> The proximity of the name change to April Fool’s Day initially raised suspicions that it was just a joke. But VW insists that it’s a real thing, so here we are.
> "The company was apparently planning to make the announcement at the end of April but accidentally published a press release about the name change early Monday afternoon, which was first spotted by CNBC before it was taken down. The proximity of the name change to April Fool’s Day initially raised suspicions that it was just a joke. But VW insists that it’s a real thing, so here we are."
Sounds to me like a publicity stunt -- they "accidentally published" a press release a month early? Sorry, that doesn't happen.
Seems like trying to generate buzz on social media, then they'll quietly "decide" not to change the name after all, but people associating VW with electric cars more so -- mission accomplished.
No, but I find it very hard to believe that a gigantic company had a press release finalized and sitting in a CMS a month in advance, just waiting for time to pass.
(Source: have worked in 3 large public companies and seen how these things come down to the wire with approvals from PR, Marketing, IR, Legal, Country Leadership, Corporate, etc...)
Huh, why does the name change have to be announced 2-3 days before in your world? They would need to send new stationery and signage to dealers, so the chatter would start in the coming week or 2 anyway... Why not pre-empt that with a press release.
Does it bother you when Germans say "zis"? German has no "th" sound, so "zis" is what they start with before they practice. It's similarly grating to Germans to hear their language mispronounced by others.
And yet, English has an "f" sound. German has an extremely consistent spelling and essentially all "v"s are pronounced as "f". We share (the latin) alphabet, and English has absolutely no authority, given how inconsistent it is.
Given that, I will say the voiced "V" when speaking English and the unvoiced, as necessary, speaking German.
> It's similarly grating to Germans to hear their language mispronounced by others.
Americans are generally very tolerant and patient with non-native speakers butchering proper english. So no, it's not nearly as grating to an American to hear people mispronounce english words than it might be for Germans.
No one cares what Germans think about people abusing their language. I personally have zero issues with accents or mispronunciations here and there by non-native speakers. That smells of "fear of the other" to me and taking easy potshots at people I consider my full equal isn't cool. If I feel a little "anger" then that's a fallacy in me not in their pronunciation. As long as I can understand we're good otherwise we'll work it out someway or other.
It just bothers the historical linguistics nerd in me that all the other Germanic languages (other than Icelandic) lost the beautiful Thorn and Edh sounds consonants :-)
I've always found it interesting that the German approximation is "z" here when it could be "t" or "d", since that is what "th" sounds turned into in Old Franconian.
'bother' me? No, not at all, the sounds are close enough I get the meaning, mostly from context.
I am not sure why there should be an emotional factor here, as expecting everybody to conform to some pronunciation ideal they have no experience with is arrogant, to say the least.
Well you claimed that Americans are pronouncing it "perfectly correctly," and Germans might disagree. It's a German word which has been Americanized. The company mostly doesn't care, but there is a single correct pronunciation in their native language. Insisting you are correct mispronouncing a foreign word because the letters look a certain way is just hubris.
> there is a single correct pronunciation in their native language
But see, that's the point. We're not speaking German when we use a borrowed word in English. It's no longer a purely German word, despite its origins, just as "xylophone" isn't a mispronounced Greek word, nor "Handy" a misused and miscapitalized English word.
I would follow your logic if the english pronunciation of the word Volkswagen was actually phonetically consistent. But while "Volks" is pronounced in an english way, isn't the word "wagen" pronounced in a weird German way?
"Wagen" on its own would probably be pronounced like way-gen, if my english intuition is not fooling me. Instead it is pronounced like wuh-gen.
I don't really care about this either way but if you are bothered by something the weird mixture is.. a bit annoying.
Accent is an inevitable part of second language speakers. I've lived in US most of my life, but English is not my native language and I started learning it around the age of 5 and at the age of 25 after living here more than 20 years, I still have a distinct accent I can't get rid of. It's just the way things are, human brain seems to learn pronunciation differently when we're a child.
This same goes for English speakers too. I know how Volkswagen is supposed to be pronounced (I know some German) but that's not the way English speakers would say it.
I don't think there is anything to be bothered by any of this. This just adds to our diversity.
Vice versa, it's interesting to me why German speakers tend to approximate the pronunciation of e.g. "think" as "sink", rather than "fink" or "vink". There's even some British accents where it sounds more like "fink". English is hard :D
Sorry, but just noticed you were using an English-only term to describe the homeland of someone who doesn't live in your country. The correct term is Deutschland.
It is respectful to at least attempt to pronounce names from different cultures. In many cases, I totally understand it is difficult. In those cases, an attempt is great. In this case, the syllable F exists in Latin and I don't see why it.
I must say, I have seen many many times a lack of interest to even attempt to pronounce of even write a name properly. One example which comes to my mind is Ghandi instead of Gandhi.
To re-iterate my point, it's not about 'respect' (respect for whom, exactly and why?) it's about communication.
If I were trying to say the word 'Volkswagen' to a German speaking person, I would do my best to pronounce it in a way they would understand.
As most of the time I ever say the word 'Volkswagen' out loud it's to my fellow English speakers, pronouncing it in the expected English way seems way less pretentious and way more effective.
I'm going to avoid being snarky and point out this is merely the way you taught it. There is not hard and fast rule that says you have to do it this way.
Also, Vs are actually pretty consistent in English. Can't even think of a word with a V where the V doesn't sound like a V.
What's interesting here is that the exception proves the rule.
V is actually the only letter in English that is never silent.
Most other letters also have various possible renderings into pronunciation, especially the vowels—"i" for instance can end up being at least 5 different vowel sounds and also some consonant sounds.
So yes. As I pointed out, English is extremely irregular orthographically, in stark contrast to languages like German, French, or Italian, all of which have extremely reliable and simple pronunciation rules.
In practice, if a name has a common pronunciation within English, you show respect by using that pronunciation when speaking to native English speakers.
Otherwise you just cause confusion. The adapted names have their own history.
If you insist on saying København and not Copenhagen, you get to have a little pretentious discussion explaining what you meant to every person you talk to. Ditto for Folks-vagen.
> In practice, if a name has a common pronunciation within English, you show respect by using that pronunciation when speaking to native English speakers.
Here's how I read this. "We as an English speaking group will continue to not make an attempt to pronounce it right even if we can. Once we don't we will have a common pronunciation that doesn't fit the original one. Once it becomes common, we will get offended if it is not pronounced in the common way that we as a group chose to actively ignore in the first place. If the original speakers insist, we will call them pretentious."
> If the original speakers insist, we will call them pretentious."
Way to overreach way beyond what I originally said. If I was speaking to someone I knew was Dutch, of course I would (try to) say "København." Then they'd probably laugh at me and we'd agree to call it Copenhagen. :P
Or if I want to read your view in the worst possible way-- similar to how you've read mine-- "People who use the established pronunciation of a loanword or place in their native tongue are wrong. We should always seek to find where we are using words of foreign origin and correct them to be perfectly pronounced in their original tongue, even when this causes confusion and isn't helpful to people from the original place. Japanese gairaigo should be abolished and they should just say those words in the correct original English (or German or French).
And those damn Frenchmen should stop calling the place I live Californie dans les Etats Unis, which is nothing like how I say it, and should stop calling me 'Michel' which sounds a whole lot like the female version of my name"
I'd like to take a stock of how this conversation went.
1.0 (me) : "It is respectful to attempt pronunciation if
possible".
1.1 (you) : "There is a common English pronunciation. It's pretentious if you don't use the common pronunciation. Show respect to the English speaker!"
1.2 (me) : "The common pronunciation exists because of the lack of attempt in the first place. It's not pretentious. "
1.3 (you) : "It is established, we should use common pronunciation"
You turned the initial conversation about making an attempt to be kind and respectful towards non-English speakers into something else. Almost feels like victim blaming to me. Once again, to be clear - we should make an attempt. Just because there's an established pronunciation (or spelling) doesn't mean it is right. Overtime, established pronunciation can move towards the original pronunciation. The right pronunciation is what the speaker wants to have. You, me or the English society don't have any say in it. It doesn't matter if it is established or not. Going the extra mile in kindness helps; calling others pretentious because they ask you to empathise doesn't.
> you show respect by using that pronunciation when speaking TO NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS.
or
> If I was speaking to someone I knew was Dutch, of course I would (try to) say "København."
Because what you're accusing me of-- and the words you're putting in my mouth "There is a common English pronunciation. It's pretentious if you don't use the common pronunciation. Show respect to the English speaker!"-- make no sense in that context.
German is full of exonyms. All languages are full of exonyms and weird pronunciations of foreign words. It is OK.
I'm not sure if this is a joke I don't get but speaking about weird cultural mix-ups: Copenhagen is not related to the Netherlands. I'm actually glad that people are getting EU states all mixed up but we're not there yet, guys ;)
I know persons who are doing this in times. A example is a person I am knowing who say "Mexico" with Spanish accent. A first problem is this person is not a speaker of Spanish and so it is bothering on me for bad pronounsing and no interests in improvement and not in learning more Spanish. A second problem is it disruptes conversation when a person is slipping into different accent without reasoning. A third problem is it takes persons I am knowing who are not speaker of Spanish extra time for to process these remarks. I am not seeing any good reason. There exists also a difference between nation name, is fixed, and brand, for which the job is make friendly for a consumer.
Yah. It can also sometimes be difficult to distinguish between an attempt to use the native pronunciation out of respect vs. mockery. I know people that if I heard them saying "Me-hi-co" it would almost certainly be to exaggerate foreignness and to be racist.
> In many cases, it is unnecessary and only makes the speaker look foolish.
Comedic skits touch on this [1][2] and though a caricature, I think they capture the gist of how it's perceived when attempted.
I think it stems from a desire for "cultural wokeness" which is a good thing and has its place, but as you say when communication is the goal, speak the language of the receiver.
I found a YT video saying it's "wo er wo". Which suggests they have a hard time pronouncing it, which shouldn't come as a surprise given how different their phonemes are.
Approximating it, because you can't pronounce it is one thing. Not giving a shit, even though you do have the same word (i.e. folk) is another one.
But for a brand definitely not. It's the job of the brand creators to make sure that the name can be read and pronounced in the various target markets.
This is an unreasonable expectation. People should try but if they don't, there is no malice here.
There are many languages around the world and it is impossible to remember every nuance of how to pronounce things. Ghandi is common pronounciation even in Germany. The Japanese might pronounce it something else.
> Ghandi is common pronounciation even in Germany.
I don't think it is an unreasonable expectation to write the word "Gandhi" as "Gandhi". That's how he wrote the name, that's how he signed it and that's the actual spelling. I can understand the difficulty in pronunciation but getting the name right while typing it out is unforgivable in this century.
Also, learning to forgive is a rare virtue these days. Entitlement and expection creates conflict. Learn to forgive others and you'll have a better time with everyone else. No one who even spells it as Ghandi means any malice or offense. So, it is a matter of technicality. Let go.
I agree - learning to forgive is rare virtue. For example, I think we should also "learn to forgive" to people who point out that Gandhi is the right spelling. It's not meant as many malice of offence. So, it is a matter of technicality. Let go.
The worst part of English orthography is adopting the writing conventions of literally every other language in the world and then expecting people to pronounce the words "correctly." If you want English speakers to pronounce something a certain way, it should be written use our spelling system. There's no point in shaming people for not knowing literally every language. But that's basically the system we have now.
That "correctly" needs an extra pair of scare quotes. The spelling bee competition is, essentially, the "guess the mispronounced foreign word" competition. Pejerrey? "Pay-ray". Lol.
This is an interesting observation. As a non-native speaker I was surprised by how many German expressions are used in English (with the correct German spelling). Even when there is a perfect (or near perfect) English equivalent.
However, this is pretty different as VW is a brand name so you don't have much liberty in how you write it.
Toyota was toyoda in Japanese, but they changed the spelling to look better in English. It can be done. And why not? They change the names of cars all the time. Why not the brands too?
