Hacker News Reader

Comment by gafage | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of how overstated the volkswagen emissions scandal is here in HN. In real life no one gives a shit.

Probably because IRL, people have their own burdens to worry about like their families, careers and paying the bills. Going after a trillion dollar corporation slowly killing them with invisible particles is not first on their agenda but delegate it to the states to handle as that's their responsibility because that's why they pay taxes. The states which don't really do much against major corporations of that size but slap them of the wrist.

I do. I will be a lot more hesitant buying a 'green' vehicle from a company that 1) did not give a damn about switching to electric before Elon transformed the industry. 2) even lied about the pollution they created.

Consumers wanted electric cars a long time ago, those old-timers just denied us because it would've hurt their short-term profits.

... Eh? The first eGolf (ignoring weirdo historical electric Golf variants; VW has occasionally dabbled since the 70s) was delivered a year before the first Tesla S, though for a pilot scheme in California; they didn't hit normal retail til a year or so after. The eUp came out in the same timeframe. Commercial deliveries of Tesla Ses, eUps, and eGolfs all started within a couple of months of each other. By the time Tesla got around to launching an electric car that didn't cost like 100,000 EUR, VW had been making such cars for years.

I think VW maybe made a marketing mistake by making the eGolf and eUp so... non-obvious (there was really almost no way to tell they weren't a normal Golf/Up from the outside); it lead people to believe that the ID.3/4/5 were their first electric cars.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com