VW is considering axing as many as 30,000 jobs as it scrambles to save billions of euros amid a slowdown in the car market, German media has reported:
The carmaker recently announced it could close some of its German factories for the first time in history as it struggles to reinvent itself for the electric era.
Analysts at Jefferies said VW is considering closing two to three facilities, with as many as five German sites under threat, putting 15,000 jobs at risk.
[...] A VW spokesman said: "We do not confirm the figure. One thing is clear: Volkswagen has to reduce its costs at its German sites.
R&D will likely be hit hard:
While Volkswagen is staying tight-lipped on specifics, Manager Magazin suggested research and development could take a massive hit. If their numbers pan out, roughly 4,000 to 6,000 R&D employees could be cut from the current number of around 13,000.
Previously: VW Turns on Germany as China Targets Europe's EV Blunders
(Score: 5, Insightful) by crm114 on Thursday September 26, @01:06PM (7 children)
From TFA (I know... who reads those)
“This is the only way the brand can offer attractively priced vehicles and still make enough money for future investments.
In other words, the only way you move your company forward is to fire your R&D research.
The world has gone loopy.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday September 26, @01:28PM (6 children)
If you make your own fuel pumps, you need a R+D department for fuel pumps, for the long term
If you're planning on outsourcing all your fuel pumps very soon to XYZ corp whom is paying wages about half what your company pays, perhaps sell the plant to them or perhaps import directly from China, the first people to get the axe are probably R+D because your company has NO long term plans for fuel pumps anymore, then later on, fire the shop floor folks and finally all the management in the former fuel pump department. Probably the last people to get the axe are support personnel, eventually, the IT guy who spent most of his day fixing problems in the fuel pump dept will get the axe because there is no fuel pump dept anymore.
Looking back very long term, in the old days VW seemed to position itself as cheap and simple yet reliable. Since the turn of the century they seemed to try and push to be an aspirational luxury brand wanna be cool euro import, very artsy and very expensive. Maybe they're making a long term run to sell to the 3rd world, where artsy flower vase holder on the dash won't sell as well as cheap, indestructible, reliable, and simple to work on engines.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Thursday September 26, @02:49PM (5 children)
Unfortunately around the turn of the century all the major European automakers seem to have switched away from engineering to being marketing focused. To give an example: Once upon a time VW built cheap reliable easy to maintain cars, Mercedes built reliable expensive limousines that were harder to maintain. Their brands reputation reflected this, so if you wanted a reliable car you bought one of those (depending on your taste and wallet size).
However around the 2000's they seemed to switch into trying to sell me their brand as some kind of fashion/lifestyle choice. The quality of the vehicle itself became irrelevant, all their effort went into "branding" and marketing. VW positioned itself as "artsy, cutesy yet aspirational" primarily targeting a female audience (especially with the "new beetle" they released in the late 90's). Mercedes positioned itself as "snooty and highbrow", the idea being that if you buy a Mercedes it means you "made it", I guess they were targeting people with inferiority complexes.
They seemed to believe they could sell a polished turd if it had their badge on it, and indeed Mercedes did try, making cars of such poor quality that by the end of the 00's there was an actual backlash against the company for the poor quality of their cars. They promised to bring quality and reliability back, the scandal subsided but to this day they are still found near the bottom of reliability statistics.
The problem is neither one of them actually care about the quality of the vehicles they produce. In fact I think they deliberately don't want to make cheap reliable cars that can be easily maintained as that eats into their profits. Their ideal is that every 3 years you scrap your old car and buy a new one from them on lease, so why design a car to last longer than the lease length?
The people however don't want that, so more and more of them either buy older cars built before the change, or they buy Chinese, Korean or Japanese cars, of which the first two provide the "cheap and easy to maintain" mantra and the latter being the more "expensive but reliable" option.
So a lot of European manufacturers are struggling to sell their wares, and no doubt will be angling for either a bail-out, or for the competition to be banned or hit with tariffs so that peoples choices are restricted.
