Volkswagen seeks to counter rivals with budget EV model | Hacker News Reader

Volkswagen seeks to counter rivals with budget EV model

ttnews.com

144 pointsherbertl193 comments

That's way too expensive for an "affordable EV".

The BYD Seagull retails here in Uruguay for less than that and we tax cars at about 100%. On China it seems to go for 10-12k.

It's a proper, basic city car. 4 to 6 air bags, ~300km range (more than what this article's car indicates), all basic security features and standard gadgets out of a modern car.

Our EV infrastructure is not viable if you don't have a charger at work/home and yet these have sold like hot cakes.

Legacy carmakers are making increasingly worse ICE cars for the most part (btw does GM sell a C-segment hatchback on any market, anymore?) and their EVs are simply uncompetitive. What's it going to take for them to wake up to the fact they're going to have to stop fleecing their customers with crappy products? Bankruptcy?

It's too expensive for an affordable EV in half the world I am sure. The wealthier half of the world will never let Chinese auto makers in. China wants to do the same thing they've done with other manufacturing, use government subsidies, borderline slave labor, and artifically low currency to eat the market and kill everyone else's manufacturing capacity until they have the market entirely.

There's no way we let that happen to cars. China's average auto worker pay is $4.20 an hour. America's is 6x that. What you call fleecing customers we call paying workers a living wage.

We'd rather pay $25k for a cheap EV and have a thriving auto industry than pay $10k and have none. We'd happily choose paying more for cars over Latin America-style wealth inequality, though lately it seems as if we're going to manage both at the same time.

Does a thriving auto industry mean that its industrial workers can't afford eggs?

Your figures are way out of date. The average Chinese auto worker now earns 21900 CNY/month, or about $36000/year. Even the low end is ~$15k.

https://www.salaryexplorer.com/average-salary-wage-compariso...

Also, Chinese manufacturers will do the same as Japanese and Korean manufacturers before them: work around tariffs by building assembly plants in the US and Europe.

Those numbers seem like the average for an auto plant manager. Seems like most of the rank and file make around $11-15,000/yr.

Cost of living is an important consideration. I dont know why people are comparing absolute values here. Wages are relative to cost of living.

That's not too far off what people earn here, in an EU country with cars as our main export

> Also, Chinese manufacturers will do the same as Japanese and Korean manufacturers before them: work around tariffs by building assembly plants in the US and Europe.

That's literally the stated purpose of Trump's tariffs, though.

It's not about hurting the Chinese. That's a bonus in some cases, sure, but the stated purpose is to encourage US economic growth in the industrial sector.

If BYD starts building factories in the US to hire American workers and sell to American consumers, Trump would be bringing it up every time he saw a microphone.

Says you. Poorer people in the United Stares would LOVE to have the option for a 10K car. It would really help their standard of living.

I’m happy for you that you can afford to plop $25K down for a car.

I am very doubtful that one could manufacture a $10k (USD) car, have some tiny amount of profit margin on it, and still meet federal dual airbag, crash test safety standards. The extremely affordable cars sold in India for example would never meet US/Canadian road standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Motor_Vehicle_Safety_S...

That’s a different conversation. The OP was arguing 2.5X the price solely to support union wages.

You don't think people deserve a livable wage?

$36K/yr is a livable wage in China.

Define "livable". A suburban detached home is far more expensive than a single-room-occupancy hotel room. And yet people lived in the latter for a large portion of US history, often with roommates. Some still do.

It would be great if everyone could be wealthy enough to buy all their necessities and never worry about money, but that's a pipe dream.

> It would be great if everyone could be wealthy enough to buy all their necessities and never worry about money, but that's a pipe dream.

Easily possible if we fix zoning laws, encourage building more homes, and reduce regulatory capture that prevents competition in industry.

Well, you are certainly living up to your handle here… do feel free to explain your plan for how nobody ever needs to worry about money ever again. And how everyone gets a studio apartment at least.

There are ICE cars in India for around 10k that scores 5 stars on global ncap, idk how that compares to US road safety standards tho.

We've decided we'd prefer to mandate tons of "lifesaving" technology in new cars. Nevermind that it pushes poorer people into old rust buckets, and due to risk homeostasis and the false sense of security that comes with driving a safe/quiet/competent car, people who _can_ afford new cars manage to find worse and worse ways to crash... that's without getting into the awful consequences of cars you can't see out of, "safety features" that numb people to the driving experience, and so on...

I thought the stats have shown driving becoming safer and safer?

It has! More impressively, it's done so while Vehicle Miles Travelled has gone up as well.

