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VOLKSWAGEN dealers will be at the heart of the German brand’s move towards evolving its cars into a central hub in the Internet of Things.

Jürgen Stackmann, Brand Board Member for Sales said VWs will increasingly become digital devices on wheels with customers becoming part of an ecosystem it has named ‘We’.

New dealer contracts will allow VW to engage direct with customers over the vehicle’s entire life cycle. Customers will receive tailor-made offers without having to make an appointment with a workshop.

The backbone of the ecosystem will be a Group-wide, primarily cloud- based platform, the “One Digital Platform” (ODP). This is mainly based on cloud-technology and connects the car, the customer and the services. The ODP ensures the connection with its IT architecture comprising VW services or external partners who are integrated in the VW ecosystem.

Christoph Hartung, Head of Digital and New Business/Mobility Services, said: “Volkswagen is spearheading the development of the OPD in collaboration with the Group brands. And we are seeking additional external support. We will soon be announcing cooperation projects and partnerships”,

Michael Jost, Chief Strategy Officer of the Volkswagen Brand and Head of Group Strategy Product, said that software and associated services would make a significant contribution to differentiation in the automobile industry in future. “To deal with this development, we need to reinvent the automobile in some ways.”

This will include a redesigned, much simpler vehicle IT architecture, which will be premiered in the I.D. family of electric models from 2020. This IT architecture dispenses with a large number of separate control units that run on manufacturer-specific software.

Currently there are up to 70 such units in a vehicle. Instead, vehicle intelligence will be concentrated in just a few computers with a unified programming language. In future the software will come from one source – the customer will experience services based on the “vw.OS” automotive operating system.

Jost said: “Separating the hardware from the software lays the groundwork for continuous updates and upgrades.”

He added that 2020 will be a turning point for the VW brand. Currently some 1.5m vehicles with no online access can already connect with the Internet thanks to the “Volkswagen Connect” retrofit solution. From 2020 VW will begin connecting its entire fleet. Each year, over 5m new vehicles will then become part of the Internet of Things.

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