Following in the line of automobile companies offering connected Apple Watch apps to control aspects of their vehicle, like Porsche Car Connect, German car manufacturer Volkswagen today announced a similar Apple Watch app that will bring most of the features of the company's Car-Net mobile app to a user's wrist.
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The app will allow customers to lock and unlock a car's doors (on 2016-and-later models), open and close windows and the sunroof, provide a map of the vehicle's current parked location, and even set off a minor alarm when locating the vehicle is proving tiresome. Interestingly, the app will also bring over Car-Net's feature of tracking speed and set boundary notifications, allowing parents to monitor a child's top driving speed and send notifications if they break from a pre-set geofencing boundary area right to the Apple Watch.
“These high-tech features, available through the Car-Net® app for Apple Watch, are paving the way to Volkswagen’s future of connected vehicles,” said Abdallah Shanti, Executive Vice President and Group Chief Information Officer for Region Americas. “As a part of Volkswagen’s Digital Vehicle Management Platform, this was a truly collaborative effort between our Technical Development and Group IT teams.”
The Volkswagen Apple Watch app also brings the ability to check fuel on gasoline and TDI Clean Diesel engines and even the charge on the all-electric e-Golf. The full suite of Car-Net features is available on "select trims" of the 2014 and later Beetle, CC, Eos, Jetta, Passat and Tiguan models and on all trims of 2015 and later Golf, Golf GTI, Golf R, Golf SportWagen and e-Golf models.
Top Rated Comments
(View all)I think UI designers keep forgetting the Apple Watch doesn't have an edge-to-edge display.
This is the extent of Apple Watch's display:
Image (http://i.imgur.com/YuOo93f.jpg)
Oh, the dots at the bottom.. I see now.
I get it. You can't stop all distractions. I'll bet more people crash their car from daydreaming than they do talking on the phone. But by adding all this gear in the car, they need to hurry up and automate the driving process so you *can* do all this good stuff safely. I know that if I have a great Apple GUI staring at me in my face, I'm gonna want to toy with it.
From what I've heard and seen, sleepy drivers are one of the biggest causes of crashes, but I don't see the cattle prods built into the seats to prevent this.What really gets me is that when I'm a passenger, I can't pair my Phone to the stereo because the car thinks I'm the driver, and that it's dangerous. So they need to figure stuff like that out first...
And, thank you for the nice response!
Looks like most 2016 MY VW models with MIBII entertainment platform will have CarPlay enabled.
Men In Black II? :DOn a serious note, I'm kinda glad I've waited so many years to trade-in my long paid off car. Now I get to do cool stuff like controlling my car with my watch! But then I hear rumors about Apple Cars in 2020 and wonder "How long can this car really keep going?"
Why must they use such an ugly font?
I'm glad they use such a nice, clean font.
This is the extent of Apple Watch's display: