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Comment by fergie | Hacker News Reader

Maybe VW was just the best match.

VW have significant experience of producing cars for other manufacturers, and put a lot of effort into developing reusable "platforms". They are super popular in Europe- hitting the exact sweet spot between practicality and desirability (Top Gear described the Golf as "the car that everybody buys with their own money"). The forthcoming ID range is perhaps the strongest lineup of EVs in any manufacturer's pipeline. They need more traction in the US, and it therefore makes sense to partner with the arguably coolest US corporation.

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Golf driver spotted.

But jokes aside I wouldn't be so sure about this. DHL has famously chosen StreetScooter instead of VW to built their last-mile fleet and the top brass in VW were also famously upset about this.

Also sales of the first gen Golf EV weren't even of the same order as sales of e.g. the LEAF - perhaps because VW insisted on keeping diesels alive longer than it made any sense.

>perhaps because VW insisted on keeping diesels alive longer than it made any sense.

They're still making way more money than the leaf on Diesels. Giving up on your cash cows is the most misguided business advice I've ever seen.

You should use the money from your cash cows to innovate. And wishing for more innovation on the EV side would be nice for advertisement mostly. EVs just aren't mass market yet.

It's good to have the EV knowledge ready when you need it. So far I would agree with you. But how many EVs you sell has little to do with how much you know about the technology.

> They're still making way more money than the leaf on Diesels. Giving up on your cash cows is the most misguided business advice I've ever seen.

Was that cash cow worth a global scandal, billions lost in unsaleable inventory(hundred thousands) and fines($25bln) though? I mean - they lost roughly two years of net income here and had several executives land in prison.

Nissan on the other hand invested roughly 20% of that($4bln) to develop the LEAF.

Perhaps giving up on diesels before it was too late constituted sound advice after all?

You're forgetting that Diesels are still making up a huge amount of VW group profit. Of course the scandal wasn't worth it, but it also wasn't necessary. Rather the decision to save on AdBlue was not worth it, not the Diesel technology itself.

I mean it's kind of like asking GM if it was worth it to not update their ignitions after they found out they were faulty and killed a few people (and got off easy because US company ;)). It's not a problem with ignition switch technology itself, but just this case of bad management decisions.

You can invest 4bn in EV technology, that would be smart, but those 4bn have to be made somewhere. In this case you can make this with Diesels and reinvest in EV. This is not some SV startup that will just waste its investors cash reserves until it goes broke.

> Giving up on your cash cows is the most misguided business advice I've ever seen.

Sure - but sooner or later there's a time.

The people who wouldn't give up their buggy whip manufacturing capability didn't win in the long run. (Or for more recent examples perhaps - serial/parallel ports, floppy drives, or removable phone batteries...)

Diesel passenger cars had a brief window of regulatory and technological advantage. Those started to close (eg: the tightening NOx regs and the tech and infrastructure improvements for electric cars), so the players in that game needed to change (eg: Mercedes' BluTec urea injection), get out of the game (like Toyota stopping diesel car sales in EU), or cheat (like VW chose to do).

My guess is - over the long term, Toyota's strategy will end up the best out of those choices...

> EVs just aren't mass market yet.

What’s you definition of mass market?

When the market is large enough to sustain the biggest auto conglomerate in the world (VW group) and a few competitors.

So worldwide production of vehicles is around 70million per year. VW group is making 10 million of these.

Assuming lower competition (because newer market), the worldwide market for EVs would have to be around 30-40 million vehicles per year to support a company the size of VW. EVs are currently at 1.1 million vehicles sold per year.

So the better alternative is to keep selling the cars you know how to make until it becomes unprofitable. Right now your EV market is so tiny that basically you could just research it and not even sell the cars and still be ready for when they actually constitute a big enough part of the market.

Anybody who lives in a rich part of a progressive country will have noticed that in 2018 all of a sudden people started to drive EVs, and that they are positioned as "aspirational" items.

Norway is currently at 37% of all new vehicles sold, San Jose is at 13% "on the road", 20% of americans are going to go electric for their next purchase (http://www.ktvu.com/news/ktvu-local-news/electric-vehicles-i...)

The market for EVs is kind of sort of there already.

> DHL has famously chosen StreetScooter instead of VW to built their last-mile fleet and the top brass in VW were also famously upset about this.

Any reason this is substantial news? People choose other vehicles over VW all the time, it's normally down to price.

> perhaps because VW insisted on keeping diesels alive longer than it made any sense.

Anything to back up this statement? They seem to have been doing well lately [1](https://www.ft.com/content/6e31d4e2-fb5f-11e7-9b32-d7d59aace...)

> Any reason this is substantial news?

Yes, because they've already conquered a decent part of the market:

https://www.treehugger.com/cars/one-europes-top-selling-elec...

> Anything to back up this statement?

Um, diesel scandal? People in jail? Brand image hurt? Isn't this enough?

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