The German car giant Volkswagen Group has taken an unexpected and quite controversial move that has angered thousands of technology enthusiasts around the world. The car company has quietly cut off unofficial access to its CarNet API interface for the We Connect service. This software solution has served as a "bridge" for car owners for years, through which they integrated their vehicles into smart home and intelligent energy management systems.
The average driver probably won't even know about the change, as the factory applications of the Volkswagen, Audi, Skoda and Cupra brands continue to function without fail. For people betting on deep automation, however, this decision came like a bolt from the blue. The first to feel the blow were users of the popular Home Assistant platform and the openWB smart charging system. At the end of last month, external applications suddenly lost connection to the German giant's cloud database, leaving thousands of smart homes "blind" to what was happening with the car in the garage.
The problem is far from cosmetic, as the independent community of software developers had created an ecosystem with much broader horizons than those that the conservative manufacturer officially offers. Through these integrations, electric vehicle owners managed the charging process extremely finely – drawing electricity only during the hours with the cheapest night tariff or capturing excess green energy from their own photovoltaics on the roof. From smart notifications in case of anomalies in the network, through automatic air conditioning of the cabin based on the weather forecast, to triggering home scenarios when approaching the address – the possibilities were practically unlimited.
The case is especially painful for owners of electric vehicles. When Home Assistant coordinated data from the car's battery, home solar power plant and dynamic tariffs from energy distribution companies, the car was charged completely free of charge or for pennies, without the driver even thinking about it. Now this autonomy has been brutally cut off.
The Volkswagen Group headquarters in Wolfsburg are keeping a complete silence on the subject. The only hesitant comment came from Skoda's European division, where they justified the software reconfiguration with a transition to a new, official data sharing model. In practice, however, this smacks of preparing for a paid licensing business model, in which external services will have to pay to partner with the concern's cars.
After the wave of discontent in the Internet forums, the Czech brand tried to cover up the situation with the promise that it was looking for a balanced solution that would preserve “some basic functions”, without jeopardizing the security and cybersecurity of the cars. However, it was this vague definition that activated the red lights among digital enthusiasts. Consumers are massively afraid that we are entering an era in which you buy the car physically, but its digital soul remains locked behind subscription walls and corporate padlocks.
For Volkswagen, this move could play the role of a Trojan horse in terms of image. It was precisely technologically literate buyers who were the biggest advocates of the so-called “software-defined vehicles” and were the first to advertise the benefits of the digital evolution. Now that their favorite toy is crippled, many of these loyal customers will seriously consider whether their next car will again be from the German concern's family.