have manufacturers and dealers begun exploring a digital-first approach to the car-buying user experience. 

Discovery

The extended reality end state may be unclear, but the time to start your journey is now.
Explore EY services
Connect with Mastercard

Imagine yourself walking down the street to meet friends for dinner. A parked car catches your eye. What make is this? What model? What a cool color! Your extended reality (XR) headset presents to you a dialog box. “Learn more?” With a swipe, you converse with a generative AI-driven agent to discuss pricing, horsepower, color options, emissions and mileage. You’re even given details about leasing and the location of the closest dealer. All this without a salesman pressuring you to make a deal.

Seeing a car you like in the real world or on a billboard or in an advertisement is a big part of the discovery process. In making these experiences interactive and conversational, immersive technologies like XR and generative AI also make them more personalized, engaging and ultimately far more impactful.

How EY can help

The metaverse represents the future of the human experience, combining next-generation technologies like augmented reality (AR)/virtual reality (VR) and new forms of value creation to enhance customer experiences. Generative AI can further enrich the customer experience by making it more personalized, turning an online search for a vehicle into a rich conversation about what you want out of a vehicle and how best to find the right match. EY can help you develop AI-enabled metaverse strategies that include relevant regulatory considerations and leverage the latest advances in generative AI.

How Mastercard can help

Mastercard’s Dynamic Yield optimization platform helps businesses build optimized and synchronized customer experiences with fast, agile personalization.

Exploration

Today’s dealer experience can’t quite give buyers certainty, which creates friction in their journeys.

With big-ticket items like cars, we consumers want to see exactly what we’re getting before we buy. We don’t need the unpleasant surprise of a paint job that’s not quite as blue as we desired. We’d like to avoid driving our vehicle home for the first time only to find out that, measurements aside, it simply “feels” a little too big for our garage.

Today’s car-buying process can only go so far in eliminating such issues: a dealer’s paint chips, or repeated glances at photos of your garage, can’t completely ease your anxiety or give you a foolproof sense of what you’re paying for. That’s bad for the dealer, too. Unsure buyers translate into deferred or lost sales, and a general lack of confidence in the dealership experience. 

Exploration

Create engaging and immersive experiences for customers to interact with your brand and offerings.
Explore EY services
Connect with Mastercard

With AR tech, you can superimpose your potential car into your garage and make sure it “works” there. Strap on VR goggles and you can sit in its driver seat or interact with the dashboard to make sure it suits you. Add haptic equipment to feel the car’s driving dynamics and the curves of the road and you’re taking a virtual test drive.

Photorealistic effects precisely render the paint color you want and the shading of the leather. You can even visualize two models side by side in your driveway and gather input from friends and family on which to buy. And you haven’t even left your home.

Will this experience replace interaction with a physical car? For many, yes. For others, perhaps not. But it will shorten and smooth the buyer journey.

How EY can help

The EY Consumer Mobility Index delivers insights and guidance on the future of the car-buying experience and highlights how electric vehicle buyers are embracing digital experiences, including the metaverse, for an elevated car-buying journey. See also how EY can help brands build value in the metaverse and improve customer experience.

How Mastercard can help

With next-gen solutions encompassing real-time payment, hyper-personalization, predictive intelligence, verification and more, Mastercard is creating the digital future.

Purchase

Securing financing and taking delivery require lots of paperwork and sharing confidential information.

If the discovery and exploration phases of the car-buying experience are strenuous, the moment of actual purchase can be stressful. By now you’ve spent hours at the dealership and might be worn down. But brace yourself: you’ve got to hand over your Social Security number, your income data, your employer’s phone numbers and your last three residential addresses to the salesperson. That’s a lot of sensitive data you’re releasing into an environment you hope is secure.   

But that’s not all. As soon as you’ve lined up financing and paid, you’ve got to arrange for insurance, transfer of title, registration and license plates. That’s much more paperwork and several more interaction points before you drive off in your new car. (And you might still have to visit the DMV.)

Purchase

Remove friction from customer transactions and payments leveraging blockchain technology.
Explore EY services
Connect with Mastercard

As you pass your phone over the card reader, a bank token in your Web3 wallet validates your creditworthiness and authorizes the car loan — instantly. Seconds later, the vehicle’s title appears as an NFT in your wallet and a smart contract automatically generates an electronic request for the issue of a new registration. The DMV obliges quickly and the registration presently materializes in NFT form in your wallet next to your title. You’ve just bought a car.

Now comes the insurance process. Shared with the insurer, the title NFT proves your ownership of the car and indicates what sort of car it is to determine your rate. Once your rate is established, you tender your first insurance payment via your digital wallet and you’re set.

How EY can help

Tokenization via blockchain can transform car titles and registration and validate identity and credit to create low-friction, high-function digital asset solutions. The EY team leverages tools like EY Blockchain Analyzer and zero-knowledge proof technologies to help you build secure blockchain solutions, payment infrastructure and operating models to capture new revenue in the metaverse.