Because brands have a value. And probably VW doesn't really care that much if some people call them wolkswagen instead of folkswagen (even if they could pronounce the latter).
Also, I don't think FW would look better than VW ;). And well, Toyota didn't change their name to look better in English (or rather, written with the Latin alphabet). At least not according to wikipedia. Quite the contrary, it was about how it was written in Japanse:
"Vehicles were originally sold under the name "Toyoda" (トヨダ), from the family name of the company's founder, Kiichirō Toyoda.
[...]
In September 1936, the company ran a public competition to design a new logo. Of 27,000 entries, the winning entry was the three Japanese katakana letters for "Toyoda" in a circle. However, Rizaburo Toyoda, who had married into the family and was not born with that name, preferred "Toyota" (トヨタ) because it took eight brush strokes (a lucky number) to write in Japanese, was visually simpler (leaving off the diacritic at the end), and with a voiceless consonant instead of a voiced one (voiced consonants are considered to have a "murky" or "muddy" sound compared to voiceless consonants, which are "clear").
Since toyoda literally means "fertile rice paddies", changing the name also prevented the company from being associated with old-fashioned farming. The newly formed word was trademarked and the company was registered in August 1937 as the Toyota Motor Company.[31][32][33]"
Ei sink ju wud bi surpreist if Ei wud tok to ju leik sis.
(I think you would be surprised, if I would talk to you like this.)
German pronounced English. :)
"ju" would be pronounced the same as "you" when speaking.
And "Ei" would be just the same as "I".
"wud" = would
"leik" = like
"tok" = talk
"bi" = be
All of the above would sound exactly the same when spoken.
Nope. It's not about using similar phonemes instead of the actual ones a German would use. It's trying to pronounce the wrong word/name. The name doesn't start with a V but with an F. It's just written with a V. It's nothing Americans can't pronounce.
If you argued that you can't pronounce 'Wagen' as the Germans do ("'vaːɡn̩", according to Wikipedia), that would be a different thing. But we're not talking about that.
Indeed, the word, i.e. folk, you are not willing to pronounce happen to exist in English as well and can mean the same (or very similar) thing. "Volk" (i.e. "wolk") OTOH doesn't mean anything in either languages. (It does mean wolf in Russian, though ;) )
People's car or you could say "Folk's Wagon" (or maybe "Folks' Wagon"). Yeah, weird choice of words and won't exactly sound like it was German but close enough, kind of meaningful and nothing you couldn't pronounce. Just remember to write is as VolksWagen.
Pronunciation doesn't go like that but that is a big discussion for its own thread
Funny remark though while watching the F1 Netflix show, Schumacher said his name like SchumaKer , hence the Engish Pronunciation which goes to show that he adapted to the audience.
> Pronunciation doesn't go like that but that is a big discussion for its own thread
Honestly it kinda does. I wince every time I hear emoji pronounced like いmoji (where the e rhymes with tea) instead of えmoji (where the e rhymes with meh), or pluralize Japanese nouns (“emojis” “sushis”). That said, this is a me problem. People are going to pronounce words in whatever way makes sense to them, where the emphasis goes, how it is pronounced, which vowels get emphasized or contracted together will change over time. There is a reason we don’t all sound like Elizabethan-era Englishmen when we speak English.
Even proper nouns such as names get adapted. How many different variations and pronunciations are there for the name “John” in Europe?
Mate, that’s why I stated forthright that this is a me problem and made no bones about it.
The “e” is from 「絵」and “moji” from 「文字」, transliterated as 「えもじ」, “e” + “moji” gets you “picture message”. It was a stroke of luck that it was similar enough to emoticon to neatly fit into our existing lexicon and be understood at a glance by an English speaker, at least the gist of it. A picture message is a little bit different than an emote icon if you think about it because there’s many more pictures which are not emotes per se, but can be used within a message alongside the emoting emoji. :)
The odd thing I notice is how English speakers always want to put a stress in the middle of Japanese names (naRUto). Japanese pitch accent is different in different dialects but the standard one is always at the start.
If I were trying to say the word 'Volkswagen' to a German person, I would do my best to pronounce it in a way they would understand.
As most of the time I ever say the word 'Volkswagen' out loud it's to my fellow English speakers, pronouncing it in the expected English way seems way less pretentious and effective.
This is an issue I face from time to time when I'm (native German) in international calls and am talking about a German colleague ... I could pronounce properly German (while it's not too easy always for my mind to switch) or adapt to the way most others do (which often is English with an attempt to Germanize)
Luckily due to video conferencing software printing my name on my image, I don't have to do that for my name, as I had to do in phone conference times.
It has been adopted to a degree. Just like you don't need to say Paris as "Pari" in an imitation of the French pronunciation (which would probably sound rather affected and twee in English if you did)
Anyway, let's hope they make reliable electric vehicles (as their combustion engine cars have traditionally been) otherwise people may render it as Faultswagen
Typically the capital city has an English name, which is often not just pronounced differently but also spelt differently from the local name. But for almost every other town English speakers use the same spelling, or a transcription of it, and aim for something like the local pronunciation. So for France, there's "Paris" and "Strasbourg" and that's about it. For Germany, there's "Berlin" and "Munich" and that's about it. But for some reason loads of Italian towns have their own English name: Venice, Milan, Naples, Florence, Turin, ...
Whilst it's interesting to think about your points, they feel somewhat orthogonal to my point about the word being adopted into English (so it can have a pronunciation the way native speakers feel comfortable with, which can vary to a degree from the original unadopted word). Was it meant as some kind of rebuttal or merely an interesting observation? (eg with the Italian names)
Note as well that Turin and Milan are the names in the local
(regional) language.
Edit: And Munich is almost identical to Munichen which is the old form of München. Cologne could have been a better example (but it also comes directly from French, like Rome, Florence or Naples).
Standard French pronunciation of "Strasbourg" has an /r/ but no /g/. Of course it's a German name, really, but the Germans spell it a bit differently, and neither French nor Germans pronounce the second vowel in the way it is normally, I think, pronounced in English.
Good point about regional languages in Italy.
"Cologne" is a good example, though some people, including me, usually say "Köln" in English, though I wouldn't say "München", except in the name of the football team "Bayern München", which for some reason is usually called thus in English.
Do you mean then that English speakers write the name of every French city, including Paris and Strasbourg, as French speakers do and also pronounce them as French speakers would except for Paris and Strasbourg?
Edit: I had never thought about Strasbourg, really. I see now that the adoption of the French spelling in English is relatively recent and also Marseilles and Lyons used to be written differently.
Edit2: Dunkirk seems to be the main (only?) example where the French name is not used.
They most certainly did not want Americans pronouncing it in German when they came to the US after WWII. Hell, they called them Victory Wagon at first.
Some Americans have pronounced it "Voltswagen", not sure why.
I wonder if it would be less confusing to Germans if we used "Fow Vay" to pronounce the abbreviation. Instead of "Vee Double-You." I'm not being sarcastic, but I don't think a change to the correct pronunciation is likely.
Do you actually pronounce it like "double-you" (with 3 syllables) in that context?
I'm a native speaker from the US South, and hadn't realized this until I read your comment. For me, the "W" always gets shortened to "dub-you" in AWS (or "dubya" if I'm not being picky about it). Standalone, I might pronounce "W" more like "dub-a-you if I'm emphasizing it, but not usually.
Anyhow, thanks for pointing this out. I will also now forever think that "double-you" is ridiculous.
I’m a native speaker from the north and west US and it’s definitely “double-u”. A double-u S. In my experience only Southerners shorten it the way you describe.
No kidding! Do you even pronounce the "l" sound in "double" (and if so, dub-el or dub-ull or something else)?
It's always fascinating to be reminded that I'm still basically ear-blind to certain linguistic patterns (the "pen/pin" merger being one I still can't even hear as different, let alone say). For a long time, I falsely assumed that because I grew up watching the same TV shows as the rest of the country, and because I didn't speak with the same accent as my family members, that I didn't have an accent at all. Turns out I do - I just can't hear it.
Everyone I’ve been around says “dub-ull”. I moved from Michigan to Utah as an adult and pen/pin can be very close here, which I find annoying because I don’t want my kids to pick up the Utah accent... but of course they have.
I took Linguistics in college and my professor could tell where people were from in the US within a couple hundred miles by their accent. Anyone who thinks they don’t have an accent absolutely does. Except maybe Nebraskans — I read somewhere that they have the most neutral, “correct” American accent, though I don’t think it was a scientific source.
Nearly, but unless I'm speaking with family members / other people with thick southern accent, I try to keep the "u" sound present - though it's more like the French "u" than the "you" sound. So typically it sounds like 'ay-dub-yuez", with a short pause between the "yu" and "ez". It's the sound that would be in between "Suez" (like the canal) and "swez". Replacing the "yu" sound with the "ya", does indeed end up sounding like slightly elongated "yes".
How so? The Taycan (and eTron GT) is an excellent car; the ID4 is receiving okay reviews despite choosing a different space in the compromise space than other makers, and they have a large slate of upcoming cars that seem decent to great. I think that within 5 years, VW AG will be selling more electric cars than Tesla.
Make that 3. I'm not going to go out and buy their car, but I don't see how this is ridiculous in any way. 50 years from now, people may look back and think "yes, that was the moment that really marked their switch to EVs"
I think it's likely they're feeling that their EV product isn't compelling enough to stand out on its own, so they need to do something ridiculous to capture attention and hopefully gain market share in the EV market.
.com for example was only reserved today and is using a domain parking service. Things like this would have been prepared if it was a serious rebranding.
But Voltswaken, honstely if that isn't a joke it's sad. It is basically guaranteed to be a typo crisis. I can just say have fun, to all the banks and other companies doing business with it.
Not that surprising. If they were planning on doing a surprise name change at the end of April, registering the trademark a month early would have spoiled the surprise. Plus it wouldn't give any advantage. Voltswagen would be protected by their Volkswagen trademark, and trademarks don't even offer protection until you submit proof of you already using them in commerce. And you don't have to register trademarks to have common law protections in the US, and they aren't planning to use it in Germany.
I'm not certain but if they were serious there would be legal filings of some sort. I'm not an expert in trademarks and I understand that sometimes trademarks can be filed but held in confidence until a company is ready--Apple does this if I recall correctly.
Whois is also less than certain. Domain redirects to a generic parking site.
(IAAL but this is not legal advice, and I could be incorrect in certain aspects. Consult a licensed attorney for legal advice.)
With respect to the USPTO, I believe only patent applications can be filed confidentially. FCC applications can also be filed confidentially. But I believe trademark applications are published immediately upon filing, because the essence of a trademark is use in commerce. You don't need to file a trademark application with the USPTO to be protected by trademark law, but it is an important element of notice, which is relevant when determining certain aspects of infringement claims.
If it was, it's gotta be one of the good ones. Bordering on truth (still people are trying to work out whether it's real or prank), good media coverage, and even if called out – will only end up having a positive association with their electrification efforts.
From what I have seen VW had a sort of genuine reckoning with the whole diesel issue. They have reinvented themselves, shed cruft, cut all fuel vehicle development and completely devoted themselves to an electric future (vehicles, batteries, chargers). They have turned things around wholesale and are now producing amazing, relatively affordable electric vehicles (their new id.4 SUV will debut in the US for just a little more than a tricked out Honda CR-V, once you factor in the federal tax credit).
I was excited by Tesla but they remained expensive. Now feel like VW will have a chance to bring electric vehicles to a much larger group of people... a group I fit into and I can't wait.
So can I now go into a VW / Audi dealer in North America and buy an EV off a lot?
Because every time I look (and I've looked constantly since I traded my Jetta TDI for cash in dieselgate) I still can't. And they are issuing a new press release every few months promising mass production EVs next year.
