~ Auto Buzz ~: Using Volkswagen Digital Services to get around Berlin

When you look at the future of mobility it’s always interesting to see how companies are laying their groundwork. Berlin is a city to keep an eye on and Volkswagen has launched a slew of digital services. We’re going to take a closer look at what you can do with We Park, Volkswagen Connect and Car-Net, a few digital services offered by Volkswagen We.

My chariot around Berlin is the Volkswagen Arteon, which basically looks like the kind of car that Tony Stark might drive.

Berlin is a city full of tiny streets and long boulevards, so while jetting around town I found a few of Volkswagen’s digital services to be pretty useful while on the go. Looking for places to eat is important for me, using the navigation system I was able to look for a delicious bowl of noodle soup to warm me up while I tour around Berlin.

When I arrive at my destination, We Park is an app that allows you to pay for parking in the city. You just select where you’re parked and swipe to start paying for parking and when you leave don’t forget to tell it you’re done! You pay only for the time you use! It’s great!

How to Use Volkswagen We Park

1. Download App from the App Store, iTunes or Google Play.
2. Sign Up
3. Connect Payment
4. Update location to make sure your car is roughly where you’re selecting on the map
5. Swipe right on the bottom bar to pay
6. When you’re back at your car and ready to go, swipe again to let the app know you’re done. If you don’t do this, you’ll keep paying for parking!

After you swipe the screen turns green so you know you’re good to go!

We Park is available in over 100 cities in Germany.

Volkswagen Connect

Connect your smartphone with the DataPlug and make your Volkswagen a connected car. ‘Volkswagen Connect shows you the mileage, registration, when you need to get your car serviced and if there is something wrong and what to do about it. You can add you tyres and Volkswagen Connect will remind you when they need to be changed. Or you can put in the gas price and calculate how much it costs per kilometer to drive your car, which is great when you need to log drives for work.

Volkswagen Connect is aimed at people who have slightly older Volkswagen (from 2008 onward), giving your car modern connectivity features. One of the features I used frequently was finding the last location I parked my car and using the walking directions to get back to it. The logbook feature is ideal when you need to make expense reports for work.

You also get driving data on your drive style, your where you went and you can even take driving challenges around types of trips, and in Berlin, I took the checkpoint charlie challenge!

Car-Net

Send addresses from your phone to your infotainment system in advance

Car-Net means in-car information services as well a customer frontends like the Car-Net app. With the app you can search points of interest on your phone and send them to your car. You can search points of interest while sightseeing, read the news, get the weather and since parking is something always on my mind I liked the Park feature when I got close to my destination. I really appreciated the real-time traffic predictions was especially great and saved me from sitting in traffic. Another time-saving feature was saving addresses I was interested in visiting on the app and finding them on my infotainment system through Car-Net.

A feature that I found funny, was apparently in Germany it isn’t normal to trust your kid with your car, so you can set speed and distance alerts here to monitor how fast and where your kids are driving. Or you can set the speed to 0 and use it as theft detection.