With Tesla test drives scaled back, your options to check out a Model 3 or Model S sedan are limited enough that you may need to turn to virtual reality to see the car before you buy it. 

Oculus’s new VR headset could become the next best way to check out cars without going to a dealership or car lot — or in Tesla’s case, without buying the car sight unseen.

The Oculus Quest was officially announced this week at Facebook’s F8 conference and when it arrives on May 21 for $399 most of the attention will be on how it performs for gaming apps. For the non-gamers out there, however, the headset can give you a glimpse at what thousands of cars look like. It’s one of the many non-gaming uses for VR that’s getting a boost with the new device.

SEE ALSO: Oculus Quest is a VR gaming revelation, but who is it for?

RelayCars has a vast library of car imagery that lets you take a look at each one from all angles and while sitting in the driver seat. With images of 13,000 vehicles and counting, you can take a peek at the Tesla Model 3, a Mini Cooper, or even a Prius. 

During a demo, COO Gina Callari compared the app to a “virtual auto show” where you can hop from car to car, getting a feel for the vehicle without driving it. The library is stocked with luxury vehicles, big trucks, and everyday options like a Honda Accord or Toyota Camry.

It’s available for free on Oculus Go, Samsung’s Gear VR, HTC Vive, and other VR platforms (there’s also a mobile and tablet app with 360-degree images available for perusing for the VR-disinclined among us), but with the new Quest, the viewing experience will greatly improve.

Currently you can explore the front seat of a Tesla, or any of the available cars, from a fixed point of view in VR. You can look all over, but you can’t see what the car is like from the back seat or from other positions. 

With the Quest the RelayCars VR app will give what’s known as 6DOF, or six degrees of freedom, instead of the usual 3DOF: pitch, roll, and yaw. The additional three are forward/backward, left/right, and up/down. 

This means you can move around the space, kneel down, get closer to the steering wheel, check out a decal on the trunk — much like you’d do when walking around a real car. It gets you that much closer to a realistic experience.

So instead of trudging to a litany of different dealerships when looking for a new car, you can browse through various options the same way you shop for everything else: online. 

“The future is private,” Mark Zuckerberg declared, as he awkward-laughed his way through his annual keynote at Facebook’s F8 conference. For Zuckerberg, the event was his chance to sell the world on his vision to turn Facebook into a a “privacy-focused” social network.

To make that happen he plans to rebuild many of the company’s core services, including:

• A redesigned Facebook that emphasizes groups and Stories more than News Feed

• A redesigned Messenger app that also allows you to chat with friends on WhatsApp and Instagram (details on how are still sketchy). It will also have a new social tab for interacting with small groups of friends.

• A redesigned Instagram camera that makes it easier to use Stories like you might have once used News Feed

All of this redesigning also comes with an increased emphasis on end-to-end encryption and ephemerality. Your conversations will be kept private, and the content you create probably won’t stick around as long (again, exact details are unclear). 

SEE ALSO: Everything Facebook announced at F8 2019

To hear Zuckerberg describe it, these changes amount to a monumental shift for the company, whose mission was once “make the world more open and connected.” 

“As we build more of our services around this privacy vision, we’re also changing how we run our company,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page following his keynote address. 

But while Facebook may be rebuilding its apps, it has shown no sign that it’s making any change to its most troubling policies. Namely, the massive amount of data Facebook collects to power its multibillion dollar advertising machine. Because while Facebook may be adapting to a world in which its users would rather share privately anyway, it still has boatloads of data on you and billions of others  (even if you don’t use Facebook). And you can bet that it will continue to use that data to sell ads, even if those ads now appear somewhere else other than News Feed.

In fact, Zuckerberg and other executives have been adamant that they stand firmly behind their business model and that they don’t have much patience for those who criticize it. 

For more proof, look no further than Facebook’s promised “clear history” tool, that would allow people to limit Facebook’s ability to track them. A year later, the tool, which BuzzFeed News reported was a last-minute addition by Zuck in an effort to gain some positive press, still hasn’t launched, and it didn’t even get a passing mention on the F8 stage this year. (Facebook said earlier this month the tool would likely launch this fall.)

That might be because such a tool, one that could actually enhance users’ privacy, isn’t actually in Facebook’s financial interest. 

So, yes, Facebook is changing many core aspects of how we use its service. And some of those changes may even make us feel like our conversations are more private. But when it comes to Facebook’s most valuable asset, your personal data, it’s still very much business as usual.

Volvo’s performance brand brought its new all-electric sedan, the Polestar 2, to North America on Wednesday. This marked the first time this side of the world got a peek at the first car to use Google to natively power the infotainment system. 

An 11-inch center console screen and a 12.3-inch driver seat screen display an Android Automotive operating system with voice-activated Google Assistant, Google Maps, the Google Play Store, and all its Android Automotive apps. 

With the $63,000 car’s arrival in San Francisco, Google opened up app development for the Polestar 2 and other cars planning to use Google for its infotainment system for everything from mapping to sending texts to listening to audio books. 

The car with a 275-mile range is expected to arrive in the U.S. later in 2020. Already a few thousand models have been pre-ordered worldwide. While it’s pricier than Tesla’s Model 3 sedan (which has a $35,000 starting price option), it’s clearly a competitor. Also on Wednesday, Consumer Reports rated Tesla’s infotainment system the best available. Now it has to compete with Polestar’s Google interface.

Earlier this week, Fiat Chrysler announced it would be using Google’s connected car system for its cars in the coming years. Google noted that it can customize the interface for different car designs and brands. For Polestar it’s a darker interface with four big tiles that house different apps and functions, like maps, media, messaging, and then a separate bottom section with climate settings.

Polestar executives said Google was put directly into the car after seeing most drivers immediately plug in their phones to use the apps and services they know and rely on their devices instead of using car companies’ attempt to build a user-friendly interface. Polestar is looking to offer those apps, like Google Maps or Waze, right in the car.

To start developers can make media apps, like podcasts and music apps, optimized for the car. That means a more stringent process that takes into account that the user is a driver and in a moving vehicle, so safety and distraction levels are key. App development will open next week at Google’s I/O developer conference.

SEE ALSO: Volvo Polestar 2 is the first car to include Google’s native dashboard

For example, Spotify is available as a Polestar music app, but it’s been rebuilt by Google for the car. The Polestar version includes larger buttons and voice controls, for one, and looks different from the Spotify app on your smartphone, while still distinctly Spotify.

At the debut, Google executives said more app development is coming for things like navigation and messaging and other communication apps. But for now cars like Polestar 2 will come with your Google classics like Maps and Assistant and plenty of apps to keep you entertained in the car.