Volkswagen Group of America is the North American operation headquarters and subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group, which is comprised of 16 brands and produces a variety of cars, motorcycles and commercial vehicles.

In 2013, Volkswagen introduced VW Car-Net, a connected service system that offers convenience and ease-of-access to Volkswagen owners through a variety of features and tools. Drivers currently interact with Car-Net through a mobile app. To reduce driver distraction resulting from drivers using their phones, the Car-Net team is building web apps that are available in the car’s screen called the Human Machine Interface (HMI).

Working with the garage door and smart home company, Chamberlain, our VW Car-Net Smart Hub Web App enables users to automate interactions with Chamberlain products without any user input.

Using our web app, a driver encompasses their house with a so-called geo-fence, which is simply a geographic area that triggers an action when the border of the geographic area is crossed. Once set, the garage door automatically opens when the vehicle crosses this border when approaching the house, and automatically closes when the vehicle crosses the geo-fenced border when leaving the house.

In addition, our web app supports other Chamberlain smart home devices such as lights, gates and door locks.

Our app enables control of all smart devices, regardless of location, from the VW HMI screen. Drivers also receive notifications relating to their smart devices directly in their car.

VW Car-Net Smart Hub Web App utilizes the Google Maps and Chamberlain APIs to enable customer ease with setting up and activating the boundary alerts. Our web app is written in TypeScript, HTML and CSS using the web development framework Angular.