WSJ Article on How Volkswagen’s $50 Billion Plan to Beat Tesla Short-Circuited

bluestarct

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This is a good article on what happened with VW. I think this is different than what has caused the delay on the Mach E. I can't post all of it here but here is the first page and a couple quotes from it. If you watched all of the videos on the launch, design and Q&A it makes more sense why Ford did what they did so that they did not go down the same rabbit hole as VW.


https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-vo...-short-circuited-11611073974?mod=hp_lead_pos5

ZWICKAU, Germany—Five years and nearly $50 billion into the auto industry’s biggest bet on electric vehicles, Volkswagen VOW -0.78% CEO Herbert Diess and his guest, Chancellor Angela Merkel, stood in anticipation as the first ID.3, Germany’s long-awaited answer to Tesla, rolled off the assembly line.

The event at the company’s flagship EV plant just over a year ago marked a “systemic shift from the combustion engine to the electric vehicle,” said Thomas Ulbrich, leader of the ID.3 effort.

The car, however, didn’t work as advertised.

It could drive, turn corners and stop on a dime. But the fancy technology features VW had promised were either absent or broken. The company’s programmers hadn’t yet figured out how to update the car’s software remotely. Its futuristic head-up display that was supposed to flash speed, directions and other data onto the windshield didn’t function. Early owners began reporting hundreds of other software bugs.

After years of development, Volkswagen decided in June last year to delay the launch and sell the first batch of cars without a full array of software, pending a future update, which is now scheduled for mid-February. Tens of thousands of ID.3 owners will have to bring their cars in for service to have the new software installed.

“After that the software will be regularly updated over the air,” Mr. Ulbrich said in an interview.

Volkswagen, the world’s largest car maker, has outspent all rivals in a global bid by auto incumbents to beat Tesla. For years, industry leaders and analysts pointed to the German company as evidence that, once unleashed, the old guard’s raw financial power paired with decades of engineering excellence would make short work of Elon Musk’s scrappy startup.

What they didn’t consider: Electric vehicles are more about software than hardware. And producing exquisitely engineered gas-powered cars doesn’t translate into coding savvy.
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“The key here is taking this distributed system in the car, dozens if not hundreds of applications, and centralizing everything,” says Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive at Nvidia Corp., the graphics chip maker that has become a player in self-driving car technology. “This is very complex, especially with a car where the safety level is critical. You can’t just flip a switch and be a software company.”
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Another component of the reboot was the Artemis project, a new in-house design team that would take the software developed by Mr. Hilgenberg’s group and integrate it in a new electric, self-driving, and internet-connected vehicle within three years.

“We fairly quickly came to the conclusion that we needed a separate unit and needed to give it the freedom to develop, a bit like a rocket,” said Alexander Hitzinger, a Porsche and Apple veteran who presented the idea to the meeting, dubbing the project “Mission T”—as in beat Tesla. The notion was so outlandish at the time that the executives eventually chose to name the project Artemis, after NASA’s planned manned mission to the moon in 2024.
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BlueMach

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It's an interesting shift in the industry - shipping product before it's "feature complete" and patching it later. We're getting that with CoPilot 360 2.0 whatever it's called - the hands free driving update. It's not available till sometime later this year - in the past Ford would have sold the car without the hardware and expected us to trade up to a 22MY if we wanted the feature.

Now VW's software issues were much deeper. But I disagree with their conclusion that it "short-circuited" their EV plans. VW seems as aggressive as ever on BEVs, and their BEVs are selling quite well.
 
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RonTCat

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To patch remotely at a later time, at vehicle launch the OTA software has to work. Actually, it just has to work well enough that it itself can be patched. The lack of this functionality appears to be the major VW downfall with ID3.
 

FredT

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To patch remotely at a later time, at vehicle launch the OTA software has to work. Actually, it just has to work well enough that it itself can be patched. The lack of this functionality appears to be the major VW downfall with ID3.
It was a major downfall. The article, though new, is dated in some of it's information, as the fixes have been rolling out already. Or many of them at any rate. Heads-up display has been working well for quite a while, and new features are being added over the air. Shocking that this happened and that it took so long to address. I don't understand articles like this one, though, coming out when the crisis is larger past.
 

malba2366

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All of the Legacy automakers are going to have big problems if they don't get serious about developing an excellent customer facing interface that is the same across all of their cars and easily upgradeable to newer versions. Apple is jumping into the auto industry in 5 years (according to reports) with the manufacturing being done at Kia's factory in Georgia...you can be assured that they will have an excellent user interface.
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