Voltswagen of America
media.vw.com
media.vw.com
> 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.
Edit: This German apologizes for an attempt at a humorous / sarcastic comment and will revert to work-machine state at once. Beep boop.
They're still called Long Blockchain; they even changed their ticker symbol to LBCC. I wonder if VW will be as committed.
I dig it ... (speaking as someone who still sees their average cars as steam engine, emission test defeaters)
https://nypost.com/2021/03/30/vw-says-voltswagen-rebrand-was...
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.
"Media outlets ... reported it as news after it was confirmed by unnamed sources within the company, who apparently lied to several reporters."
It's surreal to see it embraced by a company that, just a few years ago, was pushing diesel to the point of a planet-scale fraud.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then... you win?
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=login&p_lang=engli...
Don't see anything in Germany either:
Whois is also less than certain. Domain redirects to a generic parking site.
https://who.is/whois/voltswagen.com
Registered On: 2003-04-18
Expires On: 2021-04-18I 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.
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 Stopped making new Audi A3 e-Trons, removed the hybrid Jetta from their lineup, and only made about 500 outdated (several year old design) eGolfs with a small battery for all of the Canadian market with a year and a half waiting list to get in one.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.
But, yeah, I've owned several VWs and electrical wiring is usually faulty so I'll go with Faultswagen as well.
Not really, it would be pronounced like the v in Vincent, not Wincent.
Are there proper German words that don't read V as F? I've been lead to believe German is strict with phonem/letter combination.
Is that the correction pronunciation now?
But they must have known that people won't know that, so you still have a valid point.
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."
Tip of the hat to Elon.
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.
I’m cautiously optimistic that Volkswagen is signaling a similar change in their mission and leadership’s intent to change.
No, I think this is what happens as the date approaches April 1st.
"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.
If it is a deadpan joke, I kind of like it too. Overall, I can see no reason for outrage of any kind.
How so? "The people's car" seems rather innocuous to me. My only guess would be that it could make some American anti-socialists uncomfortable?
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 -
https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterlyon/2018/07/09/nissan-adm...
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.
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.
> 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.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions/u-s-...
Which is exactly the calculation that their lawyers and executives made, more or less.
You're right that it's a failure of society as a whole. A failure to make bad actors pay for negative externalities.
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 absolutely not the same as a sweatshop, but hollywood has a long track record of ruining children’s lives for profit.
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.
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 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.
I'm not buying this.
Edit: I stand (mostly) corrected:
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.
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.
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.
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"
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/honda-crv-civic-heater-1.59...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-car-recall-inve...
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.
Weren't the cheating VWs extremely fuel efficient (and thus less CO2 emitting), at the cost of emitting something else nasty?
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal#/medi...
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.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/39984/vw-says-its-officially-d...
Which is still…a choice.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/40001/now-the-germans-say-vws-...
April fools!
Their brand is so tainted in the US that they're renaming it.
I imagine it's going to be the only place they'll do it.
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)
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
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/vw-being-rebrand...
German cars have a bad rap in the US for being unreliable and expensive to fix.
I don't think most Americans know about or remember the emissions scandal.
That said, there's plenty of precedent for a product being so tainted that it got renamed.
Comcast becoming Xfinity comes to mind.
Americans don't care about diesel cars, and they for the most part didn't care about the emissions scandal.
I've got a diesel VW Jetta. It has been nothing but a money pit. I'm in the US for reference.
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.
I think the reputation problem is limited to the US.
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.
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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The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner.
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EDIT: it's back up now. Site was probably just hugged to death.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210330121521/https://media.vw....
That's highly unlikely, given that it is on CloudFront. Also that error is not a "too much traffic" error, it's a specific config change.
More likely is that someone accidentally pushed a bad config blocking your country for a little bit.
Maybe the P had a coronary heart-attack from all the grilled food at Big Brunch?
https://www.t-online.de/finanzen/news/unternehmen-verbrauche...
However there are now several other sites claiming it is not a joke.
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.
Because that would be undoing the entire VW brand they've been building for decades at the cost of billions.
Voltswagen is a natural increment to Volkswagen while still maintaining that legacy branding.
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.
Also, apparently not an early April Fool's joke: they confirmed the name change to Car and Driver: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35970854/vw-name-change-v...
So they get the media boost of the brand name change without actually having to suffer any hit from lack of recognition.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcarpenter/2020/08/04/bps-n...
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.
I assume the lack of hybrids and pure electrics is because Subaru is tiny, as far as auto manufacturers go.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/249375/us-market-share-o...
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.
Poe's Law: Corporate Intranet Edition
First fake emissions scandal... now fake name change?
Got to be a joke, there's no way..
Two theories:
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.
Up for grabs: André-Marie Ampère? Faraday? Edison?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_automobile
Interesting:
> Maxwell was one of the first car companies to market specifically to women.
By having 'Volts' can they can grow market share ?
Can anybody think of a similar name change that worked before ?
And, right on brand, VW screwed up the execution...
This has to be the worst branding move I've ever seen, with the exception maybe of Netflix and Qwikster
They will first do a soft revert to “Voltswagen, by Volkswagen” and then a full revert.
Did we even do April Fools last year?
"Ohm-y!" And who was charged with leading this change?
https://www.dw.com/en/volkswagens-uighur-problem/av-55579947 https://newlinesinstitute.org/uyghurs/the-uyghur-genocide-an... https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-from-jews-to-uig...
Exactly what about the mass extraction of lithium is at all sustainable to provide the energy storage for all motorised personal transport?
Im all for electrification where it makes sense, but this seems like a bad pun more than a good idea.
"It's electrifying!"
"thanks, I hate it"
Der Fahrer eines Voltswagen
aber nicht:
Der Führer von Volkswagen
And in case you're wondering, yes the company was founded by the Nazi party. I think it's good they changed the name.
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.
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!
Here you go https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20170417164448/https://www.vanco...
tldr;
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.