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Virtual Reality (VR) can play a key role in automotive marketing research, lowering costs and shortening the time to launch a new product. However, few VR applications support automotive customers’ experiences during the early stages of product design. This study aims to identify and characterize into attributes the challenges and opportunities for the application of Virtual Reality in car clinics through a systematic review of the literature and patents. We searched PatentScout, ScienceDirect, Springer, and IEEEXplore for studies published between the databases’ inception and July 2020. Of the 77,383 patents and 336,785 articles identified, 72 and 13 were eligible, respectively. We discovered that patents are strongly concentrated by a few inventors, that the United States has the most records, and that the most prevalent applications relate to devices for automatically reading responders’ emotions in virtual environments. The articles revealed sixteen categories of challenges and opportunities: cost, location to customers, flexibility in interactions, model transportation, depth perception, haptic perception, motion, movement perception/physical collision, color and texture, sound feedback, product interaction/manipulation, visual–spatial, graphic quality, intuitiveness, cybersecurity, and cybersickness. Virtual Reality may be used for automotive marketing research but key factors such as hardware and software specification, stimulus quality, and survey objectives must be considered.

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This study proposes a model to evaluate the performance of virtual reality-based stimuli for immersive car clinics. The model considered Attribute Importance, Stimuli Efficacy and Stimuli Cost factors and the method was divided into three stages: we defined the importance of fourteen attributes relevant to a car clinic based on the perceptions of Marketing and Design experts; then we defined the efficacy of five virtual stimuli based on the perceptions of Product Development and Virtual Reality experts; and we used a cost factor to calculate the efficiency of the five virtual stimuli in relation to the physical. The Marketing and Design experts identified a new attribute, Scope; eleven of the fifteen attributes were rated as Important or Very Important, while four were removed from the model due to being considered irrelevant. According to our performance evaluation model, virtual stimuli have the same efficacy as physical stimuli. However, when cost is considered, virtual stimuli outperform physical stimuli, particularly virtual stimuli with glasses. We conclude that virtual stimuli have the potential to reduce the cost and time required to develop new stimuli in car clinics, but with concerns related to hardware, software, and other definitions.