Hypnosis, AI and a handful of hallucinations, how to sell a car that does not exist

Once, launching a new model meant an engineer with sweaty palms explaining camshaft timing in some draughty garage, or a Japanese project manager talking in a form of English understood only by himself. In 2026, influencers are laid out on a hypnotherapist’s couch and told to imagine they are sitting inside a beast. CUPRA, Volkswagen Group’s permanently adolescent rebel with a weakness for bronze jewellery, may just have reached the summit of modern marketing. It staged a test drive in a car that exists only as a shared hallucination.