But it feels like we're reaching a point where we're trying to catch a falling knife, where every safety improvement is _obviously_ worth it, even as the easy gains have gone away. We've also (almost) completely ignored the safety of everyone outside of the vehicle in our arms race to protect occupants.

Driving has become _a lot_ safer in the recent decades. But the problem is not the technology that we require new cars to have, but the city planning that makes owning a car pretty much mandatory in large parts of the country.

I’ve hypothesized that more expensive cars resulting from safety and environmental mandates might make it harder for poor people to have reliable transportation to and from work. This leads to lower incomes, which are strongly correlated with worse health outcomes.

Someone would need to do a study to test if this were true. My guess is many of the safety feature are a net positive. It would be interesting to see the tradeoffs though.

They buy used.

It's a vicious circle.

Farming mfg out, puts those people out of a job, those out of a job can get lower pay or go on the dole -that comes out of all those "poorer people's" taxes. And, while we're at it, why not outsource poor people's labor overseas or even import cheap unskilled labor to undermine them?

No, you want to maintain a diversified, robust and self-sustaining economy that perpetuates wealth rather then siphon it overseas.

Autoworker salaries have very little effect on the price of cars. The final assembly labor costs are a single digit percentage of the sale price. The corporate workers (myself included) are about the same again, despite being a much smaller percentage of the workforce.

The majority of costs are just the price of raw materials and manufacturing anything, whether in the US or abroad. What Chinese OEMs are doing isn't anything secret, it's just optimizing the other things to hit those price targets. Cutting out dealerships, better value engineering, lower executive/corporate salaries and benefits, cheaper electronics, limited features, vertical integration, and most importantly being willing to sell lower margin vehicles.

And much reduced dividend payments. It is the difference between prioritizing market share over profits. Where an American company sees profits as an end goal, a Chinese manufacturer sees profits as a tool to enable expansion and development. One is working for shareholders, the other to advance national goals.

Many American companies have reinvested their revenue into R&D; notable large examples include Google and Amazon. I rode a Waymo today!

Every single expense in your P&L is ultimately salaries.

If it's not salaries in your P&L, then it's salaries in your supplier's P&L, or salaries your supplier's supplier's P&L.

Once you get more than a couple layers down in the supply chain, it's the same workers being paid the same wages for both American and foreign OEMs. The "labor price" of the same grade steel isn't vastly different for BYD and GM.

Raw materials costs are mostly based on scarcity, not salaries. If it weren't, steel would cost more that gold because it goes through more processing.

Scarcity means that you require more work to mine the same amount of material.

There is also economies of scale. Steel is much more useful than gold. This means investments on improving mining and processing will lower the costs in the long run.

Is processing and manufacturing steel actually cheaper than gold at any scale?

Gold is a very easy metal to work with. While iron into steel especially on a large scale isn’t trivial.

I doubt the cost of labor has a meaningful impact on the price of gold.

I’m not sure that’s necessarily true (or at all relevant) for a lot of precious or rate materials like gold. I don’t really know but I’d bet that gold requires much, much less labor to process than steel.

It’s just much more scarce so the people who own the mines can charge more for it.

Even high grade gold deposits are only around 10g/tonne or 1 part per 100,000 so you have to process a huge amount of material to recover a tiny amount of gold. Total world gold production was just 3000 tonnes in 2023.

By contrast a tonne of steel requires about 2 tonnes of iron ore and 0.8 tonnes of coal and 0.1 tonnes of limestone, all bulk minerals dug out of the ground. Total world steel production was 1.9 billion tonnes in 2023.

Yes, I would assume that certainly correct by weight/per kg. I was thinking more about per $ i.e. a gram of gold costs $100 I’m too lazy to look for exact figures but I would bet that labor costs (maybe even combined with energy costs) make up a very small proportion of that.

Edit: well I’m kind of wrong: https://www.gold.org/goldhub/gold-focus/2024/05/higher-gold-...

Profit margins seem to be about 50-70% currently but historically it was closer to 30% (of course that’s still many times higher than for steel production)

The profitability will depend on the production costs for each mine. Those at the margin set the price. If it stays high long enough new mines will open or too low and unprofitable mines will close. The excess profits earned by those that have easily accessible high quality ore are known as 'resource rents' but eventually they will be fully exploited and have to close.

Apparently a great uncle of mine found gold on his family farm in Scotland, but it was never profitable to exploit so saw no benefit from it!

You forgot energy.

GM's health-care costs average $1500 per vehicle.

