Comment on VW will invest up to $5 billion in Rivian as part of new EV joint venture

• TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.

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  • RayJW@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I mean they also own like half the industry. So, I don’t particularly bad for them to be honest.

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    • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.

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      • RayJW@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Don’t worry, I don’t think you are. I just think there’s a reason they admitted so easily. Probably just another calculated fallout to save all their other brands from their own mini backlash which would ultimately cause more damage.

        But yes, the whole industry is a dumpster fire when it comes to regulations and also lobbying.

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    • Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      VW doesn’t own a single of the other brands on that list.

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      • RayJW@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Yea but many of them were involved. The Audi CEO at the time was on the board making the decision and the first to be convicted.

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  • proudblond@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.

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• FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.

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  • SeaJ@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.

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    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.

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      • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        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.

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      • mortalic@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        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.

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