(Score: 4, Informative) by pTamok on Thursday September 26, @03:53PM (1 child)
Branding varies by market, but in the UK VW certainly used to market themselves as familiar and reliable. In one advert, more reliable than the boyfriend.
They dropped the ball massively with the ID.3. At launch, the software did not work, and VW have had to row back from putting all the controls (including the climate controls) on the touchscreen. Touchscreens in cars are an absolutely insane idea - no haptic feedback, and you have to take you eyes of the road to use them. They should be illegal.
The EU really ought to look at the repairability of cars, too. Not only are there lots of components unique to the cars, they are horribly expensive. Cars should be designed for maintainability and repairability - not using unique, expensive 'modules' per car, so that a standard microswitch failing in a window position sensor doesn't require a whole new door. (I am not joking).
3rd party replaceable and upgradeable batteries should be a requirement, too.
EVs should last longer than ICEs.
As it is, I don't even have a choice of (built in) navigator in my car - and the built in one is terrible in some ways. It's basically software, but the car is ever more locked down than an Aplle iPhone - so I don't have a choice of what to use, unless I lash up an external navigator. This, too, is crazy. The built-in media player is also lousy, and again, I can't replace it.
The move to EVs had coincided with the use of more software in cars as 'driver aids', which vary considerably in quality and effectiveness, and are not free. In my current car:
- The software to recognise speed limit signs doesn't work properly, so flashes up warnings inappropriately way too often.
- The automatic cruise control, even at it's most distant setting, puts the car too close to vehicles in front. This can be seen with HGVs especially, as the recommendation is that you do not drive so close that you cannot see both mirrors of the tractor unit. This means the HGV driver can see you, otherwise you are in one of the several HGV driver's blind spots, which is a safety issue.
- I have the lane-keeping software disabled, for when it is enabled, the car gets as twitchy as a methamphetamine addict - it doesn't look far enough ahead to make smooth course corrections.
- I am unable to turn off the simulation of engine-braking. This means that if I take my foot of the accelerator pedal, the car slows down unnaturally fast - using regenerative braking - which means I am unnecessarily converting kinetic energy into battery charge, only to be used again (with round-trip losses) immediately afterwards. I don't need to pretend I have an ICE in the car, thank you. It wastes energy.
Car manufacturers have lost the plot. Things that should be easy and simple to replace are unnecessarily expensive and difficult, and the software quality is lousy. No wonder they have problems selling their wares.
.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday September 29, @12:14PM
Seeing as a lot of adverts seem to portray the male as generally childish and useless, "more reliable than the boyfriend" might not exactly singing VWs praises, marketing wise XD
Not sure when they used to market themselves like that though, round these parts of Europe VW likes to market itself as a "poor mans Mercedes", kind of "you don't get the luxury, but you get the quality", which given Mercedes actual quality is once again not singing their praises if you know what the real situation is.
I agree it should be illegal, I don't know why they started down the path of integrated touchscreens, or even these "infotainment" systems. Back in the 00's the only car that I knew which had a factory screen in it was the Mercedes S-class and even that screen would disable itself while in motion because they clearly knew it was a distraction.
Perhaps its a generational change? I new batch of designers came into these companies who grew up tapping nonsense on screens, and thought sticking that in a car was a great idea. Plus much cheaper as no need for wiring looms, buttons and mouldings, etc... just a screen. Also you can add/remove features dynamically, which brought the new idea of "renting features", like on BMW, where you could pay extra per month for them to "unlock" the heated seat option. I.e. the heaters are there, the wiring is all there, but they need to flip the enable bit on the computer to allow you to use it, and for that you pay monthly.
That kind of attitude is what put me off all the European brands, the Germans especially love to squeeze you for every penny even after you bought the car. I generally will not buy a car that has a screen or "infotainment" system, which basically limits me to cars up to around 2005-7, cars that are already being regulated out of the ability to be used thanks to the EU.
