German automaker Volkswagen recently announced plans to invest as much as $4 billion by 2025 to help bolster its digital ecosystem. Given the title of One Digital Platform, the initiative marks a shift from traditional approaches for vehicle enhancements to a greater focus on mobility services to meet evolving customer needs.
Examples of this focus on new and different solutions include:
- Enabling car owners to have packages delivered to their vehicle instead of to a specific address.
- A parking app with integrated billing.
- Real-time personalized recommendations based on location.
- A new car-sharing service dubbed WeShare that will debut next year. It will provide access to 2,000 electric vehicles from VW's e-up! and e-Golf lineup as an alternative to car ownership.
The company hopes to generate $1.1 billion in sales by 2025 from these new digital services.
The investment will also strengthen VW’s new automotive operating system, vw.OS, which will be incorporated into electric cars from model year 2020 and onward. This development will negate the dependence on third-party software to analyze vehicle data. It could also provide the flexibility to push over-the-air software updates instead of issuing service-related recalls.
Image Credit: Karlis Dambrans / Shutterstock.com