How Mastercard can help

Mastercard’s worldwide cryptocurrency network is scaling and securing the ecosystem, helping make paying with crypto accessible to billions of consumers.

Ownership

From figuring out complex controls to performing maintenance, car ownership saps time and money.

Owning a car is a commitment. Even basic ownership duties, such as bringing in a car in for a checkup or programming an entertainment system, can consume time or money or both. 

As cars become more technologically elaborate, the demands they make of us increase: how come the wireless charging capability stopped working? That owner’s manual in the glove compartment grows thicker and there’s often little satisfaction in searching the support forums unreliably monitored by customer service reps. If our grandparents could themselves perform maintenance tasks on their simpler vehicles, we rely on service providers, who can be hard to schedule.  

Even minor accidents can be disruptive. The slightest fender bender sometimes brings adversarial interactions with insurers and the police. And that’s before we even get to the body shop to fix the damage.

Ownership

Optimize service infrastructure and inventory management with a decentralized, blockchain-enabled supply chain.
Explore EY services
Connect with Mastercard

Step-by-step tutorials driven by a generative AI agent, leveraging AR or via immersive VR, make it easy to grasp complex controls and other features. Ducking into a virtual service bay, we can engage a chatbot to walk us through the process of linking our phone to the car’s speakers via Bluetooth or to clue us in on what that pinging sound from the engine means. A live virtual assistant, present as an avatar, can teach us how to change a deflated tire.

In an accident situation, video taken at a crash site converts into 3D visualizations and generative AI helps customers seamlessly process claims, even in complex circumstances. It also helps accelerate payment, getting our car back on the road quickly.

Next-gen tech even makes selling a car as easy as listing its NFT on an online marketplace.

How EY can help

Keeping cars on the road means keeping tens of thousands of parts in position through a complex supply chain.  Engaging customers through generative AI improves customer experience and streamlines service delivery. EY can help envision how you can connect with customers via generative AI and empower decentralized supply chains with enhanced contract management, traceability and transparency through tools like EY OpsChain Contract Manager and EY OpsChain Traceability.

How Mastercard can help

Open banking solutions from Mastercard are putting the power of data to work, empowering both financial institutions and the consumers they serve.

Driving 2030

How will next-gen tech enable the car-buying experience of the future?

Buying a car has been hard work — a time- and labor-intensive process of visiting dealerships, filling out paperwork and braving the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). But technology is transforming car buying for the better. Explore how the experience unfolds today and how it will look in 2030 as extended reality, generative AI, Web3 and payment technologies mature.

Starting the journey
Online ads pique our interest and give us some ideas about what model we’d like.
Learn more
In triplicate
After gathering paperwork, we return to the dealership. We sign 20 documents.
Taking the leap
We pay our down payment and first month’s payment with a credit card.
Insurance anxiety
We pre-fill our insurance form online and bring the quote to the dealership, hoping it doesn’t change.
Waiting game
The car title takes a week to arrive. The registration from the DMV takes another week.
Learn more
Online learning
We research our chosen car by checking out the manufacturer's website.
Going social
We move on to social media for more personalized opinions.
Making the rounds
On four successive weekend days, we visit five dealerships, spending 90 minutes at each.
Deep dive
We choose a car. It’s preowned, so we pay $40 for a vehicle history report to ensure its history is clean.
Learn more
Short version
A dealership employee walks us to our car and gives us a 20-minute onboarding session.
The payback
We set up automatic loan payments through our bank.
Getting personal
In the event of an accident, we make an in-person appointment with an insurance adjuster.
Learn more
Extended horizons
Our XR headsets usher us into a richer, fuller world of interactive car information. Conversational AI agents will help us learn about new car options and improve the experience.
Learn more
In the loan room
In the bank’s finance room in the metaverse, we check out financing options. When we leave, we’re pre-financed.
Key connections
We use a digital wallet to make a down payment. Via a smart contract, the wallet connects with our loan, insurance policy and vehicle ID.
Insurance ensured
Our car insurance is tied to our broader policy. The car is added automatically as long as the vehicle ID ties to our wallet via a smart contract.
Proof made easy
The dealer sends proof of our ownership to the DMV instantaneously, using a smart contract.
Learn more
Virtually tested
XR tech makes it possible for us to test-drive our car while never leaving home.
Easy attestation
We enter a DMV room in the metaverse, where we find an inalterable history of our pre-owned car in non-fungible token (NFT) form.
Senses engaged
Via XR, we can deploy hearing, smell and touch to get a sense of what the car “feels” like.
Learn more
Onboarding perfected
The car uses AI to provide an onboarding experience featuring AR overlays.
AI adaptation
The AI-powered car adjusts its settings based on what it “learns” about our preferences.
Rideshare defined
If we’ve chosen a “partial ownership” model, a blockchain app determines our payments based on our rideshare.
Adjusting the process
After a fender bender, an AI claims adjuster inspects a virtual “twin” of the car, then pays out via a smart contract.
Learn more
Present perspective
Future view: 2030