Funnily enough, my main problem with European automotive markets (apart from being way too regulated by the EU already) is that the cars are already the same underneath. Recently I saw a VW hatchback parked right next to a Mercedes hatchback, and from my office above I could see they were the exact same damn car, it was so obvious I actually took a photo of it. Only changes were in the badge and some of the body panels. To think that someone spent multiples more money on the car on the left for the badge just reminds me how stupid people have become round here.
Likewise almost all the sensors are the same, usually made by someone like BOSCH for German cars. The problem is not that you cannot physically fit the sensors from different cars, it is that the manufacturers lock out the parts using DRM. In fact I think nowadays you can't even swap parts from the same make and model. So for example if you get a second hand dashboard for your car it fits perfectly in yours, all the wiring lines up, but the cars ECU rejects it.
That alone kills not only the second hand market, but any independent garage, because suddenly you need to be an official licenced garage just to get the ECU to accept the new part
That would be nice as the batteries are basically the failure point of EVs, as they were 150 years ago (which is why they were replaced by the ICE once it was invested).
Unfortunately I don't think the laws of physics will allow for that one while we use batteries. The power to weight ratio for BEVs is atrocious. While EVs have fewer moving parts they are made with the thinnest plastic parts possible to keep the weight down. Despite this they are at least twice as heavy as an equivalent ICE, meaning increased wear on the drivetrain, increased tyre wear etc...
If we gave up on the silliness of batteries and moved to something better then EVs would have a chance, but right now they are mostly being forced through with regulations and/or subsidies.
Yes, that is what I call the "infotainment" system. Its crap, and you can't replace it. My 90s car has a DIN slot for the stereo, so I've been able to update it by just buying a new stereo. My 90s car actually has a better system than the 2021 rental I had recently because the software in the 3 year old car was poor at the start (and this was a Toyota, so better than most), its locked down, gets no updates and you can't replace it. You are stuck with it no matter what.
Bring back a double-DIN slot and allow third parties to offer their wares. I don't need an integrated system.
Yes the driver aids are poor, and even worse some of them are dangerous. The Toyota I rented for a week was my first foray into "modern" cars, and yes it was a horrid soul crushing experience. I realise now why most young people are not excited by cars, they have become horribly dull hateful machines that you just throw money into.
I had a lot of complaints about the experience, but the lane following was the worst. It isn't that it didn't work because it did. The problem is that when it didn't work it was deadly. You can set it, it follows the lane fine on the motorway while cruising, then when a junction comes up sometimes it carries on, other times it violently swerves directly into the concrete barrier, which at 120km/h is instant death if you hit it.
First time it happened it scared the hell out of me but i put it down to maybe poor road markings, second time scared me less but I had to violently swerve the car back on the motorway to prevent impact (that time there were no road marking issues as I made an effort to check). After that I had to concentrate non stop to be able to take over in an instant in case it happened again.
The third time it happened I turned off the lane following and drove the damn car myself. The problem is that I found it was more taxing on my concentration to sit there watching the road being ready in a split second to take over, while not driving. It was less stressful and required less concentration to just drive myself.
I found all the other aids either irritating or annoying, and some actually got in the way of me driving well. Some I could not disable which really peeved me off. The only driving aid that really made me go "wow" was the self parallel parking. You line up next to the spot, shift into reverse and press a button. Then you take your foot off the brake and the steering wheel turns all on its own as the car parks itself. That really felt like "wow I live in the future" moment for me.
However you really must align yourself precisely for this to work. Sometimes aligning the car so it can park itself took longer than me just doing it, so two days into the rental I turned that off too and parked the car myself.
So in a nutshell, of all the driver aids a modern car provides, one is a gimmick that gets old after a couple of days, one is a deathtrap and the rest are an irritant.
