Do you know that the well known Volkswagen Group churns out a whopping five million vehicles world over and every year European auto freaks pick up around 130,000 cars from Autostadt in order to save €450 on delivery costs? Every day around 700 buyers turn up at Volkswagen's Autostadt theme park to get their favorite Volkswagen car.

Remember that Autostadt is Germany's second most-visited theme park and ensuring that the right car reaches the right person at the right time is a humungous task at this park because innumerable tasks need to be performed before delivery and in order to cure this headache the company moved to RFID.

The company makes use of active RFID tags for tracking more than ten thousand vehicles standing in the parking lots. This is being done in order to ensure that its cars meet the predelivery tasks and quality controls in the prescribed manner. The technology was implemented in the year 2000 and within a year the company recovered its investment through higher productivity and savings in labor.

Identec Solutions Intelligent Long Range (ILR) wireless technology was used for this purpose and their i-Q8 tags are hung on car's rear view mirror in a plastic casing and equipped with a small LED which flashes on coming in within the reader range. With power usage being minimal these tags can last for at least a period of six years.

The system works in the following manner:

After a car is unloaded from a truck or train bringing in vehicles from plants around the world-or, in the case of a Golf, Bora, Jetta or Tuoron model, after it arrives straight from the adjacent factory-a worker drives the car to the entrance to one of Volkswagen's three holding lots. The driver then presents a lot attendant with a piece of paper detailing the car's ID number and the various predelivery tasks that must be performed.

Each car goes through an average of four to five predelivery stations specified via bar-coded instructions printed on the form. The attendant scans the bar-coded data into the system and writes it to an RFID tag, which is hung on the car's rear-view mirror. The driver is assigned a row in which to park the car, rear first. Individual parking spaces are not numbered. After dropping the car off, he walks to a middle lane and is picked up by a holding-lot shuttle bus.

Up to three days before an owner is scheduled to pick up his or her car, a VW worker retrieves it from the lot to begin predelivery tasks. The car's ID number is sent via a wireless LAN to an on-board computer mounted in a shuttle bus in the holding lot. The onboard computer tells the bus's driver and i-PORT, connected to the onboard computer via a cable, which ID numbers to search for in specific rows. Atop of the bus, two i-PORT antennas extend like long, comical ears from either side of the windshield. As the bus drives past the parked cars, the interrogator reads their tags.

The system is calibrated so the driver has time to brake and stop just in front of the car to be retrieved. At that point, a worker jumps from the van, gets in the car (all keys are left in the vehicles) and drives the car to the manned gate of the holding lot, where an attendant reads the tag. Only at this point does the driver learn which of the 20 predelivery stations the car will go to first.

When the car is ready for delivery, it is driven to an ILR-enabled gate, where the dimensions of the wheelbase are read from the tag. This information is used to adjust the tracks automatically so the car can be loaded onto a transporting platform after the gate opens. The vehicle is conveyed to a 48-meter-high glass tower that holds 400 cars for storage and viewing by Autostadt visitors. The cars are retrieved from the tower without the help of drivers. Everything is automated and computerized, including the elevators that shuttle the cars up and down. RFID tags stay in the cars but are used only to tell the automated transport system details about the car before it goes into the system, and when it exits the transporting platform.

Volkswagen has certainly benefited from RFID and has improved its vehicle delivery by around four times. It has experienced simplification of its predelivery process and the pen and paper method has been done away with. Overall the company has gained several things such as improved quality control, productivity and labor savings. It also recovered its investment in RFID within a year and has also freed up its space at its holding lot by around twenty percent.

It looks like technologies like RFID have the power to make our lives simpler and its implementation at Volkswagen has proven that fact.