On behalf of and in close cooperation with VW, Valtech Mobility has developed an adapter solution for the Ford Tourneo Connect, which is built on the VW Caddy basis as part of the Ford-Volkswagen Alliance. This adapter solution has been establishing communication between the VW and Ford backend since 2022, enabling Ford end customers to use the ‘Ford PassApp’.
Among other things, the Ford PassApp can be used to activate the auxiliary heating, view vehicle data or lock the vehicle.
The challenge
Both backend structures and the underlying business processes are very different. The biggest challenge in implementing the adapter solution was therefore to translate the different communication mechanisms and data formats and to harmonize the business processes of the two brands. In addition, Ford’s backends and mobile app are constantly evolving, which requires continuous adjustments.
Our share
Valtech Mobility is responsible for the development and deployment of the adapter solution. In order to ensure the continuous satisfaction of the end customer, the 3rd-level support provided by Valtech Mobility also ensures that any problems that arise are solved quickly.
After back-end testing, further end-to-end tests are carried out on real vehicles in Wolfsburg. With the 2024 model year, the product range has been expanded to include a plug-in hybrid version of the Ford Tourneo Connect, for which Valtech Mobility has implemented further exciting features in the adapter solution, such as remote battery charging to control charging processes or view important information such as the charge status and remaining range.
Technology
Technologically, the Cloud-2-Cloud adapter is based on Java and SpringBoot. An asynchronous communication solution based on Kafka is used for internal communication between the individual components of the adapter solution.
Outlook
We are very pleased that VW has also commissioned us with our Cloud-2-Cloud adapter solution for the 2026 model year. The objective is a backend extension for the new model generation.