Back in 2017/2018 when this all went down they actually removed all electrified cars from their lineup. Stopped making new Audi A3 e-Trons, removed the hybrid Jetta from their lineup, and only made about 500 outdated (several year old design) eGolfs with a small battery for all of the Canadian market with a year and a half waiting list to get in one. All the while trumpeting how committed they were to electrification and how this was the future. So, I bought a GM EV instead.
And, yep, I just went to the local VW dealer's website and they have only one car with an electric motor in it, the 2019 eGolf with a 35kWh battery. That's it and I know exactly how it would go down if I were to call the dealer and ask to test drive one.
And last I looked the id.3 isn't coming to North America and the id.4 is a "maybe next year" kind of deal and the electric van they've been promising since about 2015 is now projected for 2023 when I recall in previous press releases talk about it coming out several years ago.
I'm sorry, they're greenwashing, they're desperate, and they're trying to milk as much out of the ICE while they can while playing a PR game. People trash GM's EV efforts as "compliance cars" but at least I can actually buy a Bolt.
> And last I looked the id.3 isn't coming to North America and the id.4 is a "maybe next year" kind of deal and the electric van they've been promising since about 2015 is now projected for 2023 when I recall in previous press releases talk about it coming out several years ago.
This is false, the ID4 is already being sold in US. ID3 is in fact not going to US.
What I've read is: very limited quantities for 2021. At least for us here in Canadia. I've seen this enough with VW to know that that means a few hundred almost all sent to Quebec (which has California-like EV quotas while other provinces don't).
It's going to take a lot more than going completely EV for me to for me to believe they have changed. Of course they went to EVs, it's the market. Of course they changed course, they were dealing with one of their worst scandals of all time. Of course they say they've changed, but how can we really trust them anymore?
A full blown social media crucifixion and cancellation to appease the frothing masses. Then [user] can reap the feel good vibes of knowing that even though they missed out on the Summer of Love, they were there when VW got served.
Good grief, no one believes in contrition anymore. No one even believes in the past or the future. They were always this way, they're this way now, and they always will be! There are no mistakes, only lapses that expose your "true" eternal character.
If they ran a campaign of donating to environmental protection charities, carbon capture, or some other means of protecting the planet, with a value equal to that of the money of the revenue of their diesel cheating vehicles sales, I would say they have changed.
Until then, I still think they are doing what they do for the sake of profit.
I would, but also, if they can rectify the damage they have done, then it becomes easier to forgive. I understand all companies seek profit and need to. I'm not against that, but I am against doing it illegally while harming our health and environment.
Despite all the focus on Tesla, companies that makes a minimal, good and inexpensive electric car/truck will win big as far as I'm concerned. Bonus points for an iconic look.
Both of those are hard. A big powerful sedan is the best case for electric. You get the big power for free, and you don't end up that heavier or more expensive than a powerful gasoline drivetrain.
Small low power cars and trucks that need to be able to tow are the worst case. Giving up the big power doesn't really save you any mass or cost, and trucks need a bigger gas "tank". But perhaps if the tabless and structural battery thing works out, it will get us to both of those cases.
Base model ID.4 SUV for approximately $33,000 (price taking US government tax break into account. $39,995-$7,500) is getting very close to that. A mid-20's priced EV would be amazing but low 30's is starting to get within range of a lot of people (and it ends up being nearly $10,000 less than nearest competitor Tesla's Model Y... best price I could find was $41,290... which sadly no longer qualifies for the same tax break. If it did I would probably say the Tesla is a better deal).
Remember how i said "unrealistic" and not "lower"? WLTP is a rather unrealistic way to determine fuel consumption or energy usage on cars. If you look at sites which collect fuel usage for cars you often times see fuel usages considerably higher than what WLTP defines. Especially if it's a PHEV since WLTP expects a full battery all the time. Under 2L/100km for a 2 ton SUV is not realistic by any stretch of the imagination. The numbers on https://www.spritmonitor.de/ for example seem to allign more with EPA in my experience.
> Especially if it's a PHEV since WLTP expects a full battery all the time. Under 2L/100km for a 2 ton SUV is not realistic by any stretch of the imagination. The numbers on https://www.spritmonitor.de/ for example seem to allign more with EPA in my experience.
There's a question as to what you're trying to model; if you're looking at daily usage then relatively short distances from fully charged are probably relatively representative of a lot of usage (the mean and median distances driven on a daily basis are relatively short distances!).
In reality, I suspect what would be useful is to have a further cycle based on a 100km journey largely on a motorway, as a long-distance extra-urban cycle?
Very good question: WLTP has just a number for you.
PHEVs may not be a good idea depending on your driving style. There should be more discussion about what type of engine is the correct one for you before buying. Do you drive enough motorway regularly that a diesel would make sense? Do you drive shorter distances but you cannot charge? Can you charge but you sometimes need more range? Maybe even a PHEV diesel would make sense, but that is a type of vehicle that was rare and is now even rarer.
Technology was improved a lot over the last decades. If you'd record the WLTP tests you could maybe build a system which would accurately calculate your fuel usage for your type of driving and define if a PHEV or a diesel would make any sense for you.
So your criticism is actually in the context of ICE and PHEVs - I assumed you meant pure EVs since that what this thread seemed to be about, and for those autonomy numbers seem to be strictly lower, hence my confusion why WLTP would be more doctored in this regard than NECD.
I have looked at the Model 3 and Hyundai Ioniq and even there the energy usage seems to be rather off. 15 kWh/100km WLTP vs 19 kWh/100km according to spritmonitor on the Model 3. 11 vs 14 with the Ioniq.
So yeah, it seems like WLTP is not really accurate for EVs either.
Well to be honest the cheating was pretty much only done so the cars wouldn't be unbearably slow. And every other european car manufacturer basically did the same. Once the targets become impossible to reach for everyone, you start cheating.
That isn't true. It was done so they didn't have to install NOx cleaning technologies. Modern US based diesels have SCR, and EGR systems that help remove NOx and particulates from the exhaust (or prevent it from forming). However, they add thousands to the cost and complexity.
SCR systems are very expensive in modern VWs as well. Especially to repair. With the additional pressure on the engine because of restrictive exhausts engines also don't last as long. EGR systems on diesels are known to gunk up. VW used SCR systems since 2009 if you didn't know.
Yep, you have bureaucrats at the EPA pulling numbers out of their asses that become impossible to meet and still have a car that people would want or can afford. So they find a way to meet the "letter of the law" and pass the tests. Sort of like what CPAs do when they prepare your tax return.
Excellent question, running through a few options in my mind "Version and Variation" come to mind. I'm not sure those qualify as a proper German words, probably not.
Is my understanding correct that loan words are usually pronounced according to the donor language? (e.g. "das Handy") I seem to remember V is special somehow too, for historical reasons.
If I am reading Duden right, Version is directly a French loanword:
Imagine telling someone in 2003 that this was going to happen. It would have been seen as a joke (as some are seeing it today) or something that absolutely wouldn't happen.
If this is not a joke, this seems like the best indicator that Tesla is meeting it's mission to "accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy."
I don't believe that at all. These giant companies are not just in the business of fending off bad PR, they're looking to make a lot of money for their investors, for decades to come.
Reminds me of the Netflix / Qwikster fiasco. They can still transform without changing their name. Less effort and resource on PR, more effort on the sustainability part.
Isn't it more likely that it's just electric's time? Like when you see a bunch of people inventing similar things, not because they're copying the first person, but the rest of the context is such that the invention is finally important and achievable? Maybe I'm just being contrarian, but I feel like this "first mover was a visionary compared to the second or third" thing is like the Great Person theory of history and overdone.
And people will twist it either way. A second mover doesn't appear soon, so the first is way ahead, or a second mover does appear, so it must be because of the first's influence.
This is what happens in a meeting when someone says "there are no bad ideas". This is the sort of three beer spitballing that normally you come up with as a gag and yet they're committing to it, and whilst it's US only the likelihood is they'll do some aggressive product placement and get some global recognition around it.
I felt this way when Apple removed ‘Computer’ from their name. Years later we see that it wasn’t just a name change but alignment to their company strategy.
I’m cautiously optimistic that Volkswagen is signaling a similar change in their mission and leadership’s intent to change.
If this isn't a joke, it actually does make sense. Easier to pronounce in english. Means electric car... the growth category. Why not?
"Volkswagen" is big enough that the name just means the company/product. But, it isn't really good brand name for an anglo market. You either can't pronounce it, or the literal connotation makes you a little uncomfortable.
I guess Tesla and Faraday were already taken. This is ridiculous. I hope this is a case of an April fools joke delivered according to German punctuality.
I guess that's because they didn't change the name in Germany as well. "Volkswagen" is really easy to pronounce in German, but "Voltswagen" is just weird.
I previously owned a VW, but swore on my life that I'd never buy another one after the emissions cheating scandal. There are plenty of reasons why a VW likely wont be my next choice, but I'm softening my stance a bit.
What they did was absolutely reprehensible, but I later learned that the more accurate story is that they bore the brunt of media attention for something that nearly every auto manufacturer was later found to be doing -
That doesn't make it any less wrong, but it does put them back on par with just about every other auto manufacturer in my mind. And it does seem (as others have cited) like there was some genuine change that followed.
My dad used to joke that if you wanted sneakers that were not made by child labor, your best bet was whichever manufacturer last got into trouble for it because of all the extra scrutiny.
That this level of fatalism about immoral acts exists is a failure of society as a whole. I suspect that all of those who got rich either knowingly or being willfully ignorant about emissions cheating walked away completely unpunished. Maybe less rich than if they hadn't gotten caught, but still richer than if they hadn't cheated in the first place.
Instead of posting uninformed speculation, you can just Google it…
> In 2017, the U.S.-based VW executive Oliver Schmidt, who oversaw emissions issues, was sentenced to seven years in prison and fined $400,000, the maximum possible under a plea deal the German national made with prosecutors after admitting to charges of conspiring to mislead U.S regulators and violate clean-air laws.
The US has charged nine people, and Germany at least five, though they aren't moving quickly with the prosecutions.
More recently, he has been released on parole after roughly half his term served.[1] Interestingly, the article says:
In Germany, inmates can be released after serving two thirds of their term. Parole after only half of the time is rare, but can be granted to first time offenders who demonstrated good behavior and are deemed unlikely to commit crimes in the future.
I don't doubt he exhibited good behavior. I'm not sure I believe he's unlikely to commit a crime in the future. I wonder if he thinks he was singled out for something everyone in the industry was doing, and thus it wasn't his fault. He wouldn't be wrong about the first thing, but he would about the second. It's admittedly speculation on my part though.
A close associate is an engine designer at a VW group company.
VW is not some bottoms up startup. It has a clear micromanaged road map for virtually everything. Data is gathered, sheds are biked ad nausuem.
this person was jailed because they were the last one holding the hot potatoe. There is no way (according to said associate) that upper management were not aware of what was going on. as any decision like that has to have approval.
It is/was a wide spread practice, well known in the industry. I know that ford used to routinely re-map the ECU after the warranty period, which boosted the miles per gallon at the expense of various pollutants.
The higher-up executives are also in hot water - Martin Winterkorn, then the CEO, is under indictment in both Germany and the US, and is likely to face prison time after his (more complicated, because his involvement worked through deniable cutouts) trial.
Change the parameters used to calculate the fine details of how the internal combustion engine operates, e.g. how much fuel to inject into each cylinder, when to send a spark to trigger ignition, how much pressure should the turbocharger provide, etc.
I can only recommend watching this 2015 talk at German Chaos Communication Congress about the technical details of the scandal. It's in English and really worth watching if you're technically interested. They reverse engineered the ECU configurations and showed how the manipulation works.
It's from an old parable, also called Parkinson's Law of Triviality. Basically, simple things get discussed more because everyone can understand them. It goes something like this:
"If a committee designs a bikeshed, they will spend five minutes discussing the structural requirements, half an hour on the size, and the rest of the available time arguing about what color to paint the shed."