Most definitely, my experience renting modern cars has convinced me never to pay for them, especially not second hand. If they are this bad when nearly new, imagine after 10 years when the sensors are failing, ECUs start playing up and electrics go haywire (generally the first thing to go on cars is electronics).
It seems other people are cottoning on round these parts. Second hand car prices have been increased faster than new car prices. 10 year old second hand cars cost nearly as much as a brand new one, as there is obviously more demand for the older cars than the new ones.
As for the manufacturers, if they don't want to make what customers want to buy they deserve to go out of business. There are other companies who will make what the customer wants and they will get the money instead (although I am sure the EU will work very hard to prevent customers having a choice).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by choose another one on Thursday September 26, @09:17PM (2 children)
Yeah I get that from my car mechanic too, I had an 01 Golf Mk4, his comments when it was 6,7,8 yrs old were basically "keep it as long as possible, they don't make 'em like that anymore".
His comments on newer stuff were that the cars were full of wonderful complicated new features and drove great out of the factory, but they fell apart soon as the warranty ended (or before, if you were lucky), the factory fitted parts (which would be mostly outsourced) were "made of chocolate". My Golf finally got scrapped at 18yrs old, I still wonder if I should have thrown more money at it to keep it on the road longer, newer ones don't last. Turn of the century I reckon was really "peak car" for reliability and reparability.
Turn of the century is also possibly about when VW fully integrated the "value" brands Seat and Skoda - since then it's definitely changed from Seat/Skoda being "buy a VW quality car, maybe last years design, for a lot less" to VW being "buy a Skoda quality car but pay a lot more for the VW badge".
To be absolutely fair to Euro automakers, they have been shafted more than a little by home-market govt. regulators - told to push diesel "for economy" they built superb diesels, then told "diesel is unclean" they were forced to add DPFs and AdBollocks which made superb diesels complicated expensive and fragile, so they invested in producing cleaner more efficient petrol engines inly to be told that's "unclean" too and now they have to produce electric or pay massive fines.
VW's (and others) problem with electric is that they were caught out by Tesla, and I think in VWs case it's especially bad because they sort of rely on introducing new expensive stuff in their premium brands (Audi etc.) and then filtering it down when they can make it cheap/good enough - but Tesla took the premium EV market away before they even started, if you had money and wanted EV you already had a Tesla.
(Score: 3, Informative) by corey on Thursday September 26, @11:15PM
Agree with all you and pTamok said. I had an ‘05 Audi A3 diesel, awesome car. But the service was hell expensive. I found through my car club where to take it, who would use VW or 2nd hand parts to replace engine bits rather than high profit Audi parts (which were the same anyway).
Seems like VW are way back in the distance w.r.t. EVs. Here in Australia, people are buzzing most about the Chinese and Korean brands. Seems to be a race to the bottom on pricing currently. News the other day was a Byd EV for AU$31k. There’s no way in hell VW will compete with that and there’sa huge thirst for EVs now, but most people will be going for the $30-40k models. In my uninformed opinion.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday September 29, @01:11PM
Agree with all this 100%, except that me and family did generally keep our cars going. "Throwing money at them" is just what you will generally do no matter what you own (or its age) because cars are not an asset but a liability (and one that wears out as you use it). A car rarely used will cost you little , but it will also defeat the point of having it. Even a classic will lose its value if you actually drive it (which is why I suck at being a classic car collector, I love driving them too much).
Up until recently my dad drove his dad's 1968 Mercedes 280SEL, and I had a 1982 Porsche 944 (which was originally my dads). Cars that were rock solid reliable, had only the electrics needed to get the job done and you could keep them running indefinitely. It wasn't even very expensive to maintain them because in the words of our mechanic "they are a pleasure to work on". No need for expensive diagnostic software, no need to remove a ton of plastic nonsense to get at a sensor, everything was easy to reach and could be removed and re-attached with a set of screwdrivers, socket wrenches and spanners. Plus (at least with the Porsche) a lot of the parts were actual VW parts, with VW part numbers. Only the important bits (engine, transmission, suspension) were Porsche, the rest was the VW parts bin, which meant parts were cheap and plentiful. Porsche itself would still provide parts if you need them, but its very expensive to do so as they actually make them new for you special order.
