VW partners with Waze to help drivers find great roads
It's only available in the UK for now, but it's a pretty clever idea.
Good driving roads are not exactly easy to find -- if they were, they'd be too crowded to enjoy. But Volkswagen and Waze want to make it a little easier for enthusiasts in the UK.
Volkswagen announced today that it has partnered with Waze, one of the public's favorite navigation apps, to help drivers find good driving roads in the UK. Called "GTI Superdrives," the app allows anyone -- not just VW drivers -- find a bit of excitement near their current driving route.
The routes will be available during the summer months. If drivers come within 12 miles of a GTI Superdrives road, the app will show a little GTI badge, which users can click on to be rerouted to that road. You can also hunt them down later in the event you fancy making a road trip out of it. Right now, Waze has identified 10 such roads in the UK.
Waze crunched its road data to come up with the routes. It prioritized roads with engaging corners that were relatively close to general points of interest. But despite being near other tourist attractions, Waze made sure to look for roads that were low on traffic and had a low number of incident reports. It's not much of a fun drive if you end up in a fender-bender, after all. It's not available in the US, but hopefully that changes -- although Waze will have to pore over a much larger map to find gems in the States.
The app gets its name from one of Volkswagen's most revered badges. The GTI badge has been applied to three vehicles in the UK -- the Golf, the Polo and the Up. Here in the US, we only get the Golf GTI, a five-door hatchback that puts out 220 horsepower and 258 pound-feet of torque. It also has the best plaid seats in the entire auto industry.
