Comment on VW will invest up to $5 billion in Rivian as part of new EV joint venture
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 6 months ago
Mixed feelings, I like VW but I don’t really like Rivian.
Comment on VW will invest up to $5 billion in Rivian as part of new EV joint venture
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 6 months ago
Mixed feelings, I like VW but I don’t really like Rivian.
proudblond@lemmy.world 6 months ago
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.)
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 6 months ago
For what it’s worth, all automakers had illegally high emissions (well apart from Tesla I guess). This is something I never see people bring up.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal
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VW actually wasn’t even close to being the worst for it. They were just the first to be tested, and their leadership owned up to breaking the law immediately, meaning news media could happily call them out without fear of a libel/slander case.
VW alone took the PR hit for an entire shady industry.
RayJW@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
I mean they also own like half the industry. So, I don’t particularly bad for them to be honest.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Well yeah I don’t feel bad for any big company when bad stuff happens to them (well, within reason, I obviously don’t want massive layoffs and people left unemployed).
My point isn’t to be an apologist for VW, my point is that the others are just as bad, and plenty are even worse, yet they got away with it. They shouldn’t have done.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 6 months ago
VW doesn’t own a single of the other brands on that list.
proudblond@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I wasn’t actually so mad at first. They bought back our smaller cheaper car and we felt very compensated. But for the second car, which was much bigger and more expensive, they only offered a “fix” which they said wouldn’t affect performance (yeah right), and a small amount in restitution. It felt like a slap in the face. In hindsight I would have gone about things differently but let’s just say that I have little to no faith in the way our justice system works anymore due to how we decided to proceed after that, and we will never buy a car from VW ever again.
Meanwhile, we actually replaced those cars with Teslas. And now we feel like we’re kind of back in the same place, having given money to a company that is pretty shit. We try to vote with our wallets as much as possible but there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, after all. It’s just really depressing and disheartening and makes me not want to buy anything anymore.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 6 months ago
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.
SeaJ@lemm.ee 6 months ago
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.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
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.