We had to sell those cars because the whole family decided to move abroad and the cars were right hand drive so we could not take them with us. I still miss them, especially having had a look at what passes for modern cars nowadays.
Very true, if I had to buy a VW, I would probably by a Seat or Skoda instead. As you say, same car but cheaper. I am obviously in a minority in Europe but I care for a car brand mainly for what engineering talent it represents. I care not one jot if you slap a VW, Skoda or Seat badge on the same tin can of a car.
On one hand I agree, the EU shafts everyone industry or citizen alike. However huge rich automotive companies like VW could have pushed back, they could have lobbied and argued against it. They had the financial and legal might to do so, especially when all this mess started occurring in the 90s. However they didn't, they just meekly accepted some of the most bizarre and dumb rules on earth, knowing that it would ruin them.
Being forced to produce cars your customers don't want to buy is not a long term winning strategy, no doubt the EU will then try to force people to buy them by banning or regulating the alternatives out of existence but I don't think that will build a sustainable economy. Even if by sheer brute force and violence they succeed in making this work, none of those cars will be competitive in the global markets, so they will collapse sooner or later one way or another.
Perhaps a bit of history might help shed light on why things happened that way. Originally the company was set up as a grifting operation to milk the eco stupidiy of carbon credits for money, which became so successful in the first years of Tesla the joke in the industry was that the most profitable car company on earth was one that makes no cars. Then they changed the rules for carbon credits mandating that the car company actually make cars in order to qualify, so Tesla hired Lotus cars to build them the Tesla roadster (which was basically a Lotus Elise [wikipedia.org] with the ICE replaced with an electric motor and battery).
Now they technically made cars but didn't put much effort into it (keep costs down in order to maximise profit) but the anti-co2 people complained that electric sports cars were not helping the environment as it was seen as a "rich mans toy". So governments introduced subsidies for "normal" cars for everyday use and Tesla started making those.
The reason I explain the above is because in order for Tesla to originally make so much money on carbon credits, others had to lose money. Those who lost money were the established automakers such as VW. They were effectively forced to pay huge amounts of money to Tesla, who then built a large financial war chest they could use to finance the R&D to produce the cars they now do.
Still I can't say I ever understood why people buy Tesla's. I actually test drove the roadster when it first came out (I actually went to the Porsche showroom to get some parts, only to find Tesla opened a showroom next door with the roadster offering free test drives, presumably to entice potential Porsche customers away). It handled very well (being a Lotus) but I didn't get a thrill from the electric drive train. It just moved like a very fast milk float. I remember thinking "Congratulations Tesla, you made sports cars dull", quite frankly I would have preferred the original Lotus Elise. Electric sports cars make no sense to me, because the sounds, vibrations (even the smell) gives that feeling of excitement. Just going quickly is not that exciting (for proof of this, think about flying in an airplane: you're doing around 800km/h but most people are so bored they look for any distraction)
Even their mainstream cars to me demonstrate all I dislike in a car. Touchscreen controls, cheap plastic materials put together badly, in a car that has always on tracking and connections, full monitoring and recording all with third party control over the car. Plus when it goes wrong it may lock you out randomly, or lock you in randomly, or spontaneously combust (with you locked inside if you are unlucky).
I suspect the main reason they are popular is subsidies and "branding", because for all I complained about the triumph of branding over substance in my original post, it does seem to work. The old adage "a fool and his money are soon parted" rings true more often then not, especially if the government subsidises the foolishness. The other companies do it as well because the majority of people (at least in the EU and USA) don't actually seem to care about anything anymore, just appearances.