Those numbers are two decades old. Shortly after they were made public there was a union negotiation with UAW where new employees were permitted to have far fewer healthcare and retirement benefits. It's been 20 years and GM has maintained a regular cadence of layoffs and buyouts for tenured workers, so the modern workforce is almost entirely those much cheaper employees.

It's not just that, though I'm sure the American/European car makers are still in the $1,000+ range in extra labor costs.

China's subsidized their EV market with tens of billions directly. On top of that, they subsidize critical components and materials. They also keep their currency artifically devalued.

An American comnpany could do everything BYD does and still not come remotely close on price.

I would never pay $20k for a car. No matter who made it.

I have never paid less than $20k for a new car. Is this a US thing? Does Europe have much cheaper cars? It’s around $25k for sedan, and > $30k for SUV’s in US. And the most popular vehicles in US are pickup trucks that are > $50k

Europe has smaller cars, up until recently you'd see way more very small 3-doors hatchbacks than SUVs, including in rural areas. These would cost around 10-15k€ new, bellow 10k€ with a few thousands kms on the counter.

I have never paid less than $20k for a new car.

I have never bought a new car.

"We"? Do you think the average American would pay more so workers can earn a living wage? Which America do you live in?

I'd rather pay for a transition out of car-centricity instead of subsidising a dying industry that lobbied against every single move forward in the past few decades. Against air quality, against electric transition, for fossil fuel, against cycling infrastructure, against the safety of other road users. Right now they build only SUVs, mostly hybrids, when we actually need electric Twingos.

VW and Stellantis need to go bankrupt and their technical workers need help to transition to being part of industries that will strive in a low-carbon economy: public transports, bicycles, two-wheels EVs, etc. [0] As for the management of these companies, they can all bloody starve, frankly.

[0] https://ilnousfautunplan.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Indus..., Claude's summary in English: https://claude.ai/share/695d7c05-25e5-4295-aa09-2bdc8717f8ca

Give “we” people the choice to buy a cheap car and see what they would rather choose to do.

They’ll buy the cheap cars then complain 20 years later that the politicians shipped the jobs to China, of course. It’s a tragedy of the commons.

All humans are hypocrites. We want manufacturing here, both for jobs and National security/economic resilience. But we also have our own budgets.

>The wealthier half of the world will never let Chinese auto makers in

Australia and the UK have modest barriers to entry - especially in Australia a large part of the market is Chinese.

In the EU they are allowing Chinese imports because otherwise the Chinese would restrict the sale of German cars in China. So they are coming in though still a small percentage of the market in the EU/UK.

They don't sell the seagull here in Australia, but the entry level Dolphin retails at about US $1000 less than this new EV.

With this not due to start production for two years, it does look like they're well behind the game and unlikely to be able to compete on price.

(edit - I realise this is at least in part because the Chinese government subsidise the industry, and here in Aus we have no tariffs on them because we have no car industry to protect)

In October I bought an MG4 (350km range) for 31k (AUD).

Its very much cheap and cheerful. but its a great little car, with all the issues it has I still would not hesitate to recommend it. Its perfect for our commute car, and I charge it by solar panels so drive it for free.

The VW model is likely to be about the $40-45k (AUD) which is nowhere near the "affordable" range they think they're trying to hit.

I have the GWM Ora.Very similar feelings about it. Not perfect, but very good. Mainstream/legacy automakers have already lost; They will seek to erect market barriers.

I don’t really trust BYD quality. I’ve seen way too many videos leak out of Chinese social media about build issues they refuse to acknowledge, thin or weak structural materials, fires, etc. Easier to trust Tesla or VW. I wonder if they would make different quality vehicles targeted at different markets.

The moment you focus on quality, your price can't be that low. Then good luck competing with VW or other cars.

These cars are garbage, people are happy because they are cheap, shiny and have all multimedia and can do 400KM... why not.

You probably need to brush up on a little concept called "Economies of Scale."

> These cars are garbage

A few years ago this was true, but quality has improved massively since then. Was in China recently, got to ride in a bunch of Chinese EVs including several BYDs. Really impressed with them, and came away wishing I could buy one myself, but that seems unlikely to be an option for now in the US unfortunately.

I'm old enough to have been around this bush twice already.

In the 70s your argument was made against emerging Japanese makers. Unknowns like Toyota, Datsun (now Nissan), Honda etc.

Then in the 90s it was Koreans entering the market. Daihatsu, Hyundai, Kia etc.

Now it's the Chinese brands arriving as well. The incumbents will talk about "quality" all day long, but in truth European quality was always a bit of a myth (British Leyland anyone?) And the heyday of BMW or Mercedes quality is long gone.

The gold standard for quality today? Probably Toyota or Honda.

