The Car Hub

Volvo of Sweden, makers of those comfortable, some say staid, solid, well engineered cars which are all well built with passenger safety as one of its foremost requirements have stolen a lead on other carmakers.

Ring your local Volvo dealer from Tuesday onwards and they will organize a virtual test drive for you. Nothing surprising about that you might say however the difference in this case is that you will be virtually test driving their new S60 concept car, which even more surprisingly has yet to be fully built.

What Volvo are offering is the opportunity of downloading what they call "The Game" which has been produced for them in conjunction with their own design team and a company called SimBim.

"The Game" enables potential customers of the futuristic new S60 to tePicturet the steering, visibility, acceleration and view close-ups of the interior design and colour schemes.

While Volvo are the first car company to feature virtual test driving of a yet to be built car, other motor manufacturers are also into the online test drive technology bit.

Last month Spanish car maker Seat introduced a free application for the downloading of a virtual test drive of their Leon Cupra via iPhone, customers can opt for either test drive mode or race mode by utilizing the gadgetry. Such is the popularity of this that Apple have stated there have been 250,000 downloads in the 3 weeks since its introduction.

Both Toyota and Audi have recently adopted virtual test drives in one form or another to assist in real time sales to keep their cars selling in these hard times.

While nothing can replace the actual test driving of a real car on a real road under normal conditions a free download from the manufacturers is surely superior to paper brochures to get people interested in the product.

The last word should go to the Indian car-maker Tata who have also employed the virtual test drive promotional method with their new Nano model, reputedly the world's cheapest new car. Since Tata made their website available in March this year they report they have had 1.2 million users of the facility.

Such is the power of the internet!