Volvo In-Car Delivery will save you a good deal of time this holiday season
What's better than having packages delivered to the safety of your own trunk while you're stuck in the office?
Everybody loves the jovial attitude that seems to arrive alongside the holiday season each year, but nobody loves having to slog through a veritable wasteland of shopping malls and the traffic that comes with it -- if you can even get the time off work to do so. Volvo owners in Gothenburg, Sweden, won't have to worry about that, though, because the automaker has devised a simple system that will save them from having to deal with the less savory parts of the season.
Volvo In-Car Delivery is a straightforward system with a name to match. Simply put, it allows deliverables to go directly from a courier to your car's trunk, and you don't have to be present for any step of it. Just order something from a retailer, select the Volvo In-Car Delivery option and wait for a notification confirming the drop-off.
The system works using a series of one-time keys. The courier in charge of your package will head to your car's location using GPS, and once there, he or she will use a one-time encoded key to access the trunk. After placing the items inside the car and closing the trunk, it will no longer be accessible to the courier. The owner then receives a notification, and the deal is done.
Sadly, this is only available in Gothenburg at the moment, and owners must subscribe to Volvo On Call, the automaker's connected smartphone app. However, after a successful pilot program and a subsequent partnership with varying retailers and logistics companies, Volvo hopes to roll this program out to more Swedish towns, followed hopefully by other countries.