When the organizers of the 2020 Geneva International Auto Show announced its cancellation, due to the Swiss government’s ban on bringing more than 1,000 people together just days before the doors opened, dozens of car brands faced the same problem. How would you reveal your new cars without an audience?
Normally, for the show’s two press days each manufacturer is given 15 minutes to grab the microphone, invite everyone to gather around their stand, and whip the covers off their new machinery. Journalists scramble for photos, executives from rival brands go in for a closer look, and VIP customers consider opening their check books.
Press releases will have given the impression online at the same time, but they lack what the drama makers aspire to with their 15-minute showcase. But as the coronavirus pandemic spread across Europe, they were forced to dismantle their posts, store cars and move home.
Meanwhile, ZeroLight, a three-dimensional visualization corporation founded in Newcastle, north-east England, saw an opportunity. Having worked with brands such as Audi, BMW, Porsche and Lamborghini, creating three-dimensional representations of realistic, interactive and infinitely customizable vehicles, all founded in the cloud, ZeroLight was well placed to fill the void left by Geneva.
“The current crisis is going to drive a permanent shift in behavior,” says Simon Robinson, who recently joined the board of ZeroLight, having previously co-founded Oscar-winning visual effects company, The Foundary. “[The pandemic] is making something happen in a very short cycle that possibly would have taken at least another couple of years to get to.”
The writing was probably already on the wall for the classic car show. Even before Covid-19, brands were increasingly avoiding screens in favor of organizing their own launch events. Booking a booth in Geneva (or Frankfurt, or Paris or Los Angeles) was too expensive, and in any case, why assign the headlines of the press day to your rivals, when you can have them all a few weeks or months later? ?
Because humans can’t gather en masse in the coming months, classic automatic display on the user (and brand-specific launch events) simply takes place. Companies are now struggling to attach online, with live video broadcasts of releases in remote locations, pre-recorded revelations and even truthful presentations broadcast in journalists’ homes.
This is where ZeroLight and its ability to create realistic three-dimensional representations of vehicles, transmitted from the cloud, make sense. “With the rise of coronavirus and social estrangement, we have noticed that all trends, which are the driving force of what we do, accelerate,” explains Francois de Bodinat, product manager at ZeroLight. “We’ve noticed that a lot of OEMs come to us and say, “Hello, guys, can you help us because we’re in trouble? We have lost the connection between us and our customers. »»
Instead of a small set of misspelled photos, dealers can use ZeroLight equipment to create accurate three-dimensional reproduction of each car in stock, in one position to be inspected online in detail.
De Bodinat continues: “Each OEM has an online page where you can set up the car [but] they are a very low and limited solution, they can’t do all the configurations and, in fact, they’re not interactive. What accelerated ZeroLight was when we partnered with Amazon Web Services and brought our generation of dealerships to the cloud, so that to each and every user at home or on their mobile device, with our generation of 3-d interactivity and transmission.
“We’ve made a breakthrough in the Array industry… we’re still the only ones capable of doing this on a giant scale. What makes us aside is scalability and uncompromising quality. To reach the visitor wherever you are and force them to come the dealership. This is a key trend that will only grow.”
In fact, the average number of visits to an auto dealership before making an acquisition has increased in the last years from seven to 1.5, and then, of course, to 0 in the stricter months of locking. Car sales fell in all areas, but with a few exceptions. In short, the Tesla Model 3 has become the best-selling car in the UK, thanks in part to the company’s pre-existing focus on online sales. The Jaguar I-Pace finished second, thanks to an effort made by this manufacturer and its distributors to maintain the speed of online sales.
With ZeroLight’s cloud-based system, which works on an internal viewing platform but is also compatible with the popular Unity video game engine, highly detailed car representations can be presented to newspaper sellers and potential buyers. A car launch can take position online, presenting the vehicle in an exotic location, with an audience capable of opening the doors and inspecting every detail. Then, hounds can configure the car the way they want, the correct location, adjust the camera angle and take the correct images for their items, no physical photo sessions are required.
Potential buyers can specify a car exactly as they wish, with access to each full option and configuration presented through the manufacturer, rather than the limited diversity that is typically incorporated into online configurators. To see how complex fashionable cars can be, Bodinat says: “If you take an Audi car today, you have ten with the strength of 17 other imaginable combinations of this car. It’s a seventeen-zero following. 100,000,000,000,000 combinations imaginable”. For a car.
“With three-dimensional visualization, what we can do is bring it to life and show you on your device how it looks and interacts,” Bodinat adds. “You get more data about characteristics and perceive them. Then I’m more likely to buy them.”
ZeroLight was approached almost without delay following the cancellation of the Geneva Air Show, and is now preparing to use its generation to launch cars whose launches were delayed in the pandemic. In the absence of in-person exhibits, they will most likely take up position in 2020, and Geneva 2021 was also cancelled due to lack of brand interest, online launches (and purchases) through ZeroLight are likely to become a much faster common position than many of us. Thought.
I’m a journalist of a generation who has written for Wired UK and the BBC, and I have a long hobby for everything on 4 wheels.