this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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Mixed feelings, I like VW but I don't really like Rivian.
I’m in the opposite camp. What are the reasons you don’t like Rivian? (I don’t like VW because we had not one, but two vehicles caught up in Dieselgate. They’re dead to me. Which is a shame because I really liked them.)
Rivian comes off as a tech bro startup that has talked a big game but produced poor results, they've been advertising autonomous self driving since like 2015 or earlier. After shipments started, so did layoffs.
VW has a long history of reliable manufacturing to high standards in Europe. They've had executives make claims that they would overtake Tesla as the world's largest electric car company by 2025. Obviously, VW has been lagging hard on EV and won't reach that goal, but if I had to pick a favorite car company it's between them and maybe JEEP or KIA.
I could forgive VW if they actually did something to rectify the bullshit they pulled. Instead, the EV charging network they were forced to build out, Electrify America, is absolutely the worst of the bunch and frequently has at least a third of the chargers not operational. If I had to pick least favorite car companies, it would be between them and Hyundai/Kia. Hyundai/Kia would probably take it because they were the only brand who was dumb enough to not have immobilizer in their cars which has led to high theft and the other bigger reason would be them frequently being caught using child labor.
Don't know what people expected from a company being forced to build the infrastructure against their will, they should have had to pay a fine and a State corporation should have been created from that to create charging infrastructure and reap the profit for the government's coffers.
Not only that, but they had to create a company/infrastructure that they had little to no expertise in.
I guarantee if you asked someone in 2015 "of all the companies out there, who do you think has the knowledge and expertise in civil engineering, US planning law, electricity infrastructure, and wireless communications required to build out a US-wide charging network?", very few would have come back with "VW would be great at that!"
I can definitely see the logic in it - it pressured VW to pivot to EV platforms, which I guess was the goal. But expecting them to be able to properly run a completely different business to what they have expertise in was always going to have problems.
You aren't wrong, but also it directly impacts the company reputation. Doing it as absolute crap as they did hurts them. Not the whole industry, because looks what's happened since, the charging standards in USA went from CCS to nacs, all the manufacturers switched to using Tesla network which, checks notes is your direct competition.
I think very few people realize that it's VW that built that infrastructure and the fact that major governments didn't come together to set a charging standard is a separate issue.
Which to me is also a failure. Everyone knows the Tesla network is Tesla. And it's hands down, better. People use Electrify America and have a bad experience (myself included) and they get mad at it. Even if they don't know it's tied to vw.
YouTubers and journalist talk about it and tie it to vw and suddenly your enthusiasts are panning vw for their garbage network.
It's a lose lose for Volkswagen the way they did this.