Hate driving to the gas station? Meet Volvo’s new connected concierge service

Enlarge (credit: Volvo)

LOS ANGELES, CALIF.—On Thursday at the LA Auto Show, Volvo announced a new connected car app that aims to free users from having to deal with pesky things like taking the car to the gas station or car wash. It's called Volvo Concierge Services, and it's a pilot program in the Bay Area that will allow S90 and XC90 owners to get their cars refueled, serviced, or valeted from their smartphones.

We spoke to Volvo US CEO Lex Kersemakers to find out more about the idea:

We have a number of important missions, but one of them is to make life less complicated—for our customers, not for ourselves. We want to reach a point where our customers never need to fill up their car again, or drive to the car wash themselves. We have the technology, so we realized we could create a digital key which gives a vendor temporary access to a car. We've created a secure open platform, with secure vendors to see how we can extend the level of convenience for our customers. It uses preselected vendors in your area, you send them a digital key, they come pick up the car, fill it up, return it, and you get billed digitally. It sounds very easy, but there's a lot of technology, if not a lot of lawyers involved.

Volvo is taking advantage of its new Scalable Product Architecture vehicle platform (that's used by the XC90 and S90) to try out something that until now has been the preserve of discussions around autonomous cars of the future—freeing owners from some of the day-to-day grind of car maintenance. Proponents of autonomous tech often refer to the idea of one's car going off and parking or refueling itself while the owner is busy getting on with their life, and this is (sort of) the first step along that path—although for now actual humans are involved in the process.