So yeah, laugh off the Chinese options as low-quality.

The problem is China is taking the different strategy.

All of the products they are making actually have two lines, one for the oversea, one for the nation. The oversea line would be high quality at first. But once they eat up all the market share, the story would start to change. The oversea buyer would happily to see they are been treated the same as Chinese.

Just think about the product from TEMU.

>> But once they eat up all the market share, the story would start to change.

You may be right. But at the moment this is just speculation. Just like happened from Japan and Korea, the quality ramped up quickly. And yes, companies age, and as they do so quality drops off. And another rises in it's place. That's literally the issue you're seeing now with US and European goods.

>> Just think about the product from TEMU.

Interestingly the quality there is climbing too.

The Chinese can make cheap rubbish and also very good quality depending on the incentives. Most of the Apple stuff is still made there.

I used to have a Chinese made imitation Yamaha and the quality was awful as you'd expect from a counterfeit knock off manufacturer but I imagine the BYD stuff is pretty good.

I remember our British Leyland Rovers. Yeah not great.

They are massively popular here in Australia, and I've not heard of any issues with quality or safety. They are held to the same standards as everyone else.

I don't either, but simply on account of there not being a 10, 20 year old Dolphin to see how they'll do in terms of reliability years down the line.

History shows that pretty much no one who set out to make a reliable design the got it right the first time, things tend to fail in unexpected ways.

From the teardowns, BYDs seem to be pretty much unrepairable - batteries are glued together, and the motor/inverter/charger/heatpump/etc seems to be put together into one sealed unit - something they're pretty proud of, but let's hope nothing fails in there.

From what I hear from the Chinese, they aren't big on the second hand market, so that's another worrying aspect.

"Easier to trust Tesla or VW."

Teslas are now old enough to be subject to mandatory yearly inspection in EU. They are dead last in the German and Swedish rankings based on the number of issues found during the yearly inspection.

German TÜV EV+ICE ranking:

  1. Honda Jazz

  2. VW Golf

  ...

  110. Ford Mondeo

  111. Tesla model 3

Swedish Besktining EV car maker ranking

  1. Polestar

  2. Lync

  ...

  X-1. Dacia 

  X. Tesla

Source:

https://www.carscoops.com/2024/11/tesla-model-3-comes-bottom...

https://www.tjanstebilsfakta.se/teslas-besiktningsresultat-a...

I mean, I'd expect it to be more than a gas car? No? This price would be appealing to me if on the market right now.

Why? We’re told they are mechanically much simpler. Electric motor. No transmission. Why do they cost more?

Mechanics, sure. Chemically, not so much. The batteries are rather non trivial.

How so? Batteries are simple and amenable to massive economies of scale that ice engines are not

I'm curious why you think batteries that can run a car are simple? Literally new technology, no?

They’re complicated and hard to develop initially, but are fundamentally physically and mechanically simple and thus simple to manufacture cheap at scale. Whereas ICE engines are developed tech but are intrinsically complicated to build. If that makes sense

It somewhat makes sense, but they are very much not chemically simple? Nor are any of the electronics that are required for safe charging and use simple. That they have simple packaging is largely a distraction from how complicated they are. Just as you wouldn't claim computers are simple just because a chunk of silicon is simple.

>btw does GM sell a C-segment hatchback on any market, anymore?) and their EVs are simply uncompetitive.

for whatever reason GM ended Bolt, and now the cheapest/smallest seems to be Equinox EV SUV with starting MSRP 33600 (before tax credits if any, etc). While it is on smallish side SUV-wise for US market, for the European and similar markets i guess it would be pretty large.

With Tesla being the leader in EV the second officially is Ford with 6% followed closely by GM, yet the Hyundai + Kia together have 10%, and anecdotally i see around SF Bay Area a lot of Kia/Hyundai EVs (sedans or SUV-ish sedans).

Sorry but reading Volkswagen and "crappy products" in the same sentence means either you never drove one or you've got very high standards, but then you're happy with BYD...

These new Chinese cars are literally flooding the market with the usual way we are used nowadays to think: buy cheap, change again in 2 years. (Which we didn't do before this cheap manufacturing existed.)

In this context it makes totally sense.

Cars, though, at least how we're used to think, are made to last. A car is not just a bunch of features, it's also a lot about the quality of the components, and there are videos showing how poor BYD quality is. If you're happy with that, that's OK.

> Sorry but reading Volkswagen and "crappy products" in the same sentence means either you never drove one or you've got very high standards

The rest of the car is fine I suppose but the infotainment unit in my brother's ID.4 is most certainly crappy.

