🤔 💭 Our cars aren’t selling… Hmm… Should we make them last longer? No. Should we make the interior out of anything except hard plastic? No. Should we make our cars easier to repair and not have even the most basic shit require specialized tools? No. I got it! Subscriptions for basic shit that gauges the few customers still buying our shit!
I understand your point, but have you driven a VW in the past decade? They are reliable, relatively easy to repair and have comfortable interiors that aren’t with “hard plastic.” Perhaps you’ve confused VW with Ford?
I fix cars for a living every day.
reliable
Maybe, compared to a BMW or other “luxury” car marketed to rubes. But a Honda or a Toyota would totally eat VW’s lunch in regards to reliability, at half the purchase price.
relatively easy to repair
The VW Beetle is famously easy to repair, basically every modern VW model sucks ass. It needs some proprietary tool to access half the vehicle on more than half the models. I do not like working on them. We also get wonderful examples of German Manufacturing Precision™️ where you have a half a millimeter clearance to remove a part. This was worse in older VW’s in my experience (the Germans really took to AUTOCAD like fish to water when that became common, methinks) but it still happens.
comfortable interiors
Actually totally agree here, the interior of most modern VW’s is pretty nice. Shame that doesn’t extend under the hood.
VW also got caught straight up lying about their emissions testing a few years ago so that also destroyed basically all trust that I had in their brand. They’ll sell you a car that runs, but there’s really no knowing if the numbers that it reports are actually accurate.
Yeah. I think my car has a pretty decent build overall but the (I shit you not) 14 recalls ive had to bring it in for ranging from door handle replacements, firmware updates, back hatch issues makes me raise an eyebrow to it. I let a few stack up before I bring it in because I never notice any issue before or after, but better to get the free service than not.
Evidence strongly counters my own feelings on the matter.
Ford is even worse than VW, but VW is overpriced shit.
No doubt they are all overpriced, but I thoroughly researched my Škoda before buying it in 2020 and it was competitively priced, especially with its reliability score and relatively low maintenance cost. In my case of course anecdotal, but I’ve had no issues after 90,000 km with a lot of Autobahn.
I’ll just put it this way if you check the used market for pretty much any European car in the states you can get them very cheap compared to their original price because no one wants to fix them. That is by design imo
EXCEPT the fuel pump for a Passat 2013 to 2017 is 400 to 600 dollars for the pump only. You can find some on eBay cheaper but when you can’t drive your car then you have to get what you can get.
Does “relatively easy” mean in comparison to modern cars, and not easily repairable older cars? I don’t follow cars but if it’s anything like other tech then it’s soon to be crippled by part tying.
Reliably cheating emissions regulations, maybe.
Relatively easy to repair compared to a smartphone maybe.
Capped speed isn’t enough. I want it to slam the brakes on the highway and go “Tired of the ads? Get the Volkswagen Battlepass and enjoy an uninterupted drive!”
Ooh, how about it accelerates really slowly at stop lights unless I pay for “turbo mode” to not get honked at?
Need a panoramic view instead of just a slit? Get the Extend-A-View™ subscription to instantly make the full surface of all your windows transparent!
I’m actually fine with that. People don’t need to go 0-60 in an intersection.
But what about 0-10? 0-5? Surely you’d be better off limited to 2 mph/kph for the first 10s after a stop.
Drive for yourself not for others.
Every tine you bring the car to a stop it covers half the windows in ads like youtube does when you pause it to try and read something
Our family was looking for a newer car. We found a listing for a VW, went to the dealership with intent to buy and was told that the car (which was standing RIGHT there) was available for sale in 3 months. Now we enjoy our new Toyota.
You dodged a bullet.
VW has gone down the drain.
Had a 2023 VW ID4. They literally go out of their way to make your experience worse in many cases.
They have an app, they can read locked state, but can’t lock the car.
Their app/website makes you completely re-sign in and re-accept cookies every month or so that breaks any API usage mildly like HomeAssistant.
The key unlocks the door if you walk to it, 50% chance to re-lock the door when you walk away without interacting with it.
Can detect tire pressure, but they don’t tell you what it is, only if there is “pressure loss”
Backup camera was horrific quality, especially the field of view of a telephoto camera, especially compared to my 2015 Nissan altima
The entertainmrnt console was terible, extremely laggy, and Android auto was the worst experience. It would take between 2 and 15 minutes to connect to android auto with multiple different phones, and it would choose 1 app per phone to not display. My girlfriends’ was her maps app which is insane. Sometimes I would be at my destination before it would connect.
Also putting a trailer hitch on it would have been like 1500-2000€…
Yeah, he dodge-d a bullet. Good for him he could af-ford something better.
