FCA in Auburn Hills has launched its Uconnect Market in-vehicle platform, which will allow users to order and pay for food, find gas stations, save money on fuel purchases, and make dinner reservations from their vehicles.
“Our customers live busy lives, and our goal with the Uconnect platform is to provide an advanced portfolio of services to make their daily drive more convenient, productive, and enjoyable,” says Alan D’Agostini, global head of connected services at FCA. “This is why we are launching Uconnect Market, as we continue to ramp-up our connectivity efforts around the world with the goal of having all new FCA vehicles connected by 2022.”
Uconnect Market services will include Wallet, through which users can enroll a credit card; Service, where users will can access national Mopar service offers, locate a Mopar service center, and schedule service appointments; Fuel, where users can view a list of nearby gas stations and authorize a fuel pump charge at participating Shell stations by using the Shell Pay and Save program; Food, through which Yelp displays a list of nearby restaurants and users can make reservations; and Parking, where users can book and pay for parking at thousands of garages across North America through ParkWhiz.
The platform was developed in partnership with Seattle’s Xevo, which was recently acquired by Lear Corp. It will deploy in the second half of 2019 through an over-the-air update for model year 2019 and 2020 Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram brand vehicles equipped with connected services and the latest generation of 8.4-inch touchscreens. It will continue as a carryover feature for future models equipped with the screen.
The launch follows the recent FCA announcement of a new in-vehicle ecosystem that uses HARMAN through Samsung as well as Google Technologies. The new system will manage in-vehicle and additional data using an architecture based on the HARMAN Ignite cloud-based platform. It will be powered by Android.
The components of the new ecosystem will start to rollout in phases during the second half of 2019. FCA’s goal is to have all vehicles connected by 2022.
Uconnect was launched in 2003 and is the connected vehicle platform built into Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram, and FIAT vehicles.