The touch is horrible, the unit is slow AF both in latency and update rate, and the menus kinda suck.

Sure it's a small part of the car, but it's pretty integral to the operation of the car given they removed most knobs and buttons.

I think this is what makes this new model different - they apparently work with another software company which (probably) should be better.

I've worked on car infotainment, I know VW's is crap, but serious question: why give a shit? It's not what cars are for and all of them are good enough to play some music or listen to the radio while driving. You can use a phone holder for navigation.

Because, thanks to removing buttons and such, it's an integral part of operating the car.

In my Renault Megane e-Tech, if my windshield suddenly fogs up I can hit a physical button[1] to max the heater and blower. In the ID.4 it goes via the touch screen.

So, you press the "button" on the screen, nothing happens, so you press it again, except it turns out the system registered the first time it was just slow and so now you've turned it back off again. Or, you press it and nothing happens and you press another 5x times and still nothing because your finger is too dry...

I see the 2024 variant[2] kept the all-touch approach, but I haven't tried it so perhaps it works better in practice.

[1]: https://www.megautos.com/nuevo-renault-megane-e-tech-electri... (row below the center console screen)

[1]: https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/volkswagen-id-buzz-cargo-te...

I see. "Car things user interface sucks" is quite bad indeed.

Having driven an Audi A3 for a while... and that's the "premium" VW, it was not really great at all.

And having been to China and sitting in plenty of BYDs... they're on par. Decent.

The cars can be obviously cheaper, and yet aren't. Chinese market may be subsidized, but international? Not really. Coming back to VW, ID3 in China was half the price compared to the one in Europe, so there were even people trying to import them back and sell for less than official distribution - that effort was shut down thanks to VW's lobby.

Well, the Golf is an extremely popular car, yet isn't the cheapest in the C segment by far. They achieve this not by cost cutting, but by making the benchmark car to beat.

> by making the benchmark car to beat

Fun choice of words for the company that famously got caught cheating at the benchmarks

Off-topic, but I spent time in Uruguay last year and loved it there!

You can probably always find a cheaper car, but that's not the point here. VW's goal isn’t to offer the cheapest EV in the world. The company is clearly targeting the European market.

It’s also important to note that car prices aren’t directly comparable across different global markets. China heavily subsidizes its local car manufacturers. An EV for €8,900? That doesn’t even cover the material costs.

Right now, VW offers the ID.3 for around €30,000, so the price gap is significant. When the BYD Seagull launches in Europe, it likely won’t be priced at €10,000 either—various factors will probably drive up its cost.

And while I don’t want to rely on the outdated "Made-in-Germany" argument, we should wait and see how the ID. EVER1 actually performs before comparing cars based on price alone. I know that the BYD Seagull is of a decent quality. So let's see, what VW will offer.

I think you'll find in the EU the price of the VW and the BYD will be much more similar.

However good this thing is otherwise, "ID Everyone" is a horrible slogan for a new car. I wouldn't mind some manufacturer agreeing to not buy/sell your sexual history, creating radios which aren't vulnerable to remote controlling the car via buffer overflows, and otherwise treating cars like physical goods you own and can rely opon instead of hooks into your personal life.

Their marketing people have been detoxing from their cocaine binges recently, so the air is out

https://apnews.com/article/china-volkswagen-executive-deport...

The significant part of that story is there's no claim he used cocaine or recreational drugs "on the job" in China ...

  A senior executive for Volkswagen in China has been deported for allegedly using cocaine and marijuana while on vacation in Thailand, according to Chinese authorities and German media reports.

  Germany’s top-selling Bild newspaper [..] reported he tested positive for drug use after returning from a holiday in Thailand.

  Drug use is an administrative offense in China punishable by a 10- to 15-day detention and a fine of up to 2,000 yuan ($280).

  Thailand legalized marijuana in 2022 but Chinese authorities have warned that use of the drug overseas is equivalent to using it at home and subject to the same penalties.

Going to Thailand for weekend parties is a big thing in the China white dude expat scene.

It's also a fun stop for Australians that like gun ranges with automatic weapons but can't or won't get a gun licence at home. Australia doesn't jail them for gunpowder residue on their hands when they return though.

That said, I have less sympathy for Jochen Sengpiehl here, he's reportedly the chief marketing bigwig responsible for

  Volkswagen has apologized for posting a racist video promoting its new Golf 8 [ ..that..] showed an outsized white hand pushing a black man away from a parked VW Golf, before flicking him into a restaurant called Petit Colon, which translates from French as the Little Colonist or Little Settler.

Nazi founded car company does what! now?

