I know this is more about switching from ICE to electric, but this is kinda hilarious
Feedback about the company’s new capacitive multifunction steering wheel was so overwhelmingly negative that last year, Schaffer promised to ditch the design. Meanwhile, much of the range—both electric and gas-powered—is saddled with temperature and volume controls that are touch-sensitive but not backlit, making them all but impossible to use at night.
It’s not that they didn’t know it wasn’t very good. But it was a money saver, and they thought people would accept it because “modern”.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Isn’t just a rebrand cars?
Their duster model is a copy of Renault Duster. They didn’t even bother to change the name.
I had never heard of Renault Duster before (nor seen one), so I looked it up. The Renault Duster is apparently a Dacia Duster with mostly cosmetic changes, for sale outside the eu, typically released later than the Dacia Duster is released in the eu. So it’s the same car, but different brand badges + cosmetics depending on the country were it’s sold. They are so similar, that I’d just call it the same car, not a copy.
Interesting, I thought it’s the other way around.
A part of the issue is younger generations don’t necessarily know what goes on behind the scenes of their phones or laptops.
Damned millennials. Forcing VW to lower quality and cheat emissions like that.
Shiny and the latest tech is sexy and where sales are driven from.
How’s that working out for ol’ veedub?
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…
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”.
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
How much have they spend on dieselgate?
No one wanted touch buttons.
Also, a 4-cylinder engine for atlas is a joke.
Fuck around and find out
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
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
Surprise ! workers pay the price for the 30 billion they spunked on fines and compensation for cheating diesel emissions.
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.
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:
- Pulled too close to one of those parking dividers and the bumper barely scuffed up onto it. All the plastic attachment clips in the front bumper snapped and the bumper sagged a couple inches from there out. They quoted me something like $500 to replace some plastic clips.
- Fuel injectors sprayed gas onto the engine block causing smoke to come out from under the hood
- Recall on the turn signals
- Fabric in the roof of the car bubbled up and sagged down
- Labels on the center console (radio/climate control/etc) started peeling off
- Lid of the center console broke
- Glove compartment door broke
- Stereo broke
- Cupholders broke
- Driver side door speaker went
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.
Tou definitely should be replacing your brakes and tires more than once every 8 years
I drive around 6k mi a year and get them checked often. I rode my bike to work instead.
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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.
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.
