Job losses likely at VW as the people’s car brand becomes uncompetitive
Management says high costs and low productivity are a big problem.
I know this is more about switching from ICE to electric, but this is kinda hilarious
Feedback about the company's new capacitive multifunction steering wheel was so overwhelmingly negative that last year, Schaffer promised to ditch the design. Meanwhile, much of the range—both electric and gas-powered—is saddled with temperature and volume controls that are touch-sensitive but not backlit, making them all but impossible to use at night.
Every car I've ever bought had had glaringly terrible design choices that make it obvious nobody in development actually drove the car. This has got to be one of the worst examples of that though.
Has this as a rental car a few years ago... guess which knob I kept reaching for to turn down the volume...
2015 Ford Fusion, the touchscreen is pressure-sensitive, but the physical "buttons" for HVAC right below that are, for some reason, capacitive. Which means you can't really use either one while wearing gloves; you need a bare finger for the buttons, and gloves are too bulky to accurately press the little touchscreen things.
I used to own a 2003 Hyundai Accent (of all things) that I was surprisingly impressed with in terms of interior and interface design. I particularly liked how they managed to fit cup holders suitable for 20oz plastic bottles into the door pockets.
It's not that they didn't know it wasn't very good. But it was a money saver, and they thought people would accept it because "modern".
capacitive multifunction steering wheel
Mercedes has those too... They suck.
I hate car manufacturers so much. First they whine about touch tech not being reliable, then after 10 years they implement the worst possible version of it.
The one thing I can praise Elon for is that he wasn't a dumbass that wanted to use bad 10 year old tech. He does make his fair share of unreliable car but most of that seems to actually not be software related.
You kind of get used to it. It's not as bad as it sounds. At the same time they should absolutely get back to regular buttons. The only thing that should be touch sensitive in a car should be the infotainment screen when it's displaying Android Auto or CarPlay.
Even then I think I'd like it to be a backup.
Both of those things have been acknowledged and will be changed. Cars have very long design cycles, though.
The ID.7 has the new sliders as does the facelift of the ID.4.
Yes, there’s other problems, but this one is already on the way out.
I had a '16 eGolf, loved everything about it except the range. Eventually when my commute got longer I had to upgrade, would go for a 300mi eGolf any day, but they killed it in favor of the bland AF ID.4. No thank you.
I feel pretty similar about the changes at VW. We bought a used 2020 Golf this year and are really happy with it so far. I was kind of tempted by the SportWagen, but we don't need the extra space right now. I'd consider that as our next vehicle, but here in Canada they discontinued that a few years back. They had the Alltrack which might still tempt me but this year they stopped selling that as well as the baseline Golf. So now the closest options to what I would want in the future are the ID.4, the Golf GTI, or the Jetta, none of which appeal to me!
I want to say companies that enshittify get what they deserve, but realistically we’ll just be left with fewer companies that are free to make worse products because there aren’t many alternative options. Google and Amazon both come to mind.
In other words, enshittification is a direct consequence of failure to enforce anti-trust law.
Volkswagen has always been garbage, long before any "late stage capitalism" influences. They're even worse than American cars (well, Chrysler is about as bad as VW). At least American companies embraced influences from Japan starting in the mid-70's, with Ford and GM partnering with Japanese companies, bringing some of the quality influences in from them.
I've worked on most brands since about 1975, VW has never changed quality. There's a reason VW is a meme in the repair biz - their electrics are so bad they always have a light out/dim. Similar to Chrysler in this way - they market shiny/features, but the systems are poorly designed.
Oddly Honda and Toyota don't have these issues, even today.
Ameritrash vehicles are by and far the worst. Japanese > German > Korean > "American"
Imagine that. Get a reputation for cars that are precisely engineered to have expensive parts fail shortly after warranty expiration, and cement that with a brand-wide emissions cheating scandal, and then wonder why no one trusts you.
Boomers only bought your air-cooled offerings because they were cheap. You got no brand goodwill out of the deal.
brand-wide emissions cheating scandal
To be fair, didn't it eventually come out that pretty much everyone was cheating? VW just got caught first.
To be even fairer, having such overly-strict emissions standards for diesels was a bad idea to begin with. Destroying diesels and forcing everyone into gasoline cars instead saved a little bit of pollutants like soot, NOx, and SOx, sure, but came at the expense of much lower efficiency/higher greenhouse gas emissions.
The worst part is that biodiesel burns much cleaner than dino-diesel, but isn't compatible with the fancy injection systems and emissions equipment on "clean diesel" engines. If we had let them keep building the same circa-2000 engine tech, we could've cleaned up the whole fleet at once simply by switching out the fuel (while still keeping the same high efficiency and reducing GHG emissions to net-zero because biodiesel is part of the short-term carbon cycle instead of the long-term one), but now we can't because all the new engines (at least, the few remaining on the market in trucks but not small cars) break if you use more than 10% or so biodiesel in them.
At least in North America I think they were the only brand selling passenger vehicles diesel engines.
That was their identity that made them a high volume seller. It was simple and it was clear what their market position was. The line extensions into higher end never worked and required a new brand for these higher level offerings in the end. They never learned from this lesson. Brand identity can win the day but also lose it all for you when you try to shift from a popular product.
