We’re on the precipice of a massive shift in the way we buy cars. Customers are realizing more and more that they don’t want to go into car dealerships, spend four hours haggling over pricing, dealing with shark-like sales people, and having to it around waiting for sales people to pretend to talk to managers. Instead, customers want to check out cars from the comfort of their own homes and now, more than ever, they’re able to do that. One way they can do so is with Google’s augmented reality viewer for the new MINI Hardtop and Convertible.
“Customers are doing more and more research before they even step into a dealership,” said Rahul Mahtani, Communications Manager for MINI USA. “We want to show up where customers are at, and if that means having a MINI show up in their living room, we’ll be there.”
If you click the linky thing here (it only really works on mobile), you can see the augmented reality viewer for the MINI Hardtop. With it, you can virtually place the MINI in your driveway, or inside you house if you fancy, to see what it would look like if you actually owned it. It’s nothing groundbreaking, as AR tech like this has been around for awhile, but it is still cool to see.
MINI is also trying to show New Yorkers how easy it is to park its cars in the famously overcrowded city. To do so, MINI is using what it calls a “Looking Glass Bus”, which is a double-decker bus painted in Zesty Yellow. In the bus, you can see a 2022 MINI Cooper Convertible, also painted in Zesty Yellow, through a glass window, sitting in between two SUVs. The side of the bus reads “Who says you can’t find parking in NYC.”
Considering the fact that the original Mini was designed to be an urban family car that was easy to park in the densely-packed London of the 1950s and ’60s, this marketing campaign makes a lot of sense.