I’m sure it’s awful for normal folk like us but in his case (and again this is uninformed speculation), where he’s essentially the fall guy for a scandal that was supporting one of the world’s largest economies (and a large component of several others), it’s not that hard to imagine his experience being just a bit different than what a normal inmate should expect.
He also likely knows a lot about how many of his superiors were in the loop on this, so I assume he was well compensated for his inconvenience.
He was in "Offener Vollzug" (~open prison). That means he sleeps in a normal prison cell (that usually looks like [1], so not all that bad) in a regular prison, gets breakfeast, leaves prison to go to work, then goes straight back to prison to participate in the prison's evening activities (sport, recreational, educational, etc). He might get vacation (from staying in prison), and can visit his family on weekends.
It's not that unusual in Germany, at any time about 16% of prisoners are in "offener Vollzug", and it is a great tool to reintegrate prisoners into society. It is limited to first offenders with no flight risk and no risk that they use their time out of prison to do crime.
Of course no matter how useful of a tool it is generally, it does make the prison sentences of some well known people look like a bit of a joke.
Corruption is a real problem in Germany and auto makers have a lot of influence on politicians, so the corporate and the political apparatus are interested in hiding these crimes, because a large part of our economy depends on them.
I think that depends on what he thinks the mistake was. To him, was the mistake cheating, getting caught, or being in position to be made an example of? He may no make the mistake again, but I'm not sure that means he won't cheat again in a similar way, given the chance.
can I prosecute ex parte the rest of the taxpayers and citizens and asthmatics the administrators supposed to have been in charge of ensuring compliance with emissions standards for failing so incredibly to do their jobs?
or is there no responsibility held by whoever we place in office responsible for seeing our futures aren't squandered?
how is it possible to ignore that obligation and duty when we've only just started to admit that we have to act against such universal polluting?
or has the last encumbant of 2000 Pensylvania Av. just pulled off the brilliant trick of assuming all the blame for the failure of government future and past as well?
(brit with American family and too embarrassed to speak of our politicians presently)
I’m not sure if the downvotes here are because of your Trump allusions or not, but you do raise a pretty important point.
Where was the oversight? How was it that an open secret of this magnitude didn’t incur the wrath of environmental agencies in the countries affected? Is it possible that no-one outside of the industry knew about this and that everyone in the industry, even in competing firms, just kept this secret for years without anything leaking out?
It doesn’t seem plausible that this wasn’t known about and ignored by regulators in at least some regions.
I agree, the people enforcing these laws are just as negligent. Why did the let the manufactures anywhere near the testing process.
I would like to think that now, after the scandal, they are selecting and testing cars that have recently been sold. The cars that are actually being driven around.
Is the rest of the world as harsh as the U.S. in that a prison sentence is basically the end of your career? Would this guy have a shot at being an executive again?
Depends: given that one can easily google his name and find out about this, it's a bit unlikely he'll be appointed to such a prominent position again. But in general, a prison sentence would not be the end of your career here in the EU. Anecdotally, when I was hob-hunting last time, not one company (out of ~ a dozen) asked for a criminal record before making an offer, and only one company informed me that I'd be required to hand one in afterwards. Of course, the others might've asked for it at a later stage, but at least at the company I went with (as well as all my previous employers) hired me without knowing whether I had any priors. As far as I understand, this depends on the industry, though.
My own admittedly uninformed understanding is that there was cheating all around, but VW was by far the most flagrant. BMW and Mercedes diesels required DEF (diesel exhaust fluid), whereas VW did not. Marketing and/or executive leadership (again, as per my understanding) pushed the notion that the additive would make diesels appear to be less attractive and who wants to add a second liquid beyond fuel every few hundred miles?
But weren't they all cheating? The diesels with DEF were still above the legal limits, albeit to a lesser degree than the VW's who didn't even bother with DEF because, I guess, if you're going to cheat anyway...
What about it? No vehicle will do it from the factory, so I don't see how it's relevant here. It's the result of running a diesel massively, massively over-rich (with aftermarket tuning), and it's absolute hell on the engine - that amount of diesel in the cylinder washes down the cylinder walls and wipes off the lubricating film, so the cylinder wear is insane from even fairly short periods of it.
Even in diesel truck circles, "the other 99.9%" of truck owners think it's just as stupid as everyone else does - in addition to being engine abuse, it tends to attract an awful lot of unwelcome attention, and there are people who won't distinguish between "You've modified your truck to belch a column of coal black smoke for attention" and "An older diesel puts out a bit of brown smoke if you get on it hard suddenly," which can lead to some nuisance emissions testing.
My truck (24 years and change) will smoke a bit if I stand on it and the fuel flow outruns boost coming up, but it's also entirely emissions compliant and passes the tests cleanly - it's just something older diesels do under certain conditions. I try my best to avoid it, but if I need to get a trailer up to speed (especially quickly, if someone is coming up hard behind me), it'll put out a bit of brown smoke until the turbo gets spinning.
None of that has anything to do with VW, though. They were burning clean, which any sort of modern high pressure injection system will typically do, they just had really high NOx emissions for their emissions tier.
I used to live next to a freeway and I know the true cost of dirty diesel engines. Get on any US freeway and you'll notice that while a majority of diesels are fine, there is a minority that is belching soot any time the driver steps on the gas. This is simply unacceptable - this tiny minority of diesels kills people over time - especially the poorer populations who live close to the freeways. I would prefer much more stringent enforcement where any truck belching smoke can be spot checked and impounded.
The emissions testing is not a "nuisance". It saves lives. A noisy motorcycle would be a better example of a nuisance.
I’m obsessive about using the air recirculation button when driving to isolate the cabin any time I’m in the wake of a diesel vehicle, for this reason.
While health issues from diesel particulate is documented on a wide statistical basis, there’s ample reason to believe single exposure events may lead to individual negative health outcomes i.e. getting a lungful one time might just kill you.
The pointless out of band emissions testing of an emissions compliant truck (that easily passes the tests) having to go in for a test because it smokes a bit under hard acceleration and someone called it in for "rolling coal" is very much a nuisance to the truck owner and a waste of time/resources for all parties involved.
An older diesel engine can smoke a decent bit under hard acceleration and still be entirely emissions legal - it's not until you get into the particulate filters in the... oh, 2010s or so (not sure, I don't have anything that new) that you can contain all the particulate matter.
If your stance is that diesels shouldn't be permitted, or that anything older than a certain age shouldn't be allowed to be registered, that's fine, but that's not what I'm referring to here.
My stance is that diesels should only be permitted if they satisfy the EPA 2008 diesel PM standards or better. No older engines should be permitted unless they are retrofitted to comply with the standard and pass regular state tests. We could have a "cash for clunkers" type program to incentivize them to be lawfully scrapped.
I appreciate that you are as annoyed as the rest of us at the coal rollers. I think we need much more aggressive fines and impounds for those, too.
Destroying nearly-new trucks for emissions reasons is a pretty questionable use of funding (and, yes, a 12 year old truck is still quite new) - and you're not going to be able to get away with a token few thousand dollars to encourage people to scrap them.
A decently maintained heavy road engine (tractor trailer) is a million+ mile motor, easily. A medium truck engine (think your typical toolbox work trucks, tow trucks, International boom trucks, etc) will do 300k-500k miles, and depending on how much the truck is used, that may be 20-30 years of operation. Same for the light diesels - they tend to have a practical service life of decades. My 24 year old truck is starting to be a little bit more rare on the roads out here, but I still see plenty...
If you know what to listen for, you can identify a lot of diesels by sound - and the International T444E (mid-90s design, the Ford 7.3 Powerstroke is that engine with a few tweaks) has a very distinctive snap at idle from the single shot injectors. There are still an awful lot of those on the road, and the youngest of them is almost 20 years old.
"Destroying 30-50% of the diesel fleet on the road" is not something I'd be particularly excited about - especially since new vehicle production isn't particularly environmentally friendly either. If you're specifically focused on the PM emissions, there may be ways to retrofit those older engines (at the cost of likely a substantial increase in fuel burn from the backpressure), but if you're going to hold them to the newer NOx standards, there's just no way to do it. They don't have the injection pressure and EGR systems in place to do it.
As of right now, they'd just be replaced with new diesels, because there are no electrics meaningfully on the market that solve the problems a large diesel engine solves right now. Plenty have been announced, very few are actually shipping, and of those announced, everyone is silent on their towing capabilities (I don't care if you can tow 15k lbs on a receiver mount, that kind of trailer weight should be on a gooseneck or 5th wheel hitch, and everyone is really, really silent on how their announced electric trucks fit either of those).
I also very much dislike "Cash for Clunkers" type programs in that they're one of the most nastily regressive programs one can possibly create. That program ruined the bottom end of the used car market for most of a decade, and permanently destroyed a lot of vehicles of a particularly easy to maintain and cheap to operate era (low pressure single point throttle body injection, not a ton of luxury features). It was a nice little handout to the next couple tiers up, but if you were operating in the "$100 car" realm (which were a thing at the time, I've owned 4 sub-$400 cars in the 2000-2010 era), it was absolutely devastating to your ability to find cheap cars. That sort of effective floor on vehicle prices for a while, followed by the hollowing out of anything below that price in the market... eh. Let's not do that again.
As far as coal rollers, though, the best thing that could happen is that everyone stops getting worked up about them and ignore them. They do it for the attention, and I'll suggest that it works really, really well. If you see one, get the plate, call it into your local emissions enforcement hotline if that's a thing, and move on with life. Everyone getting all wound up about them on the internet is exactly what I expect a lot of them enjoy about it anymore.
I seem to not have communicated my point very clearly.
Diesel particulate pollution kills very significant numbers of people, and it kills poor people (who have to live next to the freeway and on urban thoroughfares) disproportionately. I don't care about how easy it is to find a $100 car; I care about policies that we can enact today that can stop truck owners and manufacturers from externalizing their pollution costs onto everyone else. You make a good point about PM being easier to address than NOx - PM is more of an urgent concern given what we now know about its health effects. Whether by retrofitting or by retiring, the engines that emit more PM than the 2008 standards have to go.
New diesels are fine. I agree with you EV trucks are not here yet. The point is there are trucks out there that are 10,000x more harmful in PM emissions than the same exact capability new truck. They need to be removed.
Of course just scrapping diesels on the road isn't the best/most efficient idea. We have the technology to do EV conversions, we just need to make that more cost effective. Volkswagon has talked about shipping a mass produced "crate" system that could fit into older VW vehicles' engine blocks. Though if we are talking *trucks* the big player that should be building an EV conversion kit yesterday is Ford, who still seem to act like EV is a passing fad they can just dip their toes in and not get serious about.
Right, but the parent's point is that these things do not actually exist. VW "talking" about doing something or Ford "should" have done something does not describe things that are actually available on the market today, regardless of whether or not the technology is within our capabilities.
They do exist in small shops that are doing EV conversions every day (and have been for years).
The thing missing is mass production to drive costs down from it being an artisanal thing with used Tesla and pinball machine parts to being a reliable mini-industry. Those artisanal projects are on the market though, and have been for some time. They have a market price, it's just that that price isn't as cheap as we would all like it to be, hence the emphasis on mass production being a currently unfilled need and that it is on at least one manufacturer's stated roadmap and should have been on at least one other's. The flipside is already happening "while we wait". Some of those artisanal shops are standardizing their own tools and producing their own kits, and speeding up their processes and building on economies of scale to get those things cheaper, and if the manufacturers won't officially support it, the aftermarket will, as it often does.
"We" do? If you know of any, please, share. I know a lot of people out here who own trucks who would absolutely love a reasonably priced ($20k or so?) conversion kit for a truck that would leave you with 100 miles or so of range with a 10k lb construction trailer (fully enclosed) or similar.
I'm aware of the old electric Rangers one can find on rare occasions (swap their lead for lithium and you have a truck, though not one that can either haul much or tow much). I know of a couple more or less DIY conversion kits for vehicles (EVWest has some nice ones, $5k-$10k before you add a battery, for light VWs), but a 200hp class motor alone for a retrofit is close to $10k, and that's before controllers, battery pack, anything.
