How Car Companies Are Trying to Win Back Millennials

BELMONT, Calif.—"Smile!" says Korina Loumidi, snapping a selfie of the two of us on her iPhone. In the past hour, I've wandered through a Silicon Valley office building with all the trappings of one of the hot tech companies in the neighborhood: Google, Facebook, Apple. I've seen whiteboard walls scribbled on with marker, pool tables and ping-pong tables, a cluster of 3D printers, and an Xbox-equipped TV. Each room throngs with young employees, who like Loumidi are mostly in their late 20s, exhaling the entrepreneurial energy that hangs in the Northern Californian air.

Only I'm not at a tech company—and certainly not one that was recently a scrappy startup. I'm at a research outpost of Volkswagen, the 77-year-old German car company, and the iPhone on which Loumidi has just snapped our selfie is mounted to the dashboard of an "iBeetle," a new VW model that was designed in collaboration with Apple. The iBeetle app she's demonstrating—which, on top of a specialized selfie feature, integrates with the owner's Spotify, Facebook, and Twitter accounts—represents the latest attempt of a major car company to win back the attention of the next generation of would-be car buyers, many of whom are far more interested in the specs of the next iPhone than those of the next VW.