Car configurators are very good at helping people imagine owning a car. You pick a variant, change the colour, swap the wheels, add a package, rotate the car through 360 degrees and watch the price move. For someone who is still exploring, that works well.
The trouble starts when they decide: this is the car I want. The questions change at that point. Can I afford this exact configuration? Is it available near me? How long will I wait? Can I test drive the same variant? Will the dealer know what I've already selected? Can I reserve it without rebuilding the journey somewhere else?
Most configurators were built to answer one question: what car do you want? A buying journey has to answer several more.
That matters because car buying in India is already deeply digital but still tied to physical retail. McKinsey found that more than 70% of Indian consumers begin their journey online, and roughly 40% are willing to buy online. About 90% still want some physical contact with an OEM or dealer, for test drives, questions or negotiation. So the goal is not to replace the dealership with a configurator. It is to design a journey where the website and the dealership work as parts of one purchase.
For automotive brands, this creates a broader automotive UX design challenge: connecting vehicle discovery, configuration, affordability, and dealership interactions into one continuous buying journey.
The Onething Automotive Decision Journey Framework
We think of automotive buying as a sequence of seven decisions:
Discover → Compare → Configure → Plan affordability → Check availability → Test drive → Book
The seven-stage buying journeyEach stage answers a question the buyer already has. Which vehicles could work for me? Which model or variant fits my priorities? What exactly do I want? What will this configuration cost me, and does it fit my budget? Can I get it where and when I need it? Can I experience the vehicle I'm seriously considering? Am I ready to commit?
A good configurator handles the third question well. A good buying journey has to handle all seven.
1. Discover: help people find the right car before asking them to configure one
Buyers don't always arrive knowing the manufacturer's range. They may know their budget, or that they need an SUV for a family of five. They may be considering an EV but have questions about range, or they may be replacing an old car and want to know what has changed.
The website should let them narrow the market the way they think about the purchase: budget, body type, powertrain, driving pattern, expected range, family needs and ownership priorities.
This matters more as discovery shifts. Deloitte's 2026 automotive research says manufacturer websites and dealer visits remain among the most-used sources when people research their next vehicle, and that India is one of the markets with particularly strong interest in buying directly from manufacturers online. The manufacturer's digital experience has a bigger job than presenting a catalogue. It has to help customers make sense of it.
2. Compare: translate specifications into decisions
Once a buyer has narrowed the field, comparison begins, and this is where many experiences turn specification-heavy: battery capacity, power, torque, wheel size, screen size, boot capacity, ADAS features.
Illustration concept: compare what the extra spend buysAll of it has value, but only once the customer understands what the differences mean for them. If one variant costs ₹3 lakh more, what changes? More range, faster charging, a better safety package, AWD, more comfort? A longer feature list is not a better comparison. The interface should answer one question: what am I paying more for, and does it matter to me? That is what prepares someone to configure with confidence.
3. Configure: turn preference into a specific vehicle
This is the stage automotive brands usually execute best. The customer chooses a trim, colour, interior, wheels, packages and accessories, which turns a general preference into something specific: this model, this variant, this colour, these options, this price.
This was also a key part of our work on the Royal Enfield Make It Yours configurator, where we designed an immersive customization experience that allowed customers to personalize their motorcycles, explore accessories and move toward booking.
Illustration concept: carry one configuration forwardThat is also why the configuration should matter more after the configurator, not less. Once someone has spent time building a vehicle, that configuration should travel with them through finance, stock availability, the test drive, the dealer conversation and booking. They have already told the brand what they want. The rest of the journey should remember it.
4. Plan affordability: connect the car someone wants with what it means financially
For many buyers the next question is financial, and it isn't "what does the car cost?" It's "what does this car cost me every month?" That changes how people judge variants. Someone may configure the higher trim and find the monthly difference manageable. Someone else may find that a different down payment, tenure or variant fits their budget much better.
Yet finance usually sits apart from configuration. The customer gets sent to another calculator, page, partner or form, and the decision process breaks.
Illustration concept: online finance intent versus adoptionCox Automotive's 2026 Car Buyer Journey Study shows the gap between what buyers wanted to do online and what they did. 48% wanted to apply for credit online, but only 33% did. 40% wanted to select finance and insurance products online, but only 16% did.
Affordability also shapes choice earlier than many interfaces assume. In McKinsey research across France, Germany and the UK, more than half of respondents preferred to set a monthly budget before they started shopping, and only one in five preferred to start by browsing cars. That isn't India-specific data, but the design implication carries over: price and product shouldn't behave like separate decisions.
A stronger flow would connect the configured vehicle, on-road price, down payment, EMI, tenure, finance options and eligibility, without asking the customer to reconstruct what they already chose.
