Surprise ! workers pay the price for the 30 billion they spunked on fines and compensation for cheating diesel emissions.
I know this is more about switching from ICE to electric, but this is kinda hilarious
Feedback about the company’s new capacitive multifunction steering wheel was so overwhelmingly negative that last year, Schaffer promised to ditch the design. Meanwhile, much of the range—both electric and gas-powered—is saddled with temperature and volume controls that are touch-sensitive but not backlit, making them all but impossible to use at night.
It’s not that they didn’t know it wasn’t very good. But it was a money saver, and they thought people would accept it because “modern”.
Both of those things have been acknowledged and will be changed. Cars have very long design cycles, though.
The ID.7 has the new sliders as does the facelift of the ID.4.
Yes, there’s other problems, but this one is already on the way out.
Same will happen to other German car manufacturers. This is what happens if lobbyists and corrupt politicians wank each other off behind closed doors. No incentives to go with the times and trying to squeeze out as much money short term as possible
BS, that’s what happens with shit management. They gambled all in with EVs and it failed big time, because nobody wants them. They also gambled all in with touch and screwed their base over and also they pulled everything out of the cars that made them good cars - and also “boring”.
Their problem isn’t investing in EVs. Their problem is that their EVs are shit and also expensive so, obviously, no one will buy them. Besides, EV sales are growing more and more each year. I don’t know where you’ve been living dude
It’s probably not just because ev. Golf has become a high end brand even before that. Not really a peoples car if parts cost a lot.
More expensive and less reliable.
I wonder how their management expected increase in sales. Maybe they trusted Joe’s chart.
Yeah, even back when I liked VW, I understood the car itself might be priced in my range, but the parts cost similar to BMW parts, where there’s certainly some enthusiast gouging going on.
And then the emissions scandal came out when shit like that was getting more important to me.
A friend of a friend was offered a general counsel position at VW. They told him something like “the hours are good unless there’s a crisis”. Their timing was bad though because while he was still thinking it over, news broke of another layer to their emissions scandal which would have kept him much busier than expected. And they knew that was coming but couldn’t say, “we need more lawyers to deal with this coming crisis” but had to instead act as if it’s just a normal hire with normal hours. Has much changed from how they were run in the 1930s?
How much have they spend on dieselgate?
Funny how job incomes don’t scale similarly when brands become “competitive”
No one wanted touch buttons.
Also, a 4-cylinder engine for atlas is a joke.
Imagine that. Get a reputation for cars that are precisely engineered to have expensive parts fail shortly after warranty expiration, and cement that with a brand-wide emissions cheating scandal, and then wonder why no one trusts you.
Boomers only bought your air-cooled offerings because they were cheap. You got no brand goodwill out of the deal.
brand-wide emissions cheating scandal
To be fair, didn’t it eventually come out that pretty much everyone was cheating? VW just got caught first.
At least in North America I think they were the only brand selling passenger vehicles diesel engines.
To be fair, didn’t it eventually come out that pretty much everyone was cheating? VW just got caught first.
Which other manufacturers were cheating?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
Check the “Other manufacturers” heading.
Basically all of them.
But this is what happen when you have rules set by people that think they can ignore physical laws and somehow make it work.
To be fair, their reputation for having expensive parts fail right after the odometer ticked past the number on the warranty was earned long before dieselgate.
Dieselgate really worked out for me. The car hadn’t started to break down yet and we were just starting to need a minivan when it all came out.
To be even fairer, having such overly-strict emissions standards for diesels was a bad idea to begin with. Destroying diesels and forcing everyone into gasoline cars instead saved a little bit of pollutants like soot, NOx, and SOx, sure, but came at the expense of much lower efficiency/higher greenhouse gas emissions.
The worst part is that biodiesel burns much cleaner than dino-diesel, but isn’t compatible with the fancy injection systems and emissions equipment on “clean diesel” engines. If we had let them keep building the same circa-2000 engine tech, we could’ve cleaned up the whole fleet at once simply by switching out the fuel (while still keeping the same high efficiency and reducing GHG emissions to net-zero because biodiesel is part of the short-term carbon cycle instead of the long-term one), but now we can’t because all the new engines (at least, the few remaining on the market in trucks but not small cars) break if you use more than 10% or so biodiesel in them.
That was their identity that made them a high volume seller. It was simple and it was clear what their market position was. The line extensions into higher end never worked and required a new brand for these higher level offerings in the end. They never learned from this lesson. Brand identity can win the day but also lose it all for you when you try to shift from a popular product.
