The Metaverse and Application Scenarios in the Automotive Industry

Since Facebook rebranded itself as Meta, the metaverse concept gradually cooled, and it is time to view the essence, value, and specific applications of the metaverse from a rational perspective. Cars play a crucial role in massive application scenarios, bridging the virtual world with the real one and serving as the first arena for metaverse applications. Some stakeholders in the automotive industry can already capture real business benefit from the technologies designed to enable the metaverse. From a perspective of the whole industrial chain, this study analyzes the potential application scenarios for the metaverse in the automotive industry, makes a specific analysis of some critical scenarios such as AD virtual test, virtual plant, user community, and smart cockpit, and compares scenarios from multiple dimensions to help automakers define strategies for different scenarios. Finally, this study proposes the roadmap for the metaverse to develop in the automotive industry, which requires joint efforts of all industrial participants to progress from improving links of the industrial chain to connect all scenarios in the metaverse and ultimately integrate metaverses of different industries for co-development, sharing, and co-governance of the virtual world.