Volvo XC90, S90 owners get app-driven fueling, valet service in San Francisco
Someone in San Francisco just swiped your new Volvo in the middle of the night. So you reach for your phone, smiling, and pay the bill.
Volvo wants 300 XC90 and S90 owners to sign up for app-ordered “concierge services” — whether it’s a dealer fetching a car for service or a valet shuffling a Volvo from a tow-away zone — 24 hours a day. One of its trendy automated vendors, Filld, signed up with Bentley in October to provide owners mobile refueling anywhere in the Bay Area.
Similar to Bentley, which can automatically unlock the fuel-filler door prior to a gas delivery, Volvo sends Filld a temporary digital key with location and time restrictions so a Filld employee (or any other Volvo-approved vendor) can open and lock the car. Other services will let a company employee start your car, so that after you’ve had it vacuumed and washed it can be at the BART station when you get back from San Jose. Isn’t progressive West Coast living grand?
The services will be part of the existing Volvo On Call app, which provides remote vehicle telematics such as unlocking and GPS tracking. Volvo is also calling on other tech startups to pitch ideas, and this will eventually expand outside the Golden State. So Volvo owners in, say, Vermont could get in on the fun — the only problem, though, is that 1980s DL wagons are ineligible, plus their door locks are probably broken anyway.