https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/11/job-losses-likely-at-vw-as-the-peoples-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...
That vehicle had a recall out to replace the badly-designed shifter. It was ignored.
The fix would have been free.
That doesn’t excuse the fact that the design was clearly idiotic in the extreme from its inception.
It was bad, yes. Not debating that, and I’m glad that the design was changed and existing owners could get the shifter replaced at no cost to them.
However, it’s frustrating to see that people so often ignore recalls and then are injured or killed in a way that would have been avoided had they done the free recall. I usually feel sad when I think of deaths like that because the death is just so final and was easy to avoid.
People have recently died to exploding airbag inflators, even though the Takata recall has been in the news for years, and even if a vehicle has had multiple owners, the publicity means that chances are that the current owner has seen at least a headline about it. Yet clearly people aren’t getting the recall work done, and they’re dying because of it.
Is it a hassle to take a car in for repair? Yep. Had to have mine serviced due to a recall for something that hadn’t manifested on my car in my own use. But given that the alternative could have been very bad (the car’s software was updated to ensure that it would shift into park more reliably when there was a rollaway risk, if the driver didn’t do so manually), I dealt with having a loaner for a day when the update took longer than expected.
Designers sometimes make bad choices. Regulations are written in blood, it’s said, because it’s often tragedy that leads to changes. But I don’t think it very likely that shifters like that will make it past design reviews again. It’ll be some other bad decision that causes the next big recall.
Man, that's a yikes.
I hate those knobs, but I'm also lucky to just drive a simple standard car right now. It has a touch screen for sat nav (Carplay/Android Auto), but volume and climate controls are all physical.
Labels are not safe. Drivers need to keep their eyes on the road.
Maybe you are right, but it better not be because of a label
Bro, sorry to say this, but you should think a bit about what the actual point is the person you're replying to is trying to make, and reconsider whether you really are that much smarter than everyone else.
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.
The Fusion of the 2010-13 generation was peak for this car in my opinion. I owned a few from this generation and earlier. While I still after 12 years of ownership on my 2011 Fusion still need to look down at a block of buttons to figure out which climate control option I'm choosing it's not this nightmare or the newer touchscreen nightmare either.
It's too bad Ford left behind the simpler but trusty tech for flash and glam that wasn't practical but this has been a repeating cyclical pattern for them for a long time.
When I think back to older Fords it was slide controls. Jeep had the twist knobs along with others. Those knobs honestly are still the best controls for safety and ease of use but it's form over function these days.
We had a 2013 as well, the dome lights were weird capacitive touch. They made those physical buttons in the next iteration, which was an excellent idea.
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".
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 have a 2019 e-golf which has slightly better range, and I love it! The adaptive cruise and CarPlay make it an excellent commuter car.
It really truly is a great car! Fun to drive and the perfect size. After moving, however, my commute was landing me at home with 5 miles of range left, figured it'd only be a couple of years before that ran down to 0, so I upgraded before I had to deal with it. If VW still had an eGolf for sale, I would have picked it up without question.
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.
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.
To be fair, didn’t it eventually come out that pretty much everyone was cheating? VW just got caught first.
Which other manufacturers were cheating?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
Check the "Other manufacturers" heading.
Basically all of them.
But this is what happen when you have rules set by people that think they can ignore physical laws and somehow make it work.
To be fair, their reputation for having expensive parts fail right after the odometer ticked past the number on the warranty was earned long before dieselgate.
Dieselgate really worked out for me. The car hadn't started to break down yet and we were just starting to need a minivan when it all came out.
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?
Dacia sales keep increasing every year. This does show there is an increasing demand for simple cars.
Isn’t just a rebrand cars?
Their duster model is a copy of Renault Duster. They didn’t even bother to change the name.
I had never heard of Renault Duster before (nor seen one), so I looked it up. The Renault Duster is apparently a Dacia Duster with mostly cosmetic changes, for sale outside the eu, typically released later than the Dacia Duster is released in the eu. So it's the same car, but different brand badges + cosmetics depending on the country were it's sold. They are so similar, that I'd just call it the same car, not a copy.
The line extensions into higher end never worked and required a new brand for these higher level offerings in the end. They never learned from this lesson. Brand identity can win the day but also lose it all for you when you try to shift from a popular product.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that VW didn't understand they needed a luxury brand for higher-end cars? 'Cause they've got Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini and Bentley...
Yes but at first they tried to release the high end product under the VW brand. The Phaeton was one of the best engineered vehicles failures ever produced as many did not want to buy a higher end car with the VW economy badge on it.
