The Showroom Is Dead. Long Live the Experience.
The Showroom Is Dead. Long Live the Experience.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how people buy cars. Not just the transaction, but the entire journey — the research, the visualization, the moment someone decides *this is the one*. And if you look at that journey honestly, the traditional showroom serves only a tiny slice of it.
Most of the decision has already been made before a buyer walks through the door. They've watched videos, read reviews, compared trims, and mentally parked that car in their driveway. The showroom is just confirmation.
So why are most OEMs and dealerships still treating digital content as a support channel instead of the primary selling surface?
The gap between content and conversion
Here's what I see every day working at Eccentric: there's a massive gap between the content experiences automotive brands produce and the actual buying behavior they're trying to influence.
Brands spend millions on beautiful photography and video. But that content sits flat on a webpage, disconnected from configuration, financing, and availability. The buyer has to mentally assemble the experience themselves — and most of them drop off before they do.
Immersive, interactive content closes that gap. When a buyer can configure a vehicle in real-time, see it in their preferred color in their environment, and get a quote without leaving the experience — the whole journey collapses into something coherent. Engagement goes up. Qualified leads go up. The time-to-decision shortens.
Omnichannel is not a buzzword here — it's a requirement
The car buying journey is inherently fragmented. Buyers research on mobile, configure on desktop, visit the dealership in person, then circle back online to finalize. Every touchpoint carries context that the next one should inherit.
This is why omnichannel in automotive isn't a nice-to-have. It's table stakes. If the configuration a buyer built on the OEM website disappears when they walk into the dealership, you've broken trust and lost momentum.
The platforms that win in automotive retail will be the ones that treat the experience as a continuous thread — not a series of disconnected interactions with the same brand.
What this means for product builders in this space
If you're building for automotive commerce, the job is not to replicate the showroom digitally. The job is to do something the showroom never could: deliver a personalized, frictionless experience to every buyer, at scale, across every channel.
That means investing in configurators that actually feel like the car. Content that adapts to the buyer's context. Data that flows across channels so every interaction builds on the last.
The brands that figure this out won't just sell more cars. They'll own the relationship before the sale — and that's where loyalty is built.
What I believe is coming
In the next three years, I expect to see the distinction between "content" and "commerce" disappear entirely in automotive retail. The configurator will be the sales tool. The video will be the test drive. The chatbot will know your trade-in.
We're already building toward that. And honestly, it's the most interesting product problem I've worked on in 15 years.
Inder skipped presentations and built real AI products.
Inder Raj Singh Virdi was part of the January 2026 cohort at Curious PM, alongside 13 other talented participants.