Car Clinic: an immersive experience
There was a time when conducting a car clinic meant placing a group of potential customers in front of a covered vehicle, observing their reactions to the design, noting comments on the interior, and gathering opinions on performance. Today, a Car Clinic is much more than that: it’s a 360° experience—almost immersive—in the relationship between product and brand. It’s a multidisciplinary lab where emotions, data, and strategic insight come together to support complex decisions.
For Intelligo and its clients, the Car Clinic is a space where the product meets people in their full dimension—not just users, but individuals with expectations, past experiences, and desires. A place where value is not measured in decibels of enthusiasm, but in the depth of responses.
From Product Testing to Meaning-Making: The Evolution of the Car Clinic
A Car Clinic was originally a method for testing the design and features of vehicles before their market launch. But today, in a landscape shaped by user experience and identity-driven values, the Car Clinic has evolved. Beyond aesthetic and functional evaluation, modern clinics explore emotions, alignment with brand values, price perception, and reactions to future scenarios shaped by new players and sustainable mobility.
According to the Global Automotive Consumer Study 2025 by Deloitte, consumers are placing increasing importance on elements like technology integration, usability, and brand transparency. It’s no longer just about testing the “product”—it’s about understanding the relationship it builds with its audience.
The true value of a modern Car Clinic lies in its generative capacity: the ability to provide insights that not only help correct the course but also enable the creation of products more aligned with people’s lives and expectations. It’s not just about identifying what’s right or wrong in a vehicle, but understanding the optimal mix of product and brand in its evolutionary path.
What Is Explored in a Car Clinic Today
It’s no longer just about evaluating headlight shapes or paint colors. A modern Car Clinic investigates every touchpoint between the consumer and the vehicle: from the infotainment interface to perceived interior quality, from the sense of safety to price positioning. Today, a car is a universe where mobility, leisure, senses, and perceptions converge—making it essential to test the product in a holistic context.
Take the technological component. According to Deloitte, over 70% of consumers today consider digital experience and perceived value as decisive factors in vehicle selection. This means clinics evaluate the consistency and digital friendliness of a vehicle as part of a broader ecosystem that many now see as central to their identity. Intuitiveness of controls, smartphone integration, digital service access, and simplicity of the user journey must be evaluated together, as they will determine whether the vehicle makes drivers’ lives easier or more complicated.
Integration is key. At Intelligo, we apply a flexible approach that combines analog methods—like field observation and focus groups—with digital tools such as VR simulations, gamified questionnaires, and emotional coding techniques to detect unconscious and sensory reactions.
Studies published in SAGE Journals show that implicit emotion tracking is increasingly critical for understanding the driver’s mindset and real preferences—enhancing the predictive power of research. Because often the most important decisions are not those we can explain with words, but the ones we simply feel are right. And the most valuable research is the kind that knows how to interpret them.
The Intelligo Approach: Tailored, Immersive, Human-Centered
Every project designed by Intelligo is built as a tailored experience. There are no rigid formats, only research journeys crafted to enhance the relationship between brand and target audience.
When we designed a Car Clinic for an Italian luxury automotive brand, we selected a venue inspired by industrial design, with display lounges and hotel-style hospitality. Participants were selected not only by demographic profile, but also by economic status, vehicle ownership, and investment capacity—creating a group that reflected the brand’s desired value alignment.
The result? A coherent and immersive environment where every logistical detail—from reserved parking to security, from car wallets to custom gifting—was part of the experience. The true value emerged in the quality of time shared, the depth of insights gathered, and the ability to observe not only what people said, but how they said it. Our role was to help them feel at ease, to allow their lived experiences to emerge spontaneously and naturally—especially important with a premium target audience.
When Research Goes Virtual: Car Clinics in VR
According to a McKinsey report on the metaverse and mobility, extended reality is already used to simulate testing scenarios in virtual environments—like driving in the rain or across sandy roads—reducing individual bias and logistical costs. Immersive environments allow researchers not just to present prototypes, but to effectively test user experience.
In one of our VR product testing projects, we engaged hundreds of participants across Europe, the US, and Thailand under identical testing conditions. The result was a genuine market comparison with deep, standardized insights—delivered faster and within optimized budgets.
Travancore Analytics also confirms that VR enables manufacturers to replace physical models with 3D prototypes, accelerating design and reducing development costs. For Intelligo, integrating VR into Car Clinics means offering brands powerful, flexible tools geared for the future—while never losing sight of what matters most: the authentic voice of real people.
Why Car Clinics Matter More Than Ever
Mobility is undergoing a deep transformation: needs are changing, ownership models are shifting, and expectations around the driving experience are evolving. In this landscape, the Car Clinic is no longer just a technical validation tool—it’s a strategic accelerator for designing vehicles that truly speak to people.
Car Clinics allow brands to identify weak signals, anticipate trends, and test hypotheses around design or pricing in controlled but realistic settings. Most importantly, they allow brands to listen—really listen—to the people who will actually drive these vehicles.
For Intelligo and our clients, the Car Clinic is much more than a format. It’s a method rooted in empathy, immersion, and alignment between brand and target audience. From participant selection to venue design, from immersive settings to research design—whether physical or virtual—every clinic we deliver aims to create real value: actionable insights, memorable experiences, and smarter decisions.
If you’re an agency coordinating automotive campaigns, or a brand envisioning its next model or strategy—or simply want to better understand your market—this is the key question: are you ready to listen?
