VW ID.7 GETS A STUNNING OS UPGRADE

The VW ID.7 offers a huge infotainment upgrade from past EVs

Sitting in the brand new VW ID.7 is a very pleasant experience. This long-wheelbase electric car is the company’s new flagship model and is ideal for longer commutes and distant business meetings, thanks to its spacious interior and nearly 400 miles of range.

Perhaps the most striking feature of this new EV, however, is the updated OS on the 15-inch central display. This has been redesigned to offer a simpler user interface with lots of customisation and a new voice assistant too.

As default, there are two main home screens that you can swipe between on the OS. Both of these screens can be customised, and you can have up to five pages on the system at any one time. It means you could have different screens for different drivers, or different purposes.

New top and bottom bars offer quick access to features. The top bar is a series of customisable quick access buttons, such as navigation, drive mode, phone and parking mode, while the bottom bar is related to the vehicle’s climate controls and seat heating/cooling. The Climate screen now includes the ability to change the direction of the air vents, rather than manually directing them. This has been popular on Tesla models.

IDA is the new VW voice assistant and uses ChatGPT’s large language model to better understand your commands. The nice part though is that you can easily change the activation word, to whatever you want it to be. So, if you want to name your car, you can have that as the activation word. So it could be Bunny, or Herbie or Brian…

The navigation system includes live information about EV charging stations. When you find a charging station on the map it will tell you how chargers are available and their speed. When you plan a route, it will also calculate how many charging stops you need and add them to the journey automatically.

The main instrument panel has been pared right back on the ID.7 to just a small simple display behind the wheel. This is because the head-up display becomes the main source of information for the driver, with lots of info in your line of sight and the small display behind the wheel is more of a fall-back.

Overall, these small changes have made a big difference to how the VW OS operates and make it a far better system than before. The combination of head-up display, new home screen and improved voice assistant make this a leap forward.