If you've ever driven a Volkswagen EV and compared their software experience to what the likes of Rivian, Tesla, and Polestar have, this will come as no surprise.
I think any other vendor's software is better than this.
If it weren't for the insanely good driving experience (coming from a VW Polo before), the software would have definitely convinced us to go for another car.
Yes. But I consider this to be the least of its problems — if it were slow, but actually worked, I'd be OK with it. The problem is that it is quite simply broken in a number of ways.
It looks as if no management at VW ever used the car. It should be mandatory for management to use any new car design as their home/family car for a month or so. I'd imagine some problems would be fixed in no time. Things like the car forgetting charging settings, the car being unable to link driver profiles to key fobs (!) and distinguish between drivers, the fact that some settings are per-driver, while others are per-car, or the fact that the phone app doesn't display any useful information, especially if you have two drivers. I mean, I could go on and on. It's mind-boggling that software of this quality has ever been released.
The fact that VW invests in Rivian so it can potentially "use" its software is pretty telling in my opinion.
It's hard for companies to change that though. I think Apple did it well. AMD still needs to do it fully.
VW definitely does not believe that Software is unimportant or not a core part of the product.
They even tried to make their own software company to fix their inability to do software right.