VW Responds To Facebook Fan Comment By Building A Smart Stroller

In April, Volkswagen Netherlands posted an ad on Facebook featuring VW owners who had great expectations from their personal belongings and who wondered why other items, such as strollers, bikes, gerbil cages, and toy doors, don’t have the same advanced features that a VW car does.

One of the most memorable of the VW owners in the ad was a mother who couldn’t understand why baby stroller manufacturers don’t equip their products with an automatic braking system. As a response to the ad, a VW fan addressed the question in a Facebook comment: “Am I crazy, or is a stroller that brakes a really good idea?”

Amazingly, this comment sparked VW to start building a “futuristic” baby stroller based on technology that the automaker uses in its cars. Volkswagen certainly took the idea all the way, as its “smart stroller” is not only capable of automatically braking when it anticipates an impending collision with another object, but the stroller also has distance-keeping abilities. To make this possible, VW used the adaptive cruise control sensor from the Golf that allows the car to keep a precise distance from the vehicle in front of it. When the other car accelerates, the car with the sensor speeds up too, and when the other car brakes, the one behind it brakes as well. Additionally, VW built in technology that allows the baby stroller to automatically follow a person using a remote GPS device.

Adding these advanced capabilities to a stroller could potentially be no more than a publicity stunt, however, is it possible that there are some useful ideas there too? It remains to be seen whether or not VW’s invention progresses past the marketing stunt stage. Regardless, the fact that the automaker actually made a prototype of a smart stroller based on a Facebook comment from a VW fan is incredible, and the entertaining video below shows some comical footage of the stroller in action.