LOS ANGELES, CALIF.—On Thursday at the LA Auto Show, Volvo announced a new connected car app that aims to free users from having to deal with pesky things like taking the car to the gas station or car wash. It's called Volvo Concierge Services, and it's a pilot program in the Bay Area that will allow S90 and XC90 owners to get their cars refueled, serviced, or valeted from their smartphones.

We spoke to Volvo US CEO Lex Kersemakers to find out more about the idea:

We have a number of important missions, but one of them is to make life less complicated—for our customers, not for ourselves. We want to reach a point where our customers never need to fill up their car again, or drive to the car wash themselves. We have the technology, so we realized we could create a digital key which gives a vendor temporary access to a car. We've created a secure open platform, with secure vendors to see how we can extend the level of convenience for our customers. It uses preselected vendors in your area, you send them a digital key, they come pick up the car, fill it up, return it, and you get billed digitally. It sounds very easy, but there's a lot of technology, if not a lot of lawyers involved.

Volvo is taking advantage of its new Scalable Product Architecture vehicle platform (that's used by the XC90 and S90) to try out something that until now has been the preserve of discussions around autonomous cars of the future—freeing owners from some of the day-to-day grind of car maintenance. Proponents of autonomous tech often refer to the idea of one's car going off and parking or refueling itself while the owner is busy getting on with their life, and this is (sort of) the first step along that path—although for now actual humans are involved in the process.

Right now Volvo is looking for 300 S90 or XC90 customers in the Bay Area to join the program before evaluating it for a possible rollout nationwide in the future. "It's a trial. We need to see how the customers react to the vendors and how the payment system works," Kersemakers explained to me. "Ideas are brilliant, and there's often lots of PR talk around ideas [in the car industry], but in the end it's no use if the substance isn't good enough."

The service provides a one-time-use digital key, which is location and time-specific, that gets sent to the authorized provider like Filld (a Mountain View-based startup that delivers gas to drivers) to access the vehicle. Once the specific service request has been completed, the car is locked and the digital key expires. And the car can either be returned to where the customer left it or delivered to a completely new location.

If you're an XC90 or S90 owner in or around San Francisco or Silicon Valley, and this idea sounds intriguing to you (and it does to us), you can find out how to enroll from your local Volvo dealership.