VW ID Software 3.0 Update Brings New Features and Faster Charging
Some of these benefits will be baked into US cars, while others may take longer to arrive on our shores.
Over-the-air software updates means vehicles can receive new features well after leaving the dealership. Volkswagen's electric vehicles are set to pick up some hotly anticipated features in the company's latest software update. The update also brings a boost to charging speeds for some European models.
Volkswagen this week announced ID Software 3.0, the latest system upgrade for its ID 3 and ID 4 electric cars. People buying new cars will get access to these improvements immediately, but owners of existing EVs will have to wait until the second quarter of 2022 for those bits and bytes to land in their vehicles.
One of the most interesting updates in ID Software 3.0 is the inclusion of Travel Assist with Swarm Data. It builds upon the standard Travel Assist, which combines adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping assist to hold the vehicle in its lane with the flow of traffic. At speeds of 55 mph and up, the car will now gently change lanes after engaging the turn signal. It can also take anonymized data from other VWs and use that to, for example, know where to hold the vehicle on a road without a center line.
VW also added Park Assist Plus, which takes control of the vehicle to complete a parallel or perpendicular parking maneuver. The car can search for spaces on its own or help finish a DIY park job that's already in progress. It also includes a memory function that "remembers" specific movements, in case you have a particularly tricky parking spot, and the car can repeat them later without driver intervention.
There are a few smaller upgrades, too. The gauge display picks up a percentage-based readout of the battery life, which is a response to owners who have requested this feature specifically. The turn-by-turn system now attempts to pinpoint which lane you are in, in order to recommend lane changes prior to exiting the highway.
While you might assume charging is a hardware thing, and thus impervious to over-the-air updates, you'd be wrong. VW ID electric vehicles with the 77-kilowatt-hour battery can now receive 135 kilowatts of juice while charging, up from 125 kW. Tweaks to the battery's thermal management software should improve its cold-weather range, while a new Battery Care Mode limits the charge to 80%.
However, not every feature made the transition from the customer wish list. One-pedal braking, where the regenerative braking is strong enough to bring the vehicle to a stop, negating the use of the brake pedal, is still not available. Neither is an automatic brake-hold when the vehicle comes to a stop. But there's always future updates for those.
The US and Europe are generally on different schedules as far as Volkswagen is concerned, but in the case of Software 3.0, there are some pretty significant changes between what the EU gets and what we get Stateside. Automatic lane changes and other changes to the Drive Assist suite are still being evaluated for the US market. Meanwhile, 135-kW charging is already standard on every 2022 VW ID 4 in the US, and it's unclear if this boost will be applied to model-year-2021 vehicles at this time. Automatic parking and memory-based parking are being held until the 2023 model year. That means most of what the US gets is software-related, such as the state-of-charge readout, improved voice control and navigation with multiple charge-point routing.
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