“Plays The Road” Smartphone App

Volkswagen have brought their car manufacture expertise into the world of smartphones and produced a brand new app called “Play The Road” which was actually intended just as an experiment and never meant to be release due to health and safety issues, so what is it? It’s an app that needed the help of electronic musicians Underworld, and the idea of it is that it picks a music playlist depending upon the style of your driving.

Together Underwold and Volkswagen worked in unison to help collaborate and launch this app in time to celebrate the new release of the Golf GTI’s seventh generation. The app is quite magnificent, it connects to your car using a built in accelerometer to analyse a variety of factors such as your braking inputs, engine revs, steering and speed as well as several other factors. The urgency of all these factors indicated to the app which song it should play which ranges from Electronica to rather more relaxing tracks.

Ever since the invention of the in car stereo in around the 1930s music has been a massive part of the whole driving experience. Music directly correlates with the way you drive, so this app could potentially be a safety measure in tackling statistics but currently it’s not quite seen that way as Volkswagen are unable to release the app due to safety reasons.

The aims are high however and both Volkswagen and Underworld are setting their sights at being able to release this to the public at some point, they have had a few positive results from their experimental tests as it appears to arouse and control various different emotions of the driver causing them to drive differently which I suppose on the other hand is also a dangerous game to be playing for VW so they need to be getting it right!