Here's a big dump from Volkswagen: http://media.vw.com/release/1032/

In short, VW is doing something a bit interesting and a bit annoying. The interesting bit is that they've providing a variety of smartphone-based remote services for your car, stuff like "where am I parked" and "turn on the AC". Tesla does all this stuff, and others probably do as well, but VW is about to roll it out in a big way.

They're also supporting Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, although it sounds like those are "yeah, that too" features rather than front-and-center. They're really pushing their homebrew stuff like "2.5D navigation" and "jukebox" functionality. Yawn, but if you want the bigger screen, you're paying for all that extra stuff.

But wait, "Customers purchasing new Volkswagen models equipped with VW Car-Net will receive a no-charge trial for six months after purchase. To extend the benefits of this connectivity system, customers can choose from a number of VW Car-Net payment options: 1 year, for $199; 2 years for $378; 3 years for $540; or, month-to-month, for $17.99."

So, yeah, $15-18/month, depending on whether you pay in advance or not, to have a bunch of stuff you maybe don't care about, just so you can have Android Auto, which has zero ongoing costs to VW to support since it's just a fancy version of VNC screen scraping.

Color me irked. The whole idea behind Android Auto and Apple CarPlay is that they're supposed to get the car out of the being-smart business and leave that to the phone.