# The Advancement of Virtual Reality in Automotive Market Research: Challenges and Opportunities
## 5 Conclusions  
The automobile sector has been under pressure to reduce time to market and increase product definition accuracy. Virtual Reality is a powerful tool to engage with customers from the early stages of product development through after-sales support. The application of Virtual Reality in car clinics might be a cost-saving measure and shorten cycle time in the automotive industry. Technology research greatly contributes to identifying opportunities and challenges in employing Virtual Reality in car clinics through scientific and technological knowledge. According to the patents that were examined, there is no obvious trend on Virtual Reality applications to marketing research. In terms of the origin of active patented technology, there is a concentration in developed countries, with the United States and Japan dominating. A few inventors' organizations monopolize active patents, with six different inventors' groups corresponding to 54% of the patents, with the United States owning five groups. We observed that patents could be classified into four sorts of applications: automatic feedback, customer profile, advertisement, and virtual stores, with automatic feedback being the most prominent throughout the years and potentially valuable in virtual car clinics as one of the application advancements. The primary advantages of employing Virtual Reality in car clinics are the lowering of development expenses and the reduction of time. Several physical prototypes, such as ergonomic prototypes, have been shown in studies to be replaced by virtual prototypes with cost savings and improved time analyses. VR also allows for the investigation of vehicle differentiation (variety, alternatives, and content) with a single stimulus and clinic encounter, allowing for greater flexibility in interactions. Customers are also prevented from harming physical prototypes during car clinics, which is a recurring occurrence that jeopardizes the survey. Virtual Reality also eliminates the need to transport confidential physical stimuli from the fabrication shop to a showroom. The avoidance of these difficulties lowers the expenses of the car clinic. These opportunities are connected to model transportation avoidance and customer proximity. Aside from the employment of Virtual Reality in the automotive industry, we found few applications of end automotive customers in the early product development phase in the literature. This might be explained by the key challenges mentioned before, such as a shortage of skilled workers in the market and high hardware and software costs. This scenario may change because of the growth of VR-capable professionals in recent years, as well as the decreasing costs of software and hardware. Another possible explanation for the scarce literature on Virtual Reality applications in car clinics is the automotive industry's secrecy around product development and marketing research. Automakers may be exploring and possibly implementing Virtual Reality alternatives, but data are not yet publicly available. The paucity of virtual market research studies with products with similar price to vehicles may not give the confidence to implement this technology in car clinics. The automotive business has a variety of challenges and possibilities. There is no one-size-fits-all approach for implementing Virtual Reality methodology. The findings show that depending on the marketing research goals, the challenges highlighted in a wider variety than the opportunities may be prevented or managed by simple measures. For most car clinics, a combination of Virtual Reality and low-cost physical prototypes tends to be the most cost-effective approach. Following that, there are challenges and opportunities, as well as strategic suggestions, on how to employ Virtual Reality technology for automotive applications, which are likely to be applicable in other domains. The following sixteen attributes resulted from a review of the literature on the opportunities and challenges of using VR for automotive market research.