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/21/business/volkswagen-racis...

( according to https://www.campaignasia.com/article/volkswagen-china-cmo-de...)

From the borders to the polls to the security office, ID Everyone is for you!

You kid but the median four doors and a hatch appliance car buyer (EV or otherwise) is probably some accountant or school teacher who actually believes that sort of if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear type stuff.

All glory to arstotzka!

I might be too old but I still don’t understand why carmakers have to do electric vehicles weirder than gas vehicles in every sense, weirder lines, weirder lights, weirder names, weirder interiors.

Not saying is bad, just saying.

Yeah they could just call it the Golf EV and be done with it

There is already an e-Golf, seems like a pretty reasonable car, no idea on the price/range, etc. A friend had one, was nice.

It's dead; the id.3 was the replacement. Priced similarly to the id.3, but it didn't sell well compared to other comparable EVs AIUI. My theory is that at least a decent subset of people who want to buy an EV want an EV which looks like an EV, ie weird. Hence the id.3, which is _vastly_ more successful than the eGolf.

Oh, I didn't realize they killed it. I like the golf...

I guess it makes the car harder to compare.

If you have a Golf vs E-Golf, you will compare everything from range, weight,...

They want attention for sales from a younger demographic. That is because old people are too set in their ways to be willing to buy newer models and getting the young to adopt it will eventually produce a new generation of old people who will only buy it. That is how Toyota killed the Avalon. They chased after young people by making the car weirder and weirder, and then the people who actually wanted it could not stand to look at it anymore.

That is my personal opinion that is the result of a small sample set of observations.

In what way does the Avalon look weird? It looks like a typical car to me. If you want weird look at Citroen cars.

They don't. A BYD Seal or BYD Dolphin or a Sealion 7 look like 'normal' cars inside and out.

EVs have less inherent character than internal combustion cars. They're all quiet and refined, with stable handling thanks to a low centre of gravity. Most of them offer far more performance than any normal person needs. A small electric city car doesn't feel all that different to a large electric sedan, it's just smaller. That's an existential threat for legacy auto manufacturers, because it offers fewer points of differentiation against much cheaper Chinese brands.

EVs are less constrained in terms of packaging. The battery and all the working parts are stashed down in the floor, so you can do whatever you like from the wheels up, without having to worry about where you're going to fit the engine or transmission or gas tank.

Some manufacturers are making EVs that look just like their gasoline-powered equivalents, but there's a real possibility that they're headed down a blind alley. I think that manufacturers who fully embrace the design freedoms of EVs and find new ways of creating distinctive experiences will stand a much better chance of surviving the next decade. Weird doesn't mean good, but bland is just a concession of defeat.

Gas car design is in large part constrained by aerodynamics and safety. the engine takes up some space that a battery would not need but that hood is there anyway.

My problem is the exact opposite - they don't really explore the possibilites of a fully free form design, and the weirdness is always on the surface level.

For example, I'd love to get a car which doubles as a mobile work pod, where I could drive to a foresty car park, set up a hotspot, run the A/C, plug in my computer and do my days work from there.

But despite all the bells and whistles, interior layout is still very conservative.

Electric vanagon? Or the ID.Buzz might work.

https://soymotor.com/sites/default/files/usuarios/redaccion/...

While the idea is good, I do have to call out the Buzz as a herald of a worrying trend in van design (that's not exclusive to EVs) - building vans on top of standard road car platforms instead.

This results in longer vehicles, with lesser proportion of useful space, the packaging being worse than some ICE vans (and much worse than the original VW Bus).

This is to save engineering and manufacturing costs, which is kinda a bad thing to do when your vehicle retails for this much.

Well, I was looking at cars passing by while waiting for a bus and new ICE cars don't look normal either today. The bodywork is too busy for my taste, they resemble toys rather than utilitarian vehicles.

So, VW had the eGolf and the eUp. They looked so similar to their petrol siblings that most people ended up thinking that the id.3/4 was VW's first electric car. Meanwhile, everyone knew about, say, the BMW i3 and the Nissan Leaf and the gratuitously weird Hyundai Iconiqs.

At least slightly weird-looking electric cars seems to be what the market _wants_.

It's likely that the production car will be called ID.1.

For interested parties in the US, it is not expected to be brought here https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a64054081/vw-id-every1-con...

> it’s due to start production in two years

The specs are great for 2025. Let’s wait for 2027 when BYD has a better performing model for much less.

I am all vouching for VW’s electric efforts. I drove the ID Buzz which is great. I just wonder if they could sell competitively without tariffs in the EU.