But in general, I'm really not sure converting existing trucks is the right option, because how you build a truck for an ICE is probably not how you build a truck for electric drivetrains. If you just replace the input to the transmission with an electric motor, you end up with quite poor drivetrain efficiency - there's a lot of stuff spinning that you wouldn't use for a pure electric drivetrain, but if you're going to swap out pieces you don't need (transmission, maybe the transfer case - a motor hung on the front and rear differential, geared properly, makes a compelling argument), costs start going up again. And then there's the mass and weight of the battery pack. You could put a pack in the bed without too much trouble, but... whoops, you've just lost your access to a 5th wheel or gooseneck hitch, or you've got a lot of the bed not used for battery space. There's room under the hood, but it's weirdly shaped space, typically.
I would love an electric pickup that could handle around town work, but even if I start with a free truck body, I'm likely $40k away from a useful conversion, and that's with me doing the work myself. And I still wouldn't get that much use out of it, because I couldn't do any longer hauling with it (the bulk of my trips in trip count are about 40 mile round trips to the home improvement store, but the few longer trips I take, often with 5k-8k lb of trailer back there, make up a good fraction of the miles).
For that cost, I could buy a very nice used diesel truck, and still have a ton of money left over for other projects, carbon offsets, nice charity donations, a bunch of public EV charging stations, or whatever else I wanted to do.
The problem is that competent electric pickups have been "coming soon now" for most of a decade. Via Motors was announcing extended range electric pickups on Chevy gliders back in 2012 or so - and they've since pivoted a few times and not delivered any of those things (at least that I'm aware of, and certainly not in any meaningful numbers). A 50 mile range on battery with a good trailer, then a gas or diesel range extender, with a big split phase inverter built in, would sell like hotcakes to construction companies - you can haul your trailer to the jobsite, power the jobsite before the power company gets around to running lines without the small generators otherwise used for that, recharge at night, and pay a fraction the operating costs of a diesel you'd otherwise use for that. Think $0.05-$0.10/mi (depending on power costs) vs $0.25-$0.30/mi, plus generator costs. That adds up in a hurry.
But nobody sells one. I've no idea why. So diesel it is. Gassers are fine for infrequent towing, but their lifespan is an awful lot shorter if you use them for it regularly for towing.
I'm aware the Cybertruck is "coming soon now," and that it's rated for 14k lbs, but as I've stated elsewhere in this sidetrack, you have to be somewhat insane to hang 14k lbs on a receiver mount (I'm actually not even sure that's permitted everywhere). That much tongue weight (1000+ lbs, perhaps even 2000 lbs for high speed stability) really needs to be on or slightly forward of the rear axle for combo stability. There's a big difference between "It can move it on flat ground" and "It can safely tow it long distances in somewhat adverse conditions." A ~6000 lb truck, with 14k hanging on the receiver, is (IMO) an unsafe combination.
All of the above skips the legal problems with radically changing a vehicle (which an EV conversion is) and ensuring it's legal and certified for road operation. Hobby conversions and low volume conversions tend to fall between the cracks, but anything of a scale to matter would have to solve those problems, and they're far from trivial.
Anyway, if I'm missing something, please, let me know. But what you're arguing "should exist," as far as I know, "Doesn't exist, and won't exist."
Yeah, EVWest has been doing the work for a while now. You are correct that it currently isn't cheap, and is more complicated/DIY than anyone currently wants to call "easy", but that's the definition of "we have the technology". The next steps are productionizing it/industrializing it, which I also pointed out in my comment.
It exists as an "artisanal" option today. Per VW's roadmap they expect to have more "off the shelf" components in the near future. Ford doesn't have it on their radar at all it seems, but as I point out that's likely a blindspot on Ford's part that should be addressed (and if they don't do it, the aftermarket will, even if it starts "bottom up" from the "artisanal" shops).
> The problem is that competent electric pickups have been "coming soon now" for most of a decade
Beyond the ones you mentioned (Via Motors, Tesla Cybertruck):
Rivian have been taking preorders and are expected to deliver some of the first ones this year.
While Ford don't have EV conversions on their radar, they do have new purchased trucks. The electric version of the F-150 is supposed to be their second EV following this year's Mustang Mach-E. Rumors are that the official launch and some very early presales could start as soon as the end of this year (though most analysts are expecting Ford is likely more serious about a 2023 model year).
GM has been relatively cagey what they have planned for the big spectacle 2023 model year, but many indications are that among the "12 currently unannounced EV models" for 2023 at least three or four of them are going to be trucks across the Chevy and GMC brands, on the "Ultium" platform they beta-tested in the 2021 Hummer EV.
Lordstown Motors has seen some fraud concerns and stock shorting controversies, but is entirely focused on EV Trucks right now (similar to Rivian) and were expected to have deliveries of their first model (the Endurance) start last year, but are seemingly delayed to at least "late" this year/early next year.
(Fwiw, the "coming soon now" for the Tesla Cybertruck is also "late" this year/early next year, with delays noted due to pandemic reasons and usual Tesla timeline slippage.)
It's not just trucks - I was able to get my (pre-cheating-scandal) 2003 VW TDI to belch a cloud of smoke if I idled for a while (over five minutes) then worked it hard (e.g. a freeway onramp). I remember getting honked at by a Prius once...
IMO, these occasional particulate emissions were outweighed by the excellent fuel economy - rated at 46 MPG but regularly 43 MPG.
Of course, this technology has been largely obsoleted by electric drivetrains. No rolling coal from a Tesla!
> My truck (24 years and change) will smoke a bit if I stand on it and the fuel flow outruns boost coming up, but it's also entirely emissions compliant and passes the tests cleanly - it's just something older diesels do under certain conditions
I always thought that banning old diesels from centers of European cities was just silly (they passed their emissions after all so they can't be billowing smoke, right?), thanks for changing my opinion
No problem. If your concern is the particulate matter, then, yes, banning old diesels makes some sense. They don't have the particulate filters - those started showing up in the 2000-2010 era. However, I would rather see that implemented as tighter standards, and if you can meet them with a retrofit kit, you can continue driving the older ones. We saw this with noise kits for older jets (retrofit kits that reduce the noise to the new standards), and if the concern is specifically emissions, then if you can make an older vehicle meet the newer standards, there's no reason to keep them out. I'm not a fan of arbitrarily destroying old but operational equipment.
My truck is a '97, and I believe the smoke opacity limit for emissions testing is 40% (it's allowed to block/scatter 40% of the light going through the exhaust). I believe commercial trucks of the same age are held to roughly the same standards. That's a good bit of smoke in the exhaust. But until you get into the high pressure common rail stuff (up at 30k+ psi, multiple injections per cycle), you'll get some smoke under certain conditions.
Looking at emissions standards in Europe, a truck from 24 years ago in Europe, assuming its gross vehicle weight is between 1760 kg and 3500 kg, would be allowed to emit 0.25g of PM/km. The same limit for something built since 2013 is 0.0045g of PM/km. We're talking multiple orders of magnitude improvement here.
As a sidenote, HO+NOx has gone from 1.7g/km to 0.350g/km in 2013 (and onto 0.215g/km since then, in 2016), which is often as significant when it comes to desires to reduce air pollution.
Emissions standards change over time. You could get some really polluting cars in the old days, and you can't anymore. Why should we be breathing in the smoke from these old cars from an era where emissions and pollution weren't taken as seriously as now?
The proportion of old vehicles on the road is small. And the last thing most of the people who drive them need is additional expensive compliance hoops to drive through.
For every hipster yuppie driving "muh classic Hilux just like daddy owned in 1993" there a few dozen people living out of the back of a Caprice Classic wagon because they have no better option.
Never heard of this before, I looked it up, but I still don't get it -- you're not getting more power, you're not getting better fuel efficiency, you're not getting a smoother ride, what's the point - you're literally burning money for no reason?
Correct. And destroying your engine in the process. Beyond washing down the cylinder walls (cylinder/ring wear) and diluting the engine oil in the process (worse lubrication for the bearings), EGTs tend to go absolutely nuts during the process (you're on the oxygen limited side of mixture, not the fuel limited side a diesel is intended to operate in), which means you stand a good chance of doing damage to the hot side of the turbocharger (high EGTs tend to start melting the corner tips of the turbine blades first, which is an easy check for a used diesel - if the blade corners aren't right, the engine has probably been abused), and it's hard on the rest of the engine too.
It's quite literally as stupid as it sounds.
There are cases where you do want to run a diesel like that - some of the custom tractor pulling engines will smoke an awful lot while they're spooling up and pulling, but that's an engine that's making insane horsepower for a short period of time, and they don't have a particularly long service life (like any competition engine). I believe they run on the rich side to use the excess fuel to keep combustion temperatures down (a stoichiometric mixture is usually far, far too hot). But on a road engine, it's just pointless engine abuse for style points (among the few people who actually think it's cool).
I've only ever seen it once when I was in an EV Uber (it was a Model S) behind a pickup truck in Baltimore and the pickup kept blasting us with massive amounts of black soot (presumably because we were in an EV).
There's a political element of "Truck Driving Republican" vs. "EV Driving Liberal" that powers some of this. I think Elon has been at last partially trying to reduce this polarization with how he behaves online to widen Tesla's appeal (though maybe I'm attributing too much intentionality here).
On the west coast I was tailed super aggressively by a pickup in my model 3 on 280 which was a little scary (blinding me with headlights, switching lanes to stay 1 inch behind me). I watched cameras after to see if I cut him off or something, but I didn't. It has made me more wary of pick up trucks in general though.
That sucks. I wish it were an automatic open-and-shut case to prosecute dangerous driving / vehicular assault like this when a court is provided with dashcam evidence.
it's almost impossible to effectively regulate externalities in a global economy. Local regulators are not inclined to care about products sold overseas and all products compete with the lowest common regulatory framework.
All it takes for child labor to enter into the supply chain is one bad regulator and a couple levels of outsourcing. The final "complete" product becomes nearly impossible to audit.
> it's almost impossible to effectively regulate externalities in a global economy.
It really is not. Take the EU, for instance. They have the biggest internal market in the world. They can effectively dictate many things unilaterally that companies have to comply with under pain of being locked out of a multi-trillion dollar market (and indeed they do, with things such as health and safety standards, etc.). There's nothing stopping then from properly pricing externalities of pollution for instance, or of mandating that clothes companies pass a workplace standards audit irrespective of where their factories are located. This isn't done because of lack of will.
Even non-global economies end up diffusing the blame for poor labor practices. So many big-box stores end up in a wage-theft situation just because the upper-management sets benchmarks that are only achievable through wage-theft and then they are shocked[1] to find out that the individual store managers are committing wage theft.
Yes. My last 5 sneakers were New Balance Made in USA. I believe New Balance is the last brand of USA made sneakers, so I support them whenever I can.
Not all of what New Balance makes is domestic but they do have the Made in USA line available. Would love to have more options but thankfully these are quite good.
Man I wish I could wear NB, but the toe-box tapers too quickly causing my big toe to rub on the side. Before I found shoes that actually fit, I wore various shoes (including NB) 1.5 sizes larger than my actual size.
we decouple too much, every company is trying to survive the market and will always cut corners even though in the end no one ever asked for children to make shoes.. it was just global fear, frustration and risk that made everybody put pressure in the wrong direction.
I always found it odd that Americans have no problem with child labor at home, so long as it’s confined to movies and entertainment. We even have special laws just to make it legal when every other form of child labor is outlawed.
It’s absolutely not the same as a sweatshop, but hollywood has a long track record of ruining children’s lives for profit.
Why did textile factories hire children? Because they could pay less.
Why do movie studios hire children? Because the script calls for a child. Union regulations and price floors can be put in place to protect the child actor’s interests without completely defeating the purpose of hiring them in the first place.
Even though child actors tend to be considerably more expensive than adults, they still get cast. I don’t think that would’ve happened in sweatshops.
