Volvo S80

I was working with the TV on tonight when a two part Volvo commercial came on, advertising the S80, what I found so interesting about this commercial was their use of different buyer persona's to elicit a cool factor. It was in my mind a perfect example of the difference between the cool factor and something that will be utilized once the purchase is made.
The first part of this commercial was about a blind spot detector which drew my attention away from my current project, and was directly followed up with an introduction to their heart rate detector, in brief summary the device detected if their was a heart beat in your new S80 and alerts you before you enter your car. Now this has cool factor written all over it.

This is especially important when your market space is already saturated with competition, such as with automobiles. While items such as these two new features which Volvo is showcasing on their S80 may have significant effect on a buyers decision to buy, in most cases they will not be a highly utilized element once a purchase has been made. This isn't to say that such features are not important to incorporate into the design of a product since they very well could make the difference between a evaluator deciding to go with your product or your competitors. But design choices should be made when implementing these cool factors, so that they are not over designed during implementation.
Since these features will only be used when making a buying decision, but not during normal operation, they should consciously not be over engineered. Based off of interviews with potential customers during design these features should be identified. With the identification of such features, more engineering time can be utilized on larger ROI features.