5. Check availability: tell the customer whether the car they chose is obtainable
After affordability comes the practical question: can I actually get it? This is where the polished configurator often gives way to uncertainty. A customer may build the exact vehicle they want and then find that the site can't say whether the variant is available nearby, whether the colour is in stock, how long delivery will take, which dealer has the closest match, or whether that variant is available for a test drive.
The journey then becomes "find a dealer," but dealer selection shouldn't be only a location problem. The nearest dealer may not have the right vehicle, and a dealer slightly farther away may have the exact configuration sooner. A more useful experience would combine configuration, location, stock, delivery estimate and test-drive availability, and show which dealer fits the purchase the buyer has already built.
Not every OEM needs a perfect real-time inventory system. The design question is simpler: how much availability information does the customer need before they can confidently take the next step? That is a more useful problem to solve than showing the nearest showroom.
6. Test drive: continue the digital journey at the dealership
Digital research hasn't made the physical experience irrelevant. McKinsey's European automotive finance research found that close to 90% of customers still wanted to experience a vehicle before buying it, particularly first-time EV buyers. The Indian picture looks similar: more than 70% start online, and around 90% still want a physical OEM or dealer touchpoint somewhere along the way. The test drive is one of the most important handoffs between digital intent and physical retail.
Illustration concept: generic versus contextual test-drive form
Yet many booking flows forget everything that came before. The customer goes from this:
A7 → Performance AWD → Aurora Silver → Tech Package
to this:
Name → Phone → City → Submit
The information gets poorer just as purchase intent gets stronger.
A better test-drive flow would inherit the model, variant, configuration, preferred dealer, finance interest, purchase timeline and relevant customer preferences, and the dealership would receive the same context. Instead of opening with "Which model were you interested in?", the dealer can say, "We've prepared the variant you were looking at online."
That sounds like a small operational fix. For the customer, it is the difference between one connected journey and two separate businesses.
Improving these handoffs requires understanding the complete customer journey, including what happens beyond the interface. A customer experience audit can help identify friction between the website, dealership interactions and supporting operational processes.
7. Book: make commitment the natural next step
By the time someone reaches booking, they may have researched the range, compared vehicles, built a configuration, worked out affordability, checked availability and taken a test drive. Booking should feel like the conclusion of those decisions, not another reset.
The customer should see the exact vehicle being booked, the final or indicative price, the selected dealer, the booking amount, the refund conditions, their finance preference, the expected delivery and what happens after payment. The more decisions they have already made, the less the interface should ask them to repeat.
Customers are not necessarily asking for an entirely digital purchase. They are asking for a more connected one. In Cox Automotive's 2026 study, 63% of buyers called a mix of online and in-person activity their ideal retail experience, against 28% who preferred buying entirely online.
So the goal isn't to move everything online. It's to let each channel pick up where the previous one stopped.
How Onething evaluates a buying journey
We look at whether each stage gives the customer enough confidence to move to the next.
| Stage |
What we ask |
| Discover |
Can customers find a relevant vehicle without already understanding the product range? |
| Compare |
Can they understand the real trade-offs between models and variants? |
| Configure |
Can they build the exact vehicle they want and keep that configuration? |
| Plan affordability |
Can they see what the configuration means for their budget and monthly outgo? |
| Check availability |
Can they see whether the vehicle is available nearby, and within a reasonable delivery window? |
| Test drive |
Does their digital context follow them into the physical experience? |
| Book |
Can they commit to the same vehicle without rebuilding the journey? |
For OEMs looking to understand where customers lose momentum, Onething's UX audit services can help identify usability issues, conversion bottlenecks and disconnected digital journeys before undertaking a wider redesign.
The metric that matters is not how polished any single screen looks. It is how much customer intent survives from one stage to the next.
What OEM teams should measure
Illustration concept: measure intent through the journeyTime spent in the configurator tells you someone interacted with it. It doesn't tell you whether it helped them buy. The more useful measures sit between stages:
- Discover to Compare: how many customers move from exploring into a meaningful shortlist?
- Compare to Configure: how many go from evaluating options to building one?
- Configure to Plan affordability: how many look at the financial reality of the vehicle they created?
- Plan affordability to Check availability: how many go on to see whether that vehicle is obtainable?
- Check availability to Test drive: how well does confirmed availability turn into a dealer action?
- Test drive to Book: how many high-intent customers go from experience to commitment?
Those transitions are where the digital experience starts to become part of the sales system.
A benchmark for Indian OEMs
The next question is measurable: how many automotive websites in India support the complete buying journey? An Onething benchmark could test the major OEM experiences against the seven stages above. That would let us move past opinions about which configurator looks best and ask something commercially useful: which automotive digital experiences do the best job of carrying a customer's intent from discovery to purchase?
Beyond the configurator
A configurator helps a customer choose the car they want. The bigger opportunity is making sure that choice survives into affordability, availability, the test drive and booking. That is what turns a configurator from a visualization tool into part of the buying system.