A part of the issue is younger generations don’t necessarily know what goes on behind the scenes of their phones or laptops. They are shiny disposable products and this extends to their cars. If the product looks like the similar tech they interface with daily on their phones, it’s good for them. They won’t have the experience of simpler complex cars that broke down constantly from one thing or another or functions that just don’t work period because they cost way to much to fix.
As much as I think vehicles should be made less complex and easier to service it might not be marketable beyond farmers or trades that do their own work on these things. Shiny and the latest tech is sexy and where sales are driven from.
The line extensions into higher end never worked and required a new brand for these higher level offerings in the end. They never learned from this lesson. Brand identity can win the day but also lose it all for you when you try to shift from a popular product.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that VW didn’t understand they needed a luxury brand for higher-end cars? 'Cause they’ve got Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini and Bentley…
Yes but at first they tried to release the high end product under the VW brand. The Phaeton was one of the best engineered vehicles failures ever produced as many did not want to buy a higher end car with the VW economy badge on it.
Brand does count for a lot even when a lower economy brand has a superior made product, the masses cannot always move beyond that. I’m sure there are many that loved that VW Phaeton and were happy for owning it, but commercially it didn’t fit the brand expectations on the market in the early 2000s.
The Phaeton was a weird aberration that I agree should’ve been a different brand, but it definitely wasn’t “at first.” Audi had been owned by VW for decades before the Phaeton came out.
Well that’s a more blatant recent model. Paying $70,000 for a VW wasn’t something many would even consider in the early 2000s and yes Audi existed so it was a really odd double down on line extension of the VW line.
The earlier creep was from the original identity of VW with the it may be ugly but it gets you there marketing. For it’s time was a great way to describe the brand and the place in the market. Think of the older VW buses, rabbits, Transporters, etc. Not beautiful in relation to cars of their day but bloody practical.
Due to markets and human conditioning they weren’t going to show up and copy Ford or GM designs and expect to have a chance at taking market share. Their positioning in the lower end of the market made it their’s for a long time like the upstart Japanese.
They all came in with smaller, economical to run cars and the big 3 struggled to compete. And when the big 3 tried, they were terrible at it for quite a while. The mini Mustang comes to mind along wth the Monza and the Pinto. Cult vehicles but not market darlings. Cadillac went down market with Chevy products rebranded at Cadillac and they sold terribly. A great way to hurt a upmarket brand.
At least AMC tried different things due to the success of their Jeep brand with luxury 4x4s and 4x4 cars. New markets at the time but they were always hurting for funding. They only survived for so long due to the Jeep brand.
Now all the brands overlap with models and offerings a great deal more but there are still things they are all respectively good at. Full size trucks are mostly a Big 3 market despite excellent product from Toyota. There’s a large segment of the US population that doesn’t consider Toyota products to be real trucks despite many saying they are far better quality. The list goes on…
Dacia sales keep increasing every year. This does show there is an increasing demand for simple cars.
Isn’t just a rebrand cars?
Their duster model is a copy of Renault Duster. They didn’t even bother to change the name.
I had never heard of Renault Duster before (nor seen one), so I looked it up. The Renault Duster is apparently a Dacia Duster with mostly cosmetic changes, for sale outside the eu, typically released later than the Dacia Duster is released in the eu. So it’s the same car, but different brand badges + cosmetics depending on the country were it’s sold. They are so similar, that I’d just call it the same car, not a copy.
Interesting, I thought it’s the other way around.
A part of the issue is younger generations don’t necessarily know what goes on behind the scenes of their phones or laptops.
Damned millennials. Forcing VW to lower quality and cheat emissions like that.
Shiny and the latest tech is sexy and where sales are driven from.
How’s that working out for ol’ veedub?
Sounds like management problem, not an engineering one, but management doesn’t have to pay: everybody else does. Typical.
Fuck around and find out
I can’t help but wonder how much of this is still fallout from “DieselGate”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
Good Fuck VW. My mom had an 86 Jetta and that thing was the biggest piece of junk on the road. and every time she took it to the dealer to get it fixed they would do the cheapest thing possible. I ended up taking to my local mechanic who fixed it properly for her.
And also be wary of any good deals on some newer model VW’s. They got the court case cleared up where a bunch of cars got damaged by sea water and those vehicles which were supposed to have been sold as scrap are now on the road.
