"What defeats you isn’t competition, nor your peers, nor the times. It’s outdated thinking and lagging perspectives."

01 CHE：Car Human Environment

As we step into the age of artificial intelligence, can we still rely on experience to envision the future? Can we move from mutual constraints to mutual fulfillment?Weltmeister explores the new relationship among Car, Human, and Environment through intelligent vehicle service design:

• C (Car): Represents intelligent connected vehicles.
• H (Human): Represents the users enjoying the services.
• E (Environment): Represents all environmental factors impacting the driving experience.

02 Every Weltmeister Is a Miniature Showroom

Building a car is easy; selling it is hard. The final straw for automakers may not be the ability to manufacture but the "cost of acquiring customers." Let’s break it down: the cost of a single automotive lead is around 240 RMB, with an average conversion rate of 2%, resulting in an astonishing 12,000 RMB just for the initial conversion of one sale.Faced with such high acquisition costs, every automaker grapples with the same question: how to produce more, sell more, and profit more? Now that smart cars have replaced dashboards and keys, can they also eliminate dealerships? Can a car itself become a moving showroom, disrupting the traditional sales model? The era of selling smart with people is over.

• “We’ve done so much, but users don’t see it.” Despite significant investments in R&D to develop countless product highlights, customers often remain unaware of these features. This forces automakers to spend heavily on sales training, which is costly and time-intensive.
• "Our intelligent vehicles increasingly resemble smart, living beings thanks to breakthrough technologies." This thought sparked a new idea for Yan Feng, Weltmeister's Partner and CTO: if cars now possess the ability to perceive, decide, act, learn, and upgrade, why can't they interact independently with their environment and even other entities?

The idea of upgrading the automotive sales model from 1.0 to 3.0 became a constant thought in Yan Feng's mind. His willingness to innovate and push boundaries inspired a renewed collaboration between Weltmeister and CBi China Bridge to launch the self-marketing intelligent vehicle service design project. [Click to watch Yan Feng introduce the Weltmeister x CBi service design project]

03 Unlocking the Evolution Formula of Intelligent Vehicle Services

• How do you attract passersby to not just notice the car but experience it—find it intriguing enough to step inside?
• How do you move potential users from just leaving their information to booking a test drive, turning fun interactions into purchases?
• In a fully autonomous setting, how can the product’s technical strengths be maximized? What tasks should the AI perform, and what should still involve humans?
• How do you guide your team to turn this vague vision into tangible, actionable scenarios?

04 Giving AI a Personality That Speaks

Where there’s a gap between technological realization and user experience, there’s an opportunity for “Service Design + Artificial Intelligence.”As CTO, Yan Feng aims to lead his team in achieving their technological vision: to give AI a personality that communicates emotionally, resonating with users and exploring new modes of autonomous car sales. Under the service design methodology, Weltmeister's cross-functional team launched the RoboTrial Autonomous Showroom Project. From Xiao Wei’s perspective (the car as a persona), they explored how it could see, read, hear, touch, recommend, and interact with users. Through system upgrades to vehicle control and comprehensive updates to in-car applications, RoboTrial allowed Weltmeister's intelligent connected vehicle team to truly realize “Let Products Talk.”

 

05 Co-Creating Personalized, Contextualized Services

When imaginative service designers collide with methodical technical experts, the result is a chemical reaction that transforms intangible human-vehicle interactions into vivid, engaging scenarios.

• It initiates interaction, inviting you to get to know it:
  • A Weltmeister car parked in your path flashes its hazard lights to say hi as you pass by.
  • If you’re walking briskly, it hums an upbeat tune.
  • If you stop to look closely, its slightly open door eagerly invites you to explore further.
• It thinks like a person:
  • It interprets your mood from facial expressions, your personality from your gait, and your interests from your age. It captures insights hidden in clues, expressing itself with human-like emotional cues.
  • It knows your preferred distance, desired temperature, and destination—and quietly aligns with your every action and thought.
• It has a personality and authenticity:
  • It offers near-human interactions inside the car. Touching the door handle or tapping the steering wheel, you can feel its heartbeat, warmth, and rhythm.
  • It can take on playful personas, bond with children, and display cheeky behaviors like sticking out its tongue or giving high fives.

Co-creation produced six core scenarios: Universal Mode, Multi-User Mode, Kid Mode, Welcome Mode, Pet Mode, and Queen Mode. “Buy a Hummer, and you get a vehicle. Buy a Weltmeister with service design, and you get personalized, user-centric services.”

 

06 RoboTrial: Unlocking a New Service Paradigm

"One prototype equals 1,000 meetings."  

Three iterations of prototypes not only saved 3,000 meetings but also uncovered a new model for autonomous showrooms:

1. 1.0 Cardboard Prototype A quick co-creation process aligned the team and built confidence in the project. Simple cardboard prototypes vividly demonstrated human-vehicle interaction scenarios, fostering collective enthusiasm and creativity.
2. 2.0 Garage Prototype Within four weeks, the team enabled cars to “sell themselves” through intelligent upgrades. The RoboTrial autonomous showroom underwent early experiments in a low-cost underground parking lot at a Shanghai tech hub and outdoor venues. These tests validated the model’s feasibility.
3. 3.0 Mall Prototype Weltmeister conducted pop-up experiments with 15 upgraded RoboTrial cars in prime urban shopping districts in Shanghai and Beijing. Leveraging the post-pandemic "street economy" trend, these weekend and evening events attracted large crowds, gathering feedback and refining the autonomous sales model.

This mall experiment engaged 8,638 users, with an average in-car experience time of 3.9 minutes, a lead collection efficiency of 56%, and a conversion rate of 21%—exceeding expectations.

The results of the prototype experiments were exhilarating: we were thrilled to discover that people’s acceptance of "intelligent lifeform services" far exceeded expectations. This process—from project initiation, key insights, stakeholder interviews, and AI trend research to cross-department co-creation, scenario concepts, prototype development, continuous iteration, and the exploration of new services, strategies, models, and breakthroughs—integrated professional tools and methodologies of service design into every step, seamlessly executed by the Weltmeister team.

07 Disruptive Evolution of Automotive Marketing

Today’s popular automotive retail strategy involves opening city-center stores with investments ranging from millions to tens of millions, yet these often house only 1-2 cars.Weltmeister’s innovative Car ⇌ Environment interaction model introduces a new business paradigm:

• Every car becomes a mobile showroom, significantly reducing online lead generation and offline store costs.
• Beyond eliminating costs like construction and rising rents, smart vehicles with autonomous sales capabilities ensure precise, replicable content delivery, lowering training expenses and enhancing test-drive and purchase experiences.

08 A Future-Driven Marketing Formula

Next steps include further enhancements to in-car voice capabilities, intelligent control, and thematic games to make user interactions even more engaging. RoboTrial will integrate AI-driven behavior sensing and autonomous driving features, turning cars into highly interactive, fun spaces. By gathering comparative data across different locations—such as user scale, lead efficiency, and test-drive conversions—RoboTrial can support decisions about physical store locations through intelligent modeling and resource optimization. In the future, RoboTrial might evolve into an independent service platform, redefining traditional “selling smart with people” to a new paradigm for intelligent vehicle sales. Weltmeister is pioneering intelligent marketing strategies that integrate digital infrastructure and drive the automotive industry’s next evolution.

 

 

[Click to watch Yan Feng’s full talk: “Mobility as a Service”]