Volkswagen showed off its e-Golf Touch at CES Tuesday, touting it as the world’s first compact EV with gesture control functionality.
Building on the Golf R Touch concept that was shown at CES a year ago, the e-Golf Touch shows off an evolution of the company’s Modular Infotainment Toolkit (MIB) featuring early series-production gesture control.
At the center of the new MIB system is a 9.2-inch, high-resolution screen with user-configurable tiles for up to ten onboard functions.
Laid out with a primary tile on the left and two smaller tiles on the right, allowing three functions of the driver’s choosing to be displayed simultaneously. The main area can also be resized to fill the entire screen, allowing applications such as onboard navigation or Android Auto/CarPlay to take full advantage of the available real estate.
The e-Golf Touch also acts as a tech demonstrator for a host of additional convenience features the company plans to bring to production in the coming years, such as wireless charging in the rear armrests for passengers, USB Type C high-speed data and advanced charging and keyword-activated voice recognition.
One particularly trick feature highlighted here is electronic voice amplification. While this sounds like a feature designed to improve phone conversations, it’s actually far more clever than that. The system uses the e-Golf Touch’s hands-free microphones to amplify passengers’ voices in the cabin slightly, improving conversational clarity within the car itself. The system adjusts on-the-fly to account for vehicle speed and the volume of in-car entertainment functions to keep the voice amplification from overpowering desired audio sources.
Other enhancements to VW’s MIB and Car-Net app are also present, many of which should trickle down to subsequent generations of the infotainment platform across the VW lineup in the coming model years.
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