In a future metropolis envisioned by Hyundai Motor Co., streets are devoid of congestion and pedestrians. Automobiles journey freely down empty roads. Often, a rival car will sneak up from behind and trigger a crash.

No biggie. The driving force springs from the wreckage and ambles over to an autonomous meals truck and orders plates of tacos served by robots. Air taxis typically swoop all through the cartoonish panorama.

These are the scenes in a novel new digital atmosphere, or metaverse, developed by the automaker with the intent of familiarizing a youthful technology — maybe the pre-driving set — with its newest automobiles, such because the Ioniq, Tucson and Nexo. The metaverse is positioned on the gaming platform Roblox, and it is the primary time a worldwide automotive model has ventured into that area, which hosts 43 million every day customers.

Hyundai describes the advertising and marketing effort as a way to “nurture long-lasting relationships with followers” and focused at “younger customers who’re technologically savvy at exploring the digital worlds past bodily experiences.”

Having little expertise in such nonphysical realms, I turned to a few specialists — my 12-year-old daughter and 10-year-old sons — to guage Hyundai’s providing. After repeated journeys aboard the gamified automobiles, they report it was “glitchy” and “took too lengthy to load.”

However when it labored, they loved their journeys, notably into the “Future Mobility Metropolis” and “Racing Park” areas created by Hyundai’s customer-experience engineers.

The youngsters managed their vehicles, did donuts on the road and honked the horn on the Nexo.

A lot to my reduction, it is going to be a couple of extra years earlier than they’re making an attempt these maneuvers on actual roads. When the time comes, it is going to be noteworthy to see whether or not Hyundai’s early advertising and marketing efforts have made actual inroads.