Virtual Reality can be used  during design phases of the construction of automobiles as a tool for virtual prototyping. The main advantage is to avoid building too much physical prototypes reducing the overall cost of the design phase.

It can also be used to study the behaviour of the automobile through CAE simulations reducing the number of real simulations (e.g. crash test) through CAE analysis. Below you can find two papers which explains respectively these two applications of Virtual Rality to the industry.

Conference Paper A Novel 3D User Interface for the Immersive Design Review

Conference Paper A Virtual Prototyping Platform to Improve CAE Analysis Workflow

Thanks a lot for your help 

I agree with Francesco... other applications include assessment human factors issues including usability, accessibility, visibility (i.e., sight lines), and even aesthetics. There are applications in manufacturing process process automation, and many others.

My main point is that it is hardly a research issue anymore. Most major auto manufacturers use VR in some way, and many use projection-based CAVE systems. There is an entire commercial VR market, including software, hardware system integrators to support these and other customers. I have visited VR at Ford, BMW, Volkswagen, Diamler, Renault, PSA and others. Heavy equipment (e.g., Deere and Caterpillar) as well as aerospace companies (Boeing, Lockheed, EADS) are also big users of some of the same tools. Commercial VR vendors include ESI (ICIDO), Siemens, Dassault Systems, Mechdyne and TechViz, WorldViz and many others.

I agree with James about VR not being "per se" a first-class research topic in Automotive. However, the potential benefits that VR technologies can provide in the development process of a new car in order to reduce costs and lead times are still far from being fully understood and exploited, as they still involve (most of the times) a "change of culture" in the Automotive Industry. There is also a need to distinguish between design stages where VR is only used for pure visualisation tasks (like virtual assessment of car interiors and exteriors) and stages where VR is used to simulate assembly processes (for design validation, ergonomics, training, etc.). The latter presents still lots of challenges for VR to be used as an effective tool, and there is still room for a good number of high-level research projects, as no existing hardware and software platform are able to provide a convincing solution yet. You can find a more extended explanation of what I said in the following e-publication. This is just a preliminary work based on a three-years R&D project carried out in collaboration with Bentley at the Virtual Engineering Centre - University of Liverpool (https://www.financebirmingham.com/amsci/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/06/STRIVE-AMSCI-Case-Study.pdf) . I am currently working on the final "official" publication which will report the findings and the results of the project. Stay tuned... ;-)

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