No, of course they can't. You can't beat extremely cheap labor, government subsidized lithium, and devalued currency without tariffs.

They already sell the eUp, which in my country costs €18k after government incentives. It has a range of 260km.

This looks like it is just a replacement for that in the "ID" range.

The e-Up isn't sold anymore since EOY 2023.

I think the id.2 (25k before incentives, out next year) is supposed to be the replacement for that.

This is a concept study for a model planned for 2027.

Before that there will be the ID.2 scheduled for 2026: https://www.whatcar.com/news/new-volkswagen-id-2-electric-ca...

Sounds like the US needs to target it with tariffs quick. Surely it will be better for our economy to ensure the survival of a couple zombie automakers than it would be to bring accessible EVs to all.

You jest but one reason Chinese EVs aren’t available here is that there’s a 100% tariff on them. One hundred percent! Enacted under Biden, no less.

> one reason Chinese EVs aren’t available here is that there’s a 100% tariff on them

Our egg prices are also high because we block Mexican and Canadian imports. Trump continues a multi-decade trend of taxing consumers to subsidise business owners.

The US is the largest egg producer on the planet. We export a huge amount of them(#2, behind Netherlands I think). We don't need eggs to be imported from Mexico or Canada.

The consumers looking at egg prices 3x that of the ones across the border would disagree that they don't need eggs to be imported.

I suppose he’ll deliver on his campaign promise when our egg exports are tariffed!

Okay, and I'm sure Mexican and Canadian consumers would disagree with that because they don't want to deal with egg prices 5x what they're used to.

Canada and Mexico don't produce enough eggs to have any effect on the egg shortage in america. Which, to note, has been an issue since 2024. It is not related to any kind of trade war that Trump is starting

the egg prices are high because we are culling egg laying hens infected with H5N1 due to pandemic risk

And that’s a good thing. Modern cars are rolling surveillance devices. We don’t need CCP eyes in every garage in America. We also don’t want to lose the manufactiring capacity that the domestic auto makers bring.

CCP surveillance basically can't hurt us. what are they doing? collecting consumer habits like every American company? What would they do with that info? Make a more consumer competitive product? No wonder we get this propaganda all the time. American surveillance on the other hand, well that's connected to our security forces and can very much hurt you.

Sounds like the US needs to target it with tariffs quick.

As if VW would ever bring this to the U. S. Which they’re not.

It's too small for the US market. EU vehicles are on average much smaller.

s/small/cheap/gi

Americans like cheap, especially when there's a lot of economic pressure.

Americans like cheap

The data doesn't bear that out. Look at the best selling cars in the US, not many cheap cars on that list. Now compare it to the best selling cars in Europe, almost only cheap cars.

Top 3 car in the US are Ford F-series, Chevy Silverado and Toyota RAV. Top 3 cars in Europe are Dacia Sandero, Renault Clio and VW Golf.

As someone in the US who generally likes VWs and is interested in an EV as their next car, but who also finds the ID4 way too big this car has my attention.

I suspect you don't have much hope; the US didn't even get the id.3 (the Golf equivalent) AFAIK.

Last time I was in Germany, I was looking forward to driving something smaller than the usual beasts here in the US, and something with a manual transmission. But when I got to the Munich airport rental counter, they had “upgraded” me to the biggest automatic Volvo SUV I’d ever seen, because they were out of everything else. It was nice enough on the autobahn, but it was a pain in the rear in the small towns.

I think I drove that same car out of Frankfurt! But we had five people and luggage, so I guess it worked out.

> I was looking forward to driving something smaller than the usual beasts here in the US, and something with a manual transmission. But when I got to the Munich airport rental counter, they had “upgraded” me to the biggest automatic Volvo SUV

This was many years ago so I don't know how it is today..

I reserved the cheapest standard transmission car for rent at the Frankfurt airport. When I got there they downgraded me to an automatic car. I held firm and said I reserved a standard car so that's what I must have. I had to wait over an hour but finally they found me a standard car, a much upgraded model too compared to the cheapest one I reserved.

It’s too small for the US market, depressingly

Not an expert but my understanding is Trump's announced but not yet enacted 25% tariffs on EU goods, cars being one of the main motivators[0].

So assumung 25% tariff then 8% sale on top, the $20,000 would wind up at $27,000 sale price for the USA (although like other people have pointed out, this isn't going to be sold in the USA)

[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/18771/passenger-car-trade-bet...

If they released it right now, they could sell like hotcakes, at least in my country. Being for 2027, seeing how things are evolving, it will probably be just one more alternative, surviving in the market thanks to tariffs to Chinese cars. Nothing special.

