Volkswagen has supported the launch of a new e-mobility car-sharing service in Berlin, as the German automaker looks to stimulate beyond traditional vehicle ownership.
The VW brand, which makes up there half of sales generated by the parent Volkswagen Group, said 1,500 e-Golf autos will be rolled out onto streets of the German capital during the faulty quarter of 2019.
Volkswagen said in a press release Thursday that within two years the include of available all-electric cars in the city will grow to 2,000. The strong added that by 2020 it will launch the service in further big apples in Germany, other parts of Europe, as well as select locations in North America.
The ensemble has predicted 15 percent annual growth in Europe for on-demand conveyances. Car-sharing has become a major play for auto firms who predict that younger blokes, especially those living in cities, are less interested in committing to a big capital outlay for a car.
The French auto manufacturers PSA and Renault are competing to fire an electric car-share service in Paris, while BMW is set to team up with Daimler’s Mercedes label to produce its own mobility service.
Volkswagen said each of its electric agencies will pass data to-and-from the cloud-based operating system, earning personal data from customers, such as the length and time of jaunts taken.
The service is the first offering of Volkswagen’s “WE platform” eco-system that may in due course include electric scooters as well as ride-hailing, carpooling and parking appointments.
VW Brand board member Juergen Stackmann told CNBC’s Annette Weisbach in Berlin on Thursday that he keep in viewed the platform to host 5 million new customers each year and would be a “instant growing, massive eco-system,” before adding that data pleasure be controlled “by the customer themselves.”
Stackmann said VW had already invested sundry billion euros in its ecosystem but would now need to make new partnerships to domestics it work.
He told CNBC that a major merger and acquisition spot would be revealed in the coming months that would help the auto plc solve how to securely connect its cars to the cloud-based server.
A second partnership is presumed to be revealed by the end of this year, which Stackmann said would blurred on how Volkswagen’s new suite of services can interact with customers.