The car has to ripen.
From the same company that brought you test based emissions upgrades?
And they wonder why nobody’s buying their cars…
Strange comment, since VW group sell by far the most EV cars in EU.
Yet you get a dozen upvotes. You guys are weird. 🤣🤣🤣Lemmy moment
option to pay $22.50 per month or $879 one time to gain 20 horsepower.
At least you can buy it outright, so not the worst scheme of this sort, but still a scheme.
Auto Express UK reported on the pricing but could not verify whether the subscription follows the vehicle or the user profile.
This is bad journalism, per EU regulation, if the option is bought it follows the car, if it’s a subscription, I doubt they can legally demand either the original and definitely not another owner to keep it. A subscription can be cancelled, otherwise it’s an indefinite contract, which a new owner never agreed to.
…
Oh sorry I forgot for a second that UK is no longer in EU, so UK customers can be fucked in new creative ways, which probably also explains why this experiment is in UK. Ah well they chose to fuck themselves over I guess.
We imported all the consumer protection laws, so as long as this isn’t a recent change it will be the same in the UK.
AFAIK a lot of the EU citizen and consumer protections have been dismantled in UK after UK left EU.
Even democratic rights to protest have been limited, and privacy rights against government surveillance that is illegal in EU.
So I seriously doubt they haven’t cut user protections too, the conservative government was clearly a government that worked against the general population to benefit the rich and those in power. This was absolutely one of the main points for the extreme right politicians and media (mostly conservatives) to want out of EU.
Fuck you volkswagen!
Das subscription
Die*
Sounds like a good reason to skip buying any car warranty going forward since I’ll be attempting to void that shit almost immediately.
Bad business decisions all around.
Legally those mods only void the warrenty if the mod caused the problem. The law goes back to the 1970s in the us and applies to a lot more that they want you to think
If you pay a little extra a little corkscrew that raises up from the middle of the driver seat every half hour will only do so every two hours too.
Consumer planning anything but Volkswagen subscription upgrade
Sold my Audi when they started this, VWs are already overpriced basic shits.
Give me asian cars.
Volkswagen is desperate and absolutely fucked. If this is their answer for every one of their shitty little cars being over taken by Koreans they are just fucked.
VW makes better EV’s than Hyundai/KIA IMO.
Also VW group has bigger sales.Hyundai and KIA have some good options too, but there is no way to call VW shitty by comparison, when they far outsell the competition in EU.
In Denmark where I live, Korean EV’s have dropped out of top 10, while VW group has 7 models in top 10!
Vw doesnt make better EVs than hyundai lol, their range is worse, their charge curve is worse, their software is worse, what they have is better brand still, people are sleeping on Hyundai/Kia even though they offer better equipped cars for cheaper and with better reliability and warranty.
That’s completely okay with me. i get to buy these as used cars at extremely cut price.
Go test drive a VW id.3 from 2022, I did, it’s a 3 year old car and everything is creaking
That’s completely okay with me. i get to buy these as used cars at extremely cut price.
I don’t know if you saw I posted earlier, but I don’t dislike Hyundai, I’m even considering a second hand Hyundai for exactly that reason.
The Skoda Enyaq which is also VW group and based on the VW MEB platform is very well equipped as standard. I’d say that’s similar to Hyundai.
I cant think of anything that is extra on the Enyaq, that isn’t also extra on the Hyundai.
Also the small 60 kW Enyaq is very similar in range to a 64 kW Kona, and that’s despite it’s 400 kg heavier.
I bet there are many ways to compare, but the VW drive train is very efficient, so it generally manages to match Hyundai despite being heavier.
But you need to compare similar cars, you can’t compare Sport Sedan to SUV, and expect the SUV to be equally efficient at Autobahn speed.Go test drive a VW id.3 from 2022, I did, it’s a 3 year old car and everything is creaking
That’s anecdotal, but I agree it shouldn’t do that. Maybe it has been driven frequently on bad roads?
Last place I lived, we had a 1km dirt road to our house, that takes a toll.Not anecdotal at all man, I specifically tried it because I have heard that they have issues.
https://www.vw-id3.com/body_general_body_repairs_interior_trim_noise_insulation_front_door_trims-630.html https://www.speakev.com/threads/id3-with-rattling-sound-from-dash.168559/ https://www.vwidtalk.com/threads/rattle-in-passenger-front.13147/ https://www.id3forums.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=713
I also watch a lot of used car content, Squeaking/rattling was the norm on the Skoda Kodiaq, it’s the norm on used Superbs.
[laughs in 2013 era type-1 mod]
Fuck off