A part of the issue is younger generations don't necessarily know what goes on behind the scenes of their phones or laptops. They are shiny disposable products and this extends to their cars. If the product looks like the similar tech they interface with daily on their phones, it's good for them. They won't have the experience of simpler complex cars that broke down constantly from one thing or another or functions that just don't work period because they cost way to much to fix.
As much as I think vehicles should be made less complex and easier to service it might not be marketable beyond farmers or trades that do their own work on these things. Shiny and the latest tech is sexy and where sales are driven from.
A part of the issue is younger generations don’t necessarily know what goes on behind the scenes of their phones or laptops.
Damned millennials. Forcing VW to lower quality and cheat emissions like that.
Shiny and the latest tech is sexy and where sales are driven from.
How's that working out for ol' veedub?
The line extensions into higher end never worked and required a new brand for these higher level offerings in the end. They never learned from this lesson. Brand identity can win the day but also lose it all for you when you try to shift from a popular product.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that VW didn't understand they needed a luxury brand for higher-end cars? 'Cause they've got Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini and Bentley...
Sounds like management problem, not an engineering one, but management doesn't have to pay: everybody else does. Typical.
Funny how job incomes don’t scale similarly when brands become “competitive”
Same will happen to other German car manufacturers. This is what happens if lobbyists and corrupt politicians wank each other off behind closed doors. No incentives to go with the times and trying to squeeze out as much money short term as possible
BS, that's what happens with shit management. They gambled all in with EVs and it failed big time, because nobody wants them. They also gambled all in with touch and screwed their base over and also they pulled everything out of the cars that made them good cars - and also "boring".
How much have they spend on dieselgate?
Fuck around and find out
Fuck me so much this.
I’ve owned three generations of Seat cars (a popular European VW group brand).
This generation is absolutely atrocious. I’ve honestly got an almost endless list of issues with it - it just does not work. It crashes. It beeps. It blares. It can’t. It won’t. Doesn’t open. Doesn’t lock. Disconnects. Connects when it shouldn’t. Charges for features that seem like they are MVP. Everything is touch. The few things that aren’t aren’t in the right place. In every single way it’s awful.
I will never buy another VW group car and I tell everyone I can how awful it is.
Fuck around and find out indeed.
Got exactly the same story with Skoda. Highlights were "Speed display crapping out mid journey - through Switzerland" or "Steering wheel getting loose". Funnily enough the part that always worked without any issue was the EV part of the PHEV.
Unofficially our (very good) local dealer told us that VW did reduce QA, especially chip wise.
In the end we sued them, they tried to bully us and then they gave in two days before the trial date - we could return the car. Now we drive Hyundai and Volvos exclusively.
No one wanted touch buttons.
Also, a 4-cylinder engine for atlas is a joke.
they got billions to invest into new drive technologies and didn't
they have really tight contracts with all of their suppliers but didn't act in time to get the electric vehicle suppliers into similar contracts
Good Fuck VW. My mom had an 86 Jetta and that thing was the biggest piece of junk on the road. and every time she took it to the dealer to get it fixed they would do the cheapest thing possible. I ended up taking to my local mechanic who fixed it properly for her.
And also be wary of any good deals on some newer model VW's. They got the court case cleared up where a bunch of cars got damaged by sea water and those vehicles which were supposed to have been sold as scrap are now on the road.
Surprise ! workers pay the price for the 30 billion they spunked on fines and compensation for cheating diesel emissions.
I can't help but wonder how much of this is still fallout from "DieselGate".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
Yes
I really liked how the car drove but after owning a 2001 Jetta I'd probably never buy another VW. That car had the worst quality control of any car I've ever seen. It was insane how much stuff broke in that car. I'll stick with Japanese cars if I was in the market for one.
That's how I feel about my 2010 Tiguan. It is just such a piece of shit. I like how it handles but every other day something on its breaking or the electricals acting up. Never again
Yeah it was crazy what went wrong in this thing in the space of a few years before we got rid of it... Just off the top of my head:
There was some other stuff too but it's been a while now. My last car was an Accord that I had for many years and that thing was rock solid. I still miss it but had to sell it when I moved out of the country.
VW quality has been shit for decades. Having worked on most every brand of car, you couldn't give me a VW.
There's a meme about VWs that you can't get all lights to work simultaneously. There's always one that's out/dim, because their electrics suck.
An example of the nonsense they do: on one model the AC circuit had an ecu in the drivers door, which also controlled the door locks and windows. So if your door lock controller died, so did your AC.
No reason for this, there wasn't any automation between windows and AC. Just crappy VW design.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The news organization saw a post on VW's intranet quoting CEO Thomas Schaffer, who blamed low productivity and high costs for the impending cuts.
"With many of our pre-existing structures, processes and high costs, we are no longer competitive as the Volkswagen brand," Schaffer said at a staff meeting.
EVs remain significantly more expensive than an equivalent car with a four-cylinder engine, an effect that's more pronounced in the market segments VW serves.
Lackluster products haven't helped—an ambitious plan by VW Group to master its software destiny has become a chaotic mess, delaying new vehicles in the process.
Feedback about the company's new capacitive multifunction steering wheel was so overwhelmingly negative that last year, Schaffer promised to ditch the design.
VW's board member in charge of human resources told staff that it will look at partial or early retirement agreements but that the majority of the $10.9 billion in cuts would come from savings other than job losses.
The original article contains 315 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 50%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
At least they have the id.buzz coming. I've been waiting to replace my minivan, but so far nothing is better than the wearing out one we have.
