This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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's the same kind of idiocy that killed Anton Yelchin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or just cheap ones. VW and every other maistream cars are getting unaffordable.
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
Funny how job incomes don’t scale similarly when brands become “competitive”
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.
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.
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!
I can't help but wonder how much of this is still fallout from "DieselGate".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