Really - a massive, fuck-off tablet serves as the interior controls?

I thought car manufacturers had realised that touch-screen interfaces are simply terrible for drivers, and I thought customers were largely agreed in their hatred for them.

I would like to know how many accidents are caused by modern cars' usage of screens in the interior.

> it’s due to start production in two years at an undecided location in Europe

Two years in EV world is a long time.

I liked this thing, not an ev but it could be.

https://realitypod.com/story/volkswagen-launches-600-car-the...

For 600 all it takes is a silly mood to buy one. Then you sell it again 2 months later for 300 when you come to your senses and realize you have a wife, 3 Kids and a dog. No regrets and someone else can have their silly mood. Some will keep it because 258 miles/gallon is a sound way to save money.

Back looked like this

https://theweeklydriver.com/wp-content/uploads/vw26.jpg

Looks cool, I’m interested. Apparently I’m the combo breaker around here but I’ll live.

Cool concept, let's see if they can actually do volume production...

There's healthy scepticism, and then there's wondering whether VW can do volume production of hatchbacks.

I'm curious what the final price will be stateside. Claims of a $21,000 price point bear skepticism, these days.

Even ignoring trump tarrifs.

I doubt it will be sold in the US, there is not really any appetite for small cars with limited range.

I'd get one for my teenage kid in a heartbeat.

And for around town it'd be fine. Rivian range isn't that much more, they can't even really make it from the Bay Area to Lake Tahoe (< 200 miles).

The amount of golf carts and golf-cart adjacent vehicles in my neighborhood (and others, 2022 saw $1bn in sales) seem to differ. Although they'd have to be inexpensive.

Not coming to the US. :(

They don't even sell the id.3 in the US, so I'd be surprised if they launch this there. It'd be a very niche product.

There is zero doubt about that

.VW is already building hundreds of thousands of full BEVs every year with 383.100 sold (and delivered) in 2024 [1]

What can be reasonably questioned is the final price of the car once it enters production.

[1] https://www.volkswagen-group.com/en/articles/volkswagen-deli...

I mean, it's not a million miles away from the eUp, which they produced happily enough for years.

> The model will offer more than 155 miles of range and is the “last piece of the puzzle” for VW’s next-generation lineup, said Thomas Schaefer, CEO of the brand.

It should have been the first piece of the puzzle. I've owned three VWs, I wanted to keep buying them, but VW has made so many bad choices in the last fifteen years it's hard to support them.

Photos are here https://www.caranddriver.com/photos/g64055076/view-photos-of...

These look like renders.

The article doesn't say whether it will come to North America. Of the six numbered models, only the ID.4 made it over here. And we got the ID.Buzz minivan. The upcoming ID.1 and ID.2 seem to be launching only in the European market.

That name "ID. EVERY1" makes me wonder if it's affordable due to massive amounts of personal data being collected and sold about drivers and passengers.

It'd be a bold move after the lawsuits and data breeches Volkswagen has faced.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/customer-data...

https://carbuzz.com/news/automakers-spying-on-consumers-decl...

https://www.osborneclarke.com/insights/volkswagen-fined-eur-...

name checks out, but yea, calling a vehicle "ID. EVERY1" seems just plain weird

They also have the ID.2all.

Does "ID" translate to something more interesting in German? Both names are atrocious.

Maybe not German, but certainly French, as in Citroën's ID19, the lower-cost version of the classic DS19. In that case, "ID" is pronounced the same as idée.

This is not a joke: it stands for Intelligent Design.

When pronounced english ID pretty much has the same connotations in German as in English, but the phrase “Intelligent Design” isn’t connected to creationism in Germany (or rather, creationism wasn’t a culture war issue here in the first place).

When the letters are pronounced in German, it sounds like “Idee” (idea), but I’m not sure if they’re leaning into this, nor whether the average person will have that association.

AFAIK, EVERY1 (garyoldman.gif) is a working title and it’ll end up being called something different.

Haha I had the exact same thought when I saw the title.

That said, the new car looks very much like an "electrified" Golf, which is one of the first cars I drove, and I have fond memories about it. The new car may succeed if they target the same audience, and remove all those fancy user-tracking "features".

No. Your data isn't worth that much.

Meta has 3 billion daily users across products and brings in $165 billion. Their entire business is your data and they get about $55 a year off of selling yours. (I picked them because they have little revenue other than ads, though even then, not all of their ads have anything to do with your data, but I'm estimating in your favor and calling 100% of their revenue a result of collecting your data, because they're probably the closest to it at very large scale.)

So even if a car company was as good at collecting and monetizing your data as Meta, it couldn't