It might be an unusually American take, but I do think child labor is a bit easier to justify when the child is compensated with a tremendous amount of money. (When compared to the sweatshops you mentioned).
From my understanding, the "special laws" put hard caps on the amount of hours that a child can work in a week, and establishes a bunch of other protections like making sure they get adequate schooling, etc.
In a film with a child in a lead role, the entire movie production schedule often revolves around this hard hours limit.
Perhaps a larger tragedy is children working in family businesses. Poor, legal immigrant families often put their children to work at the family restaurant, and this is legal for any number of hours.
Same boat here, I had a VW and sold it about a year and half ago. I will not be buying one again, they've lost me.
But also, I don't really appreciate what any of the car manufacturers have been doing (location tracking, internet connectivity, subscription services, etc). Since I sold the VW, I haven't bought a car, and am currently without a car. I don't plan on buying one anytime in the near future.
We sold our VW and bought a Model 3. We had a serious look at VW’s EV lineup for my wife’s next car though. All manufacturers with a genuine EV programme have my support.
I have been driving an ID3 nearly every day since a month or so (don't own it) and I absolutely adore the car. It's both simple and full-fledged at the same time. Voice-control is hot garbage but other than that it's fine.
Disclaimer: I never drove a Tesla Model 3 before, but a few other EVs like the BMW i3. The VW ID3 feels like a genuine high quality car - as if the Golf simply reached a new era.
BMW's i3 always felt like a weird toy and the Renault Zoes I drove where just an electric replacement for Smarts which are now electric too. I can see myself sitting in an ID3 for a longer trip with a nice charging pause.
I would never even dare take a Zoe on the Autobahn or an i3 aside from a handful of kilometers. ID3? No issues here.
Same about the ID4. Its a great "normal" EV SUV. the ID3 is to the Golf what the ID4 is to the Tiguan. Plus I have no issues with the >400Kms range with such a vehicle.
Can you actually use it on the Autobahn like a "normal" car, i.e. drive over 130 km/h with AC or heating, while still getting reasonable range?
One of my major gripes with EV was always that the range on paper is good, but only if you drive like a truck speed-wise and turn off every comfort - which is honestly not what I want to do when investing in an (usually) pretty expensive car. Would be pretty awesome if VW managed to get that right.
I can speak for the ID4, yes you can do this. Sure you will not get the 520km on paper and of course it depends how you driving it but you get around 400km with ok weather conditions, AC and seat/driving wheel heating. In Winter with negative temperatures I got high consumptions but I learned it might also have to do with the fact the batteries where not hot enough.
> the Renault Zoes I drove where just an electric replacement for Smarts which are now electric too
The Zoe has nothing to do with a Smart. It's the same size as a Golf.
Also, I have driven a Zoe on the motorway and it's perfectly fine. I don't understand your problem with that car. It's the most sold EV in many countries, for good reason.
Mazda has also said they will be decreasing the importance of an infotainment screen and focusing on having quality switchgear. People who actually _enjoy driving_ like these kinds of touches; in general, in the segments Mazda competes in, they have some of the most fun offerings available.
For people who consider a car to be a status symbol that transports them from place to place, it's not the ideal choice, but I'm glad there's some variety. Otherwise, we'll all just be driving electric jellybeans with an iPad awkwardly bolted to the dashboard.
Me too, only owned a used old Toyota (pre ABS and OBDII) since and right now nothing. The VW I leased was a 2014 so I just managed to miss out on the era of rearview cameras though
It might generate higher emissions, but whether using it for another year or two generated more emissions overall, I think it's a bit trickier to know if it was worse overall.
Enough VW's not sold mean VW's not built, and producing the car is a large amount of the car's expected lifetime CO2 footprint (I've seen from 1/5th to 1/3rd).
If they were just delaying a less polluting vehicle purchase, a delay is a net negative, but since now they are driving nothing, that means it's actually possible the older vehicle was the better choice, especially since pollution from cars if very front-loaded (if we assume a new car that was purchased would be unused or very lightly used, since they are able to go without a car now).
Plus if you trade in one functional old car for a newer model with better emmissions, that perfectly good car is not magically lifted into automobile heaven never to emit again. It will be bought on the used market by someone else can't afford a new car (much less a $70K Tesla) and continue to emit whatever it emits today.
When you are in an environment where all your other competitors are cheating, I used to think you had only two options - join in or quit. Now, it occurs to me that there is a third - blow the whistle. If VW, or any other manufacturer, had made a quick call to the authorities and told them exactly what to look for, they would have dealt a huge blow to their competitors and maybe even done a victory lap along the way.
... and make themselves the enemy of the entire industry.
That's the reason almost nobody ever blows the whistle: the prisoner's dilemma variant here is the iterated one, and there are more than two players. If you defect, you get blacklisted. It doesn't matter if you're an individual abused by an employer, or a big company that, for a brief moment, grew some conscience. The only time when blowing a whistle makes sense, from a self-preservation standpoint, is when you have a backup plan for what to do when the whistle gets ignored, but everyone knows who blew it.
The corollary to that is, to allow for whistleblowing to be an option, the defector needs to be protected, and this must be public knowledge. If people have any perception of personal risk here, most will stay silent.
I'm not saying they're doing the right thing - just that the game theory is what it is. I'm trying to give an explanation, not an excuse.
Anonymous only works in a small spectrum of possible whistle blowing - where the issue and the players are large enough to matter, but small enough that it won't be trivial to guess who the anonymous tip came from.
It's funny how game theory gets fouled up all the time in real life. A rainstorm or a faulty mechanism or a careless installer or 100 other human or non-human factors that aren't part of the game theory intervene to change everything.
If game theory is stacked against ethical behavior in a particular situation, I'll back ethical behavior. It's encouraging how often the game theory gets tripped up by factors outside the "rules".
At this point, game theory is mostly useful for predicting what people who try to act rationally will do.
But the trouble is, that as these things become more of the fabric of the culture, people's behaviour takes them into account, and then it doesn't work as well as it used to.
> the prisoner's dilemma variant here is the iterated one, and there are more than two players.
The assumption there is that you're all guilty. I agree, when you're all cheating, it's hard to safely get to a point you're not cheating and can inform on others, but the solution to that is simple, don't cheat in the first place. An actual rational actor would realize that cheating opens you up to this situation where you've exposed yourself to a prisoners dilemma that you can't easily extract yourself from, and all for the chance to just have the same advantage as everyone else. Not cheating in the first place and making sure all the cheaters are punished seems a far better strategy.
That said, it's possible this was an emergent phenomenon, where none of them initially were sure the others were cheating, but felt they had to cheat themselves to compete, and by the time it's obvious they are all cheating, there's no chance for one of them to benefit by being clean and calling out all the others.
I do think that these things are all mostly emergent - a competitor sacrifices a principle a little bit to get ahead, everyone else follows suit, thus enshrining it as a new normal. Rinse, repeat
That said, I disagree with "the solution to that is simple, don't cheat in the first place", for the reasons I mentioned: if all your competitors suddenly start to cheat, telling on them only works if you can ensure they all get burned down to the ground as a result. If some survive, you'll now be competing with them as an actor nobody trusts, and nobody wants to deal with. If that's a realistic outcome, you may as well just quit.
> telling on them only works if you can ensure they all get burned down to the ground as a result.
Isn't that assuming you have to out yourself to identify others? That seems like something a company could coordinate well such that there was little or no indication of where it came from (a source identifying one or two bad actors and calling for industry wide testing would serve their interests without specifically outing them). And I'm not sure why they need to get burned down to the ground. It's about removing the advantages they've gained through cheating, and possibly applying a social penalty if it was bad enough, not ensuring they are destroyed.
> If some survive, you'll now be competing with them as an actor nobody trusts, and nobody wants to deal with.
Eh, even if it did come out that your company was responsible for outing others, this is business where past behavior has less sway, and knowing the other party will follow the rules is hardly a disqualifying factor as long as you don't do something with them that isn't following the rules. It's not like competitors are commonly giving ammunition to each other with the understanding it won't be used. And if they aren't working with you because they can't without exposing more cheating... well then that's a problem they should be trying to fix already, given the new realities.
I think in any well functioning market this all works out normally. The automotive market doesn't seem to be a well functioning one though.
I don't get it. If I'm competing with someone, and I tell on them for cheating while not cheating myself what do I lose if they don't get burned for it?
> they bore the brunt of media attention for something that nearly every auto manufacturer was later found to be doing
I find the same happens with performance enhancing drugs in sports. Everyone in the game knows that everyone is doing it. But someone gets caught, and people go full offense on them as though they're pure evil.
Ben Johnson and later Lance Armstrong come to mind.
But wasn't the cycling top 10 basically decimated by the PED scandal? I think only 1 (or a couple of) cyclist(s) remained unscathed in the top 10 rankings. I'm going on memory, but they really gave the appearance of cleaning house, to an outsider like me. Had regulators gone after 4 or 5 manufacturers, including home-team companies, it would have been much better, and would appear less like Americans piling onto out a German manufacturing bellwether.
Exactly. Most other manufacturers were/are cheating as well.
I've owned a few recent VWs and have found they're fine vehicles. The current gen Tiguan was underpowered, but my MK7 GTI and MK7.5 Golf R are amazing cars. I have a feeling I'll be driving the R for a long time.
I'm confused. My understanding is that all cars showed discrepancies between in-lab and on-road tests, due to overoptimizing the ECU for lab conditions.
However, AFAIU, only VW had an "if in_lab: reduce_polution()" line in their ECU. It could be that the "final result" was the same, but the intentionality behind it was waaay stronger for VW.
Well, all of the companies using Bosch EDC 16 & 17 control systems were doing effectively the same thing. My understanding is that Bosch includes facilities for detecting dyno use "for testing purposes" and that manufactures were using these flags in production cars. VW was apparently a lot more brazen and aggressive in triggering it. While Mercedes and FCA were a big more judicious about it.
I don't think BMW's case has made it through the court system yet though.
I bought two VWs after the cheating scandal. My impression is that because of the cheating scandal, the carefulness and quality per dollar is very high. I did a bunch of research when purchasing, and quantitatively, features and comfort per dollar have also been higher with VW than other brands. It's been a "buy the dip" situation and I don't care about brand loyalty. In fact, the years of scrutiny VW has faced due to the cheating scandal increases my confidence in the brand relative to others. And, like you said, the other guys were cheating, too. Just not being as scrutinized.
We've owned three VW's including a diesel. I am not going to condemn an entire group of people (they employ over 600K people) for the acts of a few. Particularly when authorities have dealt with the situation.
This is no different from forming opinions about a population, social, ethnic or religious group based on the actions of a very small percentage of people belonging to said group. I think it's wrong in all cases.
Even if 100 people were involved (I think it was a LOT less than that), this would represent 0.02% of the "population" of VW. How is it, in any way, fair, to condemn them all for the sins of a group that has already met their deserved legal consequences? Let's say the entire world stops buying VW because of this and over 600K people lose their jobs. How is that a morally and ethically supportable position?
Of course, everyone is free to reach their own conclusions. I would rather buy an electric vehicle from any company other than Tesla and, VW will certainly be a candidate. No, I don't hate Tesla, I want to support electrification of our transportation system. That can only happen if other companies earn our business. As more competition surfaces we'll have better and better options. Tesla might still win my business. I just want to see what the top ten auto manufacturers have to offer first.
>...they bore the brunt of media attention for something that nearly every auto manufacturer was later found to be doing...
Car manufacturers any company really tries to get away with whatever they can until until caught.
Here in Canada the latest news is Honda vehicles without any heat. People are driving in -20C or lower with no heater.
It's the terribly outdated laws we have in Canada some laws haven't been updated for 60 years. Car makers know this and here in Canada car buyers are often ignored or strung along for months.
