BEVscape: Transforming BMW’s EV Sales with an Interactive Digital Experience

Interactive Tech

Pranay Bhandare

4 Min

Oct 31, 2025

BMW’s EV story needed more than product sheets and polished showrooms — it needed a way to translate unfamiliar technology into clear, confident buying decisions. BEVscape did exactly that: an interactive platform designed to live inside BMW’s refreshed lounge-style showrooms, educate customers on the economics and practicalities of electric ownership, and give sales teams an intuitive tool to close the gap between curiosity and purchase. The project blends field research, experience design and technical craftsmanship to deliver measurable value for both customer and brand.

The brief — tangible outcomes, not gimmicks

BMW approached the brief with a simple commercial problem: EVs were new to a large section of Indian buyers, and traditional sales conversations — tuned to petrol and diesel purchasing logic — weren’t working. The brand was also shifting its retail identity toward a more relaxed, lounge-like environment; the customer experience needed to match that tone and support an evolved sales approach. The ask was pragmatic: build an in-showroom experience that educated customers about EV benefits, helped salespeople explain the business case, and felt native to BMW’s new retail design language.

Research-led design: start where the customer and salesperson live

The team began in the dealerships — not in a lab. By behaving like prospective buyers and shadowing sales conversations, the project surfaced two clear problems: buyers lacked contextual, personalised data (about running costs, charging, range), and salespeople lacked a structured, simple way to explain those facts conversationally. Rather than layering another marketing asset on top of the process, the team designed a tool to sit inside the sales flow — something customers could explore on their own, and salespeople could use to personalise the conversation. This frontline research shaped every interaction and visual choice that followed.

The idea — communicate value through interactions, not slides

BEVscape’s interaction model was deliberately simple and hierarchical. A visitor selects the EV they want to explore and then chooses from five clear, business-focused sections: savings with an EV, how to charge your EV, a “relax — we care” concierge-like guidance area, customer testimonials, and the environmental contribution (reduced emissions). Each section is designed to answer a single class of question that typically stalls a sale: cost, convenience, reassurance, social proof, and sustainability. The approach reframes the conversation from abstract benefits to decisions a buyer can complete in the showroom.

Concrete numbers that cut through doubt

What separates persuasive experiences from vague promises is concrete comparison. BEVscape uses clear, locally relevant figures so the economics of ownership read like a P&L for the buyer. For example: if a user drives 8,000 km a year, BEVscape’s calculations show annual fuel costs of approximately INR 64,000 for an EV, versus INR 320,000 for a petrol equivalent and INR 256,000 for diesel. Presenting this side-by-side, animated and contextualised, converts abstraction into a decision-making metric that buyers and procurement-minded decision-makers both respect.

Technical craft — design that scales across touchpoints

The platform wasn’t a single touchscreen demo; it was built to scale across formats and points of interaction. The team used Unity to assemble assets and animations and mapped the content flow in Figma before animating each slide. That allowed the experience to exist in several formats: an interactive screen in the showroom, a screen controlled via iPad for a guided demo, an iPad-only experience for one-to-one conversations, and a micro-website optimised for phones. This multi-format strategy meant BEVscape could live where conversations were actually taking place — whether self-led browsing or salesperson-led walkthroughs — without losing fidelity.

Practical features that support sales execution

Beyond visual polish, BEVscape included features built specifically for sales efficiency:

A personalised savings calculator that translates a buyer’s mileage into charging frequency and running cost estimates.
A charging-station map, showing public chargers across Indian cities to address range-anxiety and route planning.

Testimonial content and narrative cues designed to support a salesperson’s claims without replacing them. These elements turn BEVscape from a brochure into a conversation partner that surfaces exactly the facts a buyer needs to decide.

The real constraints — what the team had to solve

High-fidelity animation looks great — until you have to make it work on the web and on low-power devices. BEVscape’s animations were detailed and layered; that richness created optimisation challenges, especially for the micro-website. Layering existing animations online wasn’t feasible, so parts of the animation had to be rebuilt from scratch for the web deliverable. Conceptualisation took the bulk of the schedule, leaving the technical team a compressed window to implement. That pressure drove creative engineering — rethinking animation structure, simplifying runtime assets, and prioritising the interactions that mattered most to a buyer’s decision. These choices are often invisible to users but directly influence speed, reliability and conversion.

Outcomes — from pilot to roll-out

BEVscape’s trajectory demonstrates how a well-placed experience can evolve into a retail asset. What began as an activation for a single dealership expanded into a BMW sub-brand slated for deployment across more than 20 showrooms in India. The platform’s potential led to a broader reveal at the Auto Expo and a mandate from BMW India’s leadership to evolve BEVscape into a dynamic web presence. Those outcomes reflect two things: a design that solved operational sales pain-points, and an execution that made the solution deployable at scale.

Why this matters to brand leaders and retail heads

There are three business lessons in the BEVscape story that matter for senior decision-makers:

1. Sales tools must map to decision moments. Effective retail technology isn’t a novelty — it’s a bridge from curiosity to commitment. BEVscape’s structure (choose → learn → personalise → decide) mirrors the buyer’s mental flow and gives sales teams a predictable script that scales.

2. Localised economics beat global narratives. Presenting running cost comparisons in local currency and with locally relevant mileage assumptions makes the value proposition tangible. For markets with cost-sensitive buyers, this kind of clarity directly affects conversion rates.

3. Build for formats, not form-factors. If an experience only works as a kiosk, its reach is limited. BEVscape’s multi-format delivery — screen, iPad, mobile micro-site — ensured the investment could support different retail formats and customer journeys without redoing core design work.

A note on craft: why process matters as much as technology

Projects like BEVscape aren’t just exercises in visual spectacle; they require disciplined handoffs between research, UX, animation and engineering. The team’s decision to prototype flows in Figma, animate from first principles, and implement in Unity reflects an emphasis on maintainability and iteration. That process discipline is what lets a pilot become a deployable product without losing fidelity or increasing operating risk.

Final takeaways for decision makers

For established brands evaluating technology-driven retail investments, BEVscape offers a repeatable pattern: start with clear sales outcomes, base design decisions on frontline research, prioritise content that answers specific buyer objections, and ensure the solution is device-agnostic. The result is a sales-enabling platform that respects the buyer’s time and the salesperson’s craft — and that delivers measurable improvements in communication and confidence.

Ink In Caps brought this combination of creative storytelling, interaction design and engineering rigour to the brief. The studio’s practice — translating technical complexity into human, decision-ready experiences across AR/VR, projection mapping, CGI and interactive web — is evident in the way BEVscape ties audience insight to repeatable outcomes for the brand and its retail teams. For teams looking to move beyond static product displays toward purposeful, commerce-focused experiences, BEVscape is a clear example of how to do it.

If your brief demands more than stagecraft — if you need a tool that changes conversations, reduces friction in the sales funnel and scales across formats — there’s a clear set of next steps to consider: map your buyer’s decision moments, prioritise the calculations and proof points they need, and choose a delivery strategy that mirrors how they buy. When those elements align, showroom moments become conversion engines rather than curiosities — and that’s where brand investment pays back.

— For a concise discussion about how a tailored experience could transform your retail sales motion, reach out to the team at Ink In Caps for a pragmatic walkthrough of BEVscape’s approach and deployability.

About the Author

pranay Bhandare
SEO Executive