A critical tech piece in Cupra’s Australian rollout won’t arrive until at least 2025
Cupra Australia concedes it will not match the likes of Tesla in offering connected services until at least 2025.
The fledgling Spanish auto brand already offers a full suite of connected services globally, facilitating over-the-air vehicle updates, safety features, driving analytics and vehicle information for owners via a smartphone app.
However, the technology has been put on ice for Australia because of ‘back-end’ technical challenges and localisation, says the Volkswagen Group brand.
Speaking at this week’s launch of the new Cupra Born electric hatch, Cupra Australia head of product and planning, Jeff Schafer, said connected services were still time off for Aussies.
Cupra Born
“I wouldn’t expect it in the next 12 months. I wouldn’t want to speculate but I think it could happen in 2025,” he said.
“The car does everything we want it to in terms of the drive experience and the expectations as an EV – range, charging speed and price. We’ve met all those targets and we’ll look to build on that in the future.”
Cupra isn’t alone with the delay. In fact, within the broader Volkswagen Group Australia stable, only Audi offers some type of connected service functionality.
For an EV like the Born, the tech is particularly handy, notifying owners remotely via their smartphone if there has been an issue with charging or simply indicating the status of their battery before a longer journey.
“There’s work that has to be done to activate those services in Australia, and we’re currently looking at that now. It’s not so much the SIM connectivity, if that’s the way to describe it with a telco, it’s probably more the backend server systems,” Schafer explained.
“There is localisation that’s required to activate connectivity. There’s also things we need to look at in terms of information flow and privacy, those sorts of things.
“There are a few things that would be able to be turned on, though we’d need to look at it feature by feature. Over-the-air updates is an obvious one; for now my expectation is that when the customer brings the vehicle into a dealership, those updates will take place at no cost to them.
“I’ll be interested to see what they do. There sometimes can be improvements in efficiency. There might be functions that can be updated at a later time, but I don’t want to speculate until they come.”
Whether connected services become available in Australia by the time the Cupra Terramar, Tavascan and Raval SUVs arrive here remains to be seen.
Watch this space for our first full review of the Born EV next Thursday (May 4).
Cupra Born
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Keyword: Volkswagen Group connected services still 18 months away