Hyundai implemented a warning light to let you know if your engine lost all its oil and was about to erupt in flames. In other countries Hyundai had to replace the engine free of charge. Here in Canada we get "Hey your engine's gonna blow. Sorry"
It's a blinking check engine light. Ours came on steady shortly after we got the firmware update applied when the recall went out and I hadn't been told what to watch for, so I pulled over immediately and called the dealer. Then they told me...
Well, there is a crucial, legal, difference between using illegal devices (VW) and using edge cases and loop holes (everybody else). The first one is illegal cheating, the other smart playing the rules. Both are not ok, so. But only one clearly illegal.
I also bought a VW Golf GTD and ended up having to sell it right as the scandal was heating up.
Apart from the ~$10k I lost and the betrayal by VW executives, I was also upset that the car I bought to try and be a little bit eco-friendly was decidedly not.
I received a paltry payout from the class-action lawsuit, which helped. However I will never buy a VW-group car again. It has also forever jaded me about the lack of punishments for corporate malfeasance.
Are you also going to move your money from all major banks? Same pieces of thieving shits, same lack of accountability and punishments.
USA only went after VW to put political pressure on Germany for their export surplus. It's literally the only reason why suddenly one of the hundreds of large corporations in the West needs to be held accountable for something while dozens of others - European and American - continue rampaging around.
I found it to be a bit of a Snowden moment. Of course they were doing it, why all the surprise? Balancing good performance in emissions tests with the power and brunt that consumers enjoy in the real world had already made turbochargers and variable valve timings widespread instead of simply increasing displacement. In fact there were multiple other scandals in the decades before where loopholes in emissions regulations were treated the same way as in accounting or racing. I believe regulators were complicit by using ineffectual metrics like NEDC - no car buyer really expects to reach the quoted performance.
my second favorite car was my TDI Beetle Convertible (2013) and I would be more than willing to line up to buy a BEV version of the same. The closest it appears I will get is an Audi TT which may be the first mass production convertible to be available; the Tesla Roadster of past doesn't count.
Their current BEV platform is a good first shot, I am disappointed in the lack of front trunk but I expect they will eventually go that way. The real issue this platform suffers from but should be a software fix is that they don't support auto negotiation with charging stations. Even Ford is able to do so with Electrify America yet VW who backed it cannot.
As for the name change, its fitting provided they quickly move to an all electric fleet. There are some nice variations of the ID.* platform coming and the .Buzz is the neatest of them all in my book. By quickly I mean get there five years before everyone else.
I always owned Toyotas and Nissans but when I got together with my SO, I sold my last Toyota (for a spectacular price even though it had quite a lot km) and we kept her VW. Afterwards we bought another one.
The sheer amount of issues those cars had was astonishing. From bad electronics to just terrible manufacturing (water running down somewhere along the doors and causing mold inside for example) really cured me from VW and German cars altogether. We sold the VW when that emission thing came up and it looked like we might not be able to drive in our city with it anymore (Germany). Now we own a Hyundai Ioniq and it's great. I can even flash the firmware or update maps myself. The amount of electronic stuff that came inclusive is something you can only dream of with German manufacturers.
I'm never going back from Japanese/Korean cars again.
> they bore the brunt of media attention for something that nearly every auto manufacturer was later found to be doing
Maybe a better answer would be holding ALL of the automakers to task like we felt needed to be done with VW, instead of giving all of the parasitic capitalists a free pass to do it all over again.
Nah, they very just too cheap to install large enough AdBlue tanks and too greedy to allow people fill the small tanks up themselves. Or they were unable to come up with engines meeting emission standards.
> I later learned that the more accurate story is that they bore the brunt of media attention for something that nearly every auto manufacturer was later found to be doing
Even worse is now that every diesel car and truck comes with extremely unreliable and expensive to keep operational DPFs in place of the defeat devices.
Now people who live in areas that do emissions testing are forced to use less efficient vehicles, and people who don't are just removing the DPFs (rather than paying thousands of dollars every few months in repairs) and putting out more emissions than defeat device era vehicles.
A lot of ignorance surrounds this subject, and blind environmentalism has directly lead to a worse outcome than the previous status quo.
> What they did was absolutely reprehensible, but I later learned that the more accurate story is that they bore the brunt of media attention for something that nearly every auto manufacturer was later found to be doing -
> That doesn't make it any less wrong, but it does put them back on par with just about every other auto manufacturer in my mind. And it does seem (as others have cited) like there was some genuine change that followed.
Thanks for bringing that to our attention, but I think there’s a slight chance they might be aware already.
They were the first discovered by ICCT, and the media latched onto that. They should've waited to release their findings because their subsequent test results went widely unnoticed.
Actively cheating on test environment vs not good at real usage is very different. In latter case, possibly test and regulation should be improved to fit real usage.
Okay, this is a bit much. I know you came to realize all the car companies were doing it, so relatively speaking, it evens out when it comes to image. But this concept of hating a company over false marketing, it's a "and cows moo" moment. All big companies lie about their performances and benefits. Every. Single. One. Who would have guessed people would lie to make money... what a revelation. It's extremely naïve to feel hurt by a company trying to gain the edge over another by lying. That's some weird identity tying consumerism right there.
It was already an old joke when George Carlin did his stand up bit on marketing terms bs and that was some 20 years ago. It's time to grow up. No company is immune from this attitude either. Tech is fraught with it too. WeWork, Theranos are the nice examples. But remember, before it became publicly okay to rag on them, there were folks pointing out the bullshit. Folks who weren't believed because they were so negative about "wanting to change the world". Any time a company tries to play the, "We're making the world a better place" card, whether environmental, social, whatever, it's safe to assume bullshit is afoot. Plays out all the time.
How about we stop accepting this status quo? People will lie to make money, but we don't have to make it a socially acceptable practice.
In fact, to make money, people just do whatever makes money. If they lie to make money, it means lying is making them money. If we could raise the costs of lying, for example by being much more eager to punish deceptive advertising with high fines, people would lie less.
Humans have been lying for personal gain for only a short amount of time. I guess yea, we should all just decide that lying is bad. That's a novel idea.
Humans have been lying for as long as they've been human, but they've also shunned this behavior for just as long. It's destructive to both individuals and communities.
The system of private profit is what gave them the motivation to lie. It is not a natural law. Transportation could be nationalized. What we regard as corruption in the public sphere is literally the stated goal of the private sphere.
The Voltswagen text badge will be on EVs only, but the gas cars will still be sold through the Voltswagen US branding. The gas cars will keep the classic VW logo.
Their brand isn’t tainted in the US at all. You’ll see the Atlas everywhere - 160,000 sold in the last 2 years. That’s about half of Ford Explorer sales and about the same as Chevy Tahoe.
It's not tainted in Europe either. Sales are healthy and you see cars from the full range (Skoda, Seat, VW, Audi) aplenty. The overlap between car buyers and outrage bubble subscribers might be limited.
if you want a 3 row suv, the atlas is like 8-10k cheaper for the same amount of car than the others. and it doesn’t look bad. they needed something bigger than the toureg and it works
I had a VW diesel. It was mostly a good car and got great mileage and then they paid me a great price to take it back. Probably my best car experience.
I'd consider a VW again, but I'm also kind of not interested in the models they have anytime soon; I replaced their wagon with a minivan and I'm not going back; the eBus is cute, but doesn't seem as useful. VW hasn't sold a pickup in a long time, and I don't expect to replace the low cost off-lease plugin hybrid with carpool stickers (VW had models with stickers, but nothing off-lease when I was shopping)
> Their brand is so tainted in the US that they're renaming it.
If they changed the name because of how people perceive them, they would have pick a name which is different than the current name, not the same name changing only one letter :)
They do it, because they want to get the valuation of a electric car company
Hard to believe that most Americans care much about the Dieselgate.
If they did, how do you explain the massive amount of SUVs and pickups carrying a single lonely driver that you can see everyday on America's streets and highways?
Other than a highly educated and modernized young urban minority, I would bet that most Americans are not that worried about emissions.
It's also going to look really silly in 20 years when every auto manufacturer is doing electric vehicles. It'll be like Ford boasting that they run on unleaded gasoline.
Very few Americans would even consider a diesel passenger car. They just are not popular here ouside of a tiny niche. That's the irony of the emissions scandal -- there aren't enough passenger diesel cars on the road in the USA that it made any real difference anyway.
Americans don't care about diesel cars, and they for the most part didn't care about the emissions scandal.
A friend in Germany said he trusts VW even more after the scandal, because it showed their engineering cleverness. And also because they cared for their customers and gave them even better performance than the government allowed.
In general, VW has a good, somewhat inflated reputation in Germany + parts of EU. In my experience, the cars are quite solid and reliable, albeit considered a bit boring. But you can also buy a Seat or Skoda which is basically the same car with a different exterior but cheaper...
Maybe the issue is that they are different cars in the US. VW didn't have a Jetta in Germany for years. I owned a Golf MK3 convertible in the US, and I felt it was of lesser quality than similar VWs for the European market.
Different pollution, not necessarily more. Tuning the engine for more fuel efficiency generates more nitrogen oxides (above the legal limit in this case) and less carbon dioxide.
Your flaw is the assumption that all, or even most, customers prefer the non-tangible idea of "reducing pollution" to the tangible experience of greater performance.
That's exactly the problem with the public's understanding of pollution [1]. If they can't see people dying in front of their eyes, they won't believe it...
Going to second and extend TheAdamAndChe's assessment in the US to include the Audi division as well. It seems electrical/electronics are the main quality area.
I had an S5 with dash lighting issues, console control issues, premature clutch failure (to be fair the previous owner could have roasted it), a nearly new SQ5 with a failed cabin blower fan and more console issues. My sister-in-law had a Jetta with aggregate months in the shop for variety of engine management and other electronics issues. My nephew had a CC that broke a seal and the resulting oil leak wasn't detected by the oil pressure sensor and he seized the engine (also had a fuel pump failure). These are the only VWs in the extended family.
Now I have an F150 with way too many electronics in it for a pickup truck...fingers crossed.
Here in Germany VW is also considered pretty reliable and obviously has a huge network of service stations. But I'm pretty sure that's a pretty biased perspective.
Name a German brand that isn't expensive and difficult to maintain. German car manufacturers have the strongest marketing departments in the world and people will swear blind that their vehicle is reliable and costs nothing to maintain. It's incredibly difficult to get car owners to be honest about how much it really costs them and how reliable their vehicle really is.
Another problem is people don't know any better. It's not like the average person has owned cars from all the major brands for enough time for things to go wrong with them. Most people own only a few cars over their entire life. I think this is particularly true with brands like VW. People just don't know any better and think it's normal for a car to be a money pit.
Cars are a strange thing. Very quickly after getting a car it becomes an essential part of life. When the bill comes through to repair whatever has gone wrong, there's no choice but to pay it. You can't just choose to not pay because it's too expensive. People take their car to the garage where it's essentially held captive until they pay the ransom.
I own a VW myself but I'll never own one (or any other German car) ever again. I will be going back to Japanese cars next time. Honda or Toyota.
I think a lot of people's opinions on cars continue to be based on anecdotal experiences.
I owned 2 VWs in my life, my first, a 1999 Golf was an amazing car. It felt solid and was super reliable right up until I T-boned someone who made an illegal turn and it got written off. I drove an Acura Integra for years after that and had just tonnes of quality issues where it was needing constant maintenance. As soon as I was able to, I bought another VW, a 2003 GTI which I drove with only 1 major repair (AC Compressor) in the 200,000kms I put to it (sold it to a friend at 330,000kms, it still hasn't needed repairs).
I went to a Mazda most recently, but I can't say anything about its reliability since I just bought it in December and only have 5,000kms on it so far.
But my experience, and those among my friends (I was part of a local VW enthusiast club) is that the cars are fine. But the kicker is you need to stay on top of your maintenance. If you skimp on the regular work, you end up paying for it in the end. I had to do various work on the car merely due to its age, but ultimately I loved the VW GTI. It was solid and reliable for me.
"But my experience, and those among my friends (I was part of a local VW enthusiast club) is that the cars are fine. But the kicker is you need to stay on top of your maintenance. If you skimp on the regular work, you end up paying for it in the end. "
This is the absolute truth about most modern cars. The main thing I look for now in a used car is parts availability and how well the car has been maintained.
> Another problem is people don't know any better. It's not like the average person has owned cars from all the major brands for enough time for things to go wrong with them. Most people own only a few cars over their entire life. I think this is particularly true with brands like VW. People just don't know any better and think it's normal for a car to be a money pit.
This is odd coming from a person who is making a sweeping judgment based on owning one car. My family and I have owned mk4, mk5, and mk6 VWs. Never had to bring any of them in for anything other than standard maintenance. I have a newish BMW now and my folks have a lightly used Mercedes. So far everyone's happy there too.
VWs also have a pretty corporate, standard chassis of parts that's reused across almost all of VW's and much of Audi's cars. There should always be cheap parts available from third parties given the number of models interchanging the same parts under the hood. BMWs (and probably Mercedes too) definitely are more expensive to repair and maintain. IMO they tend to over-engineer, and that comes with both good and bad consequences.
you also have to ask "reliable compared to what?". my first car was a golf tdi. the only maintenance cost was the annual service. it never got close to 100k miles though because vw had to buy it back from me in the dieselgate settlement. statistically, I'm sure a toyota corolla is a much more reliable car, and I would have replaced it with one if that's all I cared about. but I've driven a few of those, and golfs are much more pleasant to spend time in, both behind the wheel and in the passenger seat.
there's an inherent tradeoff between performance, reliability, comfort, and price. once people find their preferred set of tradeoffs, they inevitably start making comments on the internet about how they don't understand why everyone doesn't buy their favorite brand.
Which Corolla did you drive as the new ones are pretty performant? I've got the 2 litre hybrid with 200nm torque from each engine and a combined bhp of 186 (could be ~305bhp and 400nm of torque if remapped as it has a 2 litre 200bhp petrol engine with 200nm of torque and a 105bhp electric engine with 195nm of torque but you'll lose linear acceleration and the fuel efficiency that Toyota equipped it with) with good mpg, MacPherson suspension at the front, and multi linked individual suspension at the back, lower centre of gravity and 52.5:47.5 weight distribution for better cornering (and cornering assist). All in all a nice car that is pretty performant and has good features.
last time I drove a corolla was several years ago, probably a 2017 model. it wasn't an awful car, but to me, it felt like a step down in driving dynamics over the tdi I was forced to get rid of. I believe that model made about the same peak power as my old tdi, but obviously at a much higher rpm. the steering felt vague, etc. I was also cross-shopping a gti (whose price was very depressed at the time), so it wasn't entirely a fair comparison.
2019 was the release of their first performance model. With the hybrid option there's no turbo lag (that gti's are notorious for) and the steering is very sharp in sports mode (can also create custom profiles to adapt steering, suspension and dampners to your own likings). The hybrid model is better compared against the gte which has very similar specs to the gti.
The gte when I tested seemed heavy and the brakes were spongy compared to the gti (regenerative brakes but the corollas aren't spongy like that) and it was evident when the electric motor switched off.
I didn't realize they now had a performance model, thanks for sharing. tbh I'm probably going rwd on my next car (very interested in the new brz/86), but I'll keep it in mind.
I'm in Canada and my last car was a Volkswagen Eos. I'm unlikely to buy another VW, for reasons which have nothing to do with the emissions scandal.
A few years ago I had to spend ~$10k to replace all the roof seals and repair damage after water leaked into the interior. I bought the vehicle new and diligently lube the seals according to the owners manual.
Last month my girlfriend found a piece of a suspension spring that broke off. I took it into the dealer, who replaced the front springs and shocks. I specifically asked them to check the rear ones, which they said were fine. Also asked about any undercarriage rust, which they said wasn't bad, and in line with what they'd expect for a 10 year old car.
Two weeks later this larger chunk of a rear spring fell off while I was driving:
I've had other minor issues. eg. Ever since the new seals were installed, one window sometimes takes multiple tries to close right, despite several attempts to correct.
It's a fun little car and the Service department has been very accommodating, but all in all the money I've spent on repairs could easily have paid the bump to buy the BMW hardtop instead.
After the last incident I bought a Toyota RAV4 with green Consumer Reports reliability ratings across the board. VW has a lot to prove if they want me back as a customer.
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So, did they take it down, or is VW really blocking European countries?
EDIT: it's back up now. Site was probably just hugged to death.
Can confirm it is still up and working for me. I am located in the continental US with an IP that nominally appears to be US based. Maybe they have configured CloudFront in an "interesting" way.
I first thought that it was a pretty poor decision considering the brand value of Volkswagen, but then I remembered that I've used the phrase "Volkswagen engineering" at work to refer to a suggestion that we optimise our application to work better in customer benchmarks.
The same thought crossed my mind. Then I thought - could they have done this now to gauge feedback, stick with it if it works, and write it off as an April fools joke if there's too much backlash? That feels like the next level of chess here :)
> Founded in 1955, Voltswagen of America, formerly Volkswagen of America, Inc., is an operating unit of Volkswagen Group of America and a subsidiary of Volkswagen AG
So Voltswagen is a unit of Volkswagen Group of America? That's not confusing to say at all... I feel like having your subsidiaries name differ by one letter (which both looks and is pronounced similarly) is a bold choice. Too bad, I liked the Volkswagen name.
Reminds me of the "Siemens Healthineers" madness. German companies are really good ruining perfectly fine brands (look e.g. at the new BMW logo), so I wouldn't be suprised if this was real. If they really want to change the name why not just use "Volta", which at least is short.
I don't know if anyone else took like 3 paragraphs to realize this, but point is Volkswagen is is changing their name to Voltswagen -- as in VOLTS wagon - as in electricity.
I hate to admit this but I somehow couldn't see the change until I got to this quote:
“We might be changing out our K for a T, but what we aren't changing is this brand’s commitment to making best-in-class vehicles for drivers and people everywhere,” said Scott Keogh, president and CEO of Voltswagen of America.
Getting VW Jetta was the worst decision I've ever made, new or old doesn't matter because all of them have countless problem. Add to that emission scandal... Yeah, I won't exchange my old honda civic even for new VW because Japanese cars are affordable and reliable.
Got a Subaru Outback 10 days ago. After I saw this, I told my wife that will probably be the last vehicle we buy that is not at least a plug-in hybrid.
We had also test-driven a Toyota Avalon Hybrid, but the Subaru was a much better value and had more vertical trunk space, AWD, and every safety/convenience feature we could imagine getting (and some we weren't even aware of) without buying a $70k+ Lexus/BMW/Mercedes.
I really wish Subaru made plug-in hybrids, hopefully they will by the time our minivan is 8-9 years old.
It’s a lot of R&D to make a hybrid, and the non-Prius sales have been…less than stellar. Now, Subaru has an environmental outdoorsy image, so they could probably market better than most, but it’s probably awfully expensive for them. And in the short term, they are selling everything they can make, and they might not want to mess with the production lines that much.
Subaru already has a Crosstrek plug-in hybrid, but it's not available very widely. I would have been interested if I'd known they existed before buying my current car, but they're only available in certain states with seemingly low stock.
I wish Subaru didn't go all-in on touch for critical controls like climate and radio. It may be the #1 reason I don't look to them for my next vehicle.
I used to say I would never buy a phone without a physical keyboard. My last phone with a physical keyboard was the original Moto Droid, which I lost in 2012.
A touch interface in a car is nice for reaching all kinds of weird settings and hopefully make good ux for maps and stuff. But for direct control it sucks. The car I'm driving now I have no way to adjust the AC without multiple screen touches (switch to AC screen, wait, click the small - button multiple times to decrease temperature, click + button multiple times to increase fan speed).
I'm all for nice touch screens, just keep some knobs as well.
Understood, but I think the ability to adjust things tactile is more important in a driving scenario. Also, The UI lag on some of these infotainment systems feels like a 2010 iphone running iOS 13.
If only one could update the processor in their infotainment the way one does a phone, instead of having to buy a new car.
You raise a valid concern. At least in the Outback, a lot of things can be done with voice commands. It's not lightning-fast, but when driving, that's safer than both a touch-screen and physical buttons/switches.
Aside from the odd naming change, the main purpose of a move like this is to signal to employees the extent that the organization is making a shift. It may especially be necessary for such a long standing organization such as VW.
+1 The cynics here are a bit blind to how deep rooted the intent to change must be, down to changing the name of the company. Win or lose, this is strictly better for humanity than the gas fueled past
1. Some young VP convinced the company to do it; that person will only last a couple years before they move on. The company will change its name back shortly.
2. It’s an April fools joke that accidentally got published too early.
If memory services, that marque is owned by General Motors and the modern version of the Speedwagon are GMC trucks. Would be catchy to actually release a new vehicle with the Speedwagon model name.
VW is really pushing EVs. In my neighborhood in Germany there are already many, many ID.3 and ID.4. It's a city near Wolfsburg (VW HQ), that might influence that as well.
I don’t know how ppl can think that this is real. VW group is the biggest or second biggest car producer in the world.
People really think they would rename to something so silly. This is the equivalent of Musk twitting about doge
A shocking change in their current direction. One hopes they have the capacity to close the circuit on this. But beyond this press release, they really have to charge forward to transform themselves.
Perhaps VW should focus on taking slave labor out of their supply chain. One could argue that their decision to work with Nazis was compelled b/c VW is a German company. What's their excuse for using slaves from a second genocide?
That's nice. The original name represented the then German government and Nazi Party Leader Adolf Hitler to create a car for the perfect Nazi family as presented in his vision.
Assuming this is a good faith question, the pollution generated by ICE cars driving 1+ metre away from me pollutes the air I breathe in a much more concentrated way than the pollution generated by a power plant 10+ miles away.
Air pollution in cities is a real problem that nobody really talks about because there's no easy solutions.
I don't drive an EV, because it's not practical / affordable for me yet. I hope this changes soon.
Besides the fact that a coal-burning plant is more efficient, one difference is a cleaner city. Another difference is that it can be charged from other sources, e.g. solar at home. Another difference is that the grid is typically a mix, not just coal. And another difference is that the battery is basically an abstraction which abstracts away the power supply so this becomes a different (easier) problem to fix.
If WV's point is that they are emphasizing their they make electrical cars, and the assumption is that those are better for the environment than all other cars, then it's fair to question that assumption. If 90%+ of our power came from zero-carbon sources like nuclear then it would be a fair point but we're a LONG way from that.
If you want to know there’s plenty of reliable sources like the doe (and if you want confirmation bias rather than facts, there’s plenty of unreliable sources)
Last time someone made a comment like yours, I actually tried googling and there’s a doe site that actually tells you the carbon emissions by state for an ev, hybrid or normal gas car given that states specific energy sources.
Even W Virginia, the worst state I could find, having about 90% coal, gives much lower emissions for an ev than a gas car. And that’s with the current mix. It’s only getting better from here. And that’s the worst state!
Gasoline will always come from dead dinosaurs and plants but electricity doesn't come from 100% coal. And the ratio dropping changing fast as other forms get more inexpensive.
Gasoline also comes from corn or anything else that can be distilled to ethanol. For greater calorific efficiency we should be looking to biodiesel as the environmental side effects are as minimal, you get more miles per gallon (km per liter), and the production of biodiesel via algae can happen efficiently in places not currently used for livestock grazing or growing crops.
In dirty electricity regions, driving on electricity creates similar climate pollution to gasoline.
Regions that burn mostly coal and natural gas to generate electricity create high levels of climate pollution for each kWh. In Alberta, for example, a Plug-In Prius will cause a similar amount of climate pollution driving on gasoline as it does driving on Alberta's electricity.
Some electric car owners have worked around this problem by putting up their own solar panels, or by purchasing cleaner electricity directly from their utility.