Brand does count for a lot even when a lower economy brand has a superior made product, the masses cannot always move beyond that. I'm sure there are many that loved that VW Phaeton and were happy for owning it, but commercially it didn't fit the brand expectations on the market in the early 2000s.
The Phaeton was a weird aberration that I agree should've been a different brand, but it definitely wasn't "at first." Audi had been owned by VW for decades before the Phaeton came out.
Well that's a more blatant recent model. Paying $70,000 for a VW wasn't something many would even consider in the early 2000s and yes Audi existed so it was a really odd double down on line extension of the VW line.
The earlier creep was from the original identity of VW with the it may be ugly but it gets you there marketing. For it's time was a great way to describe the brand and the place in the market. Think of the older VW buses, rabbits, Transporters, etc. Not beautiful in relation to cars of their day but bloody practical.
Due to markets and human conditioning they weren't going to show up and copy Ford or GM designs and expect to have a chance at taking market share. Their positioning in the lower end of the market made it their's for a long time like the upstart Japanese.
They all came in with smaller, economical to run cars and the big 3 struggled to compete. And when the big 3 tried, they were terrible at it for quite a while. The mini Mustang comes to mind along wth the Monza and the Pinto. Cult vehicles but not market darlings. Cadillac went down market with Chevy products rebranded at Cadillac and they sold terribly. A great way to hurt a upmarket brand.
At least AMC tried different things due to the success of their Jeep brand with luxury 4x4s and 4x4 cars. New markets at the time but they were always hurting for funding. They only survived for so long due to the Jeep brand.
Now all the brands overlap with models and offerings a great deal more but there are still things they are all respectively good at. Full size trucks are mostly a Big 3 market despite excellent product from Toyota. There's a large segment of the US population that doesn't consider Toyota products to be real trucks despite many saying they are far better quality. The list goes on...
Sounds like management problem, not an engineering one, but management doesn't have to pay: everybody else does. Typical.
Same will happen to other German car manufacturers. This is what happens if lobbyists and corrupt politicians wank each other off behind closed doors. No incentives to go with the times and trying to squeeze out as much money short term as possible
BS, that's what happens with shit management. They gambled all in with EVs and it failed big time, because nobody wants them. They also gambled all in with touch and screwed their base over and also they pulled everything out of the cars that made them good cars - and also "boring".
Their problem isn't investing in EVs. Their problem is that their EVs are shit and also expensive so, obviously, no one will buy them. Besides, EV sales are growing more and more each year. I don't know where you've been living dude
It's probably not just because ev. Golf has become a high end brand even before that. Not really a peoples car if parts cost a lot.
Yeah, even back when I liked VW, I understood the car itself might be priced in my range, but the parts cost similar to BMW parts, where there's certainly some enthusiast gouging going on.
And then the emissions scandal came out when shit like that was getting more important to me.
A friend of a friend was offered a general counsel position at VW. They told him something like "the hours are good unless there's a crisis". Their timing was bad though because while he was still thinking it over, news broke of another layer to their emissions scandal which would have kept him much busier than expected. And they knew that was coming but couldn't say, "we need more lawyers to deal with this coming crisis" but had to instead act as if it's just a normal hire with normal hours. Has much changed from how they were run in the 1930s?
More expensive and less reliable.
I wonder how their management expected increase in sales. Maybe they trusted Joe’s chart.
When they tried to skirt emissions standards, I decided never to buy another VW.
Whether they rolled out EVs or not, these fucks tried to break the law to destroy the planet. They can get fucked.
This is exactly how I feel about VW. Clearly an unscrupulous company that will lie to anyone to make an extra buck. If they were willing to deceive powerful regulatory bodies in a vast conspiracy with the side effect of fucking over the already fucked environment, what hope does the lowly consumer have to trust such an organization. Fuck 'em, they can go out of business for all I care.
Not disagreeing, but you are describing almost every company or corporation above a certain size
Also not disagreeing, but don't give the ones who are proven to be scum a pass because of the assumption the others are also scum. Make them at least work to hide their shit and maybe every now and then they'll decide that something is too risky and make a good choice because they know that even if the law gives them an easy out, they could be dead to a lot of people.
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.
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
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.
I test drove one of those when I was in-between Mazdas just to see if it was better and was disappointed with the handling and power. Plus it was $8k more at the time. The Mazda I bought instead has only needed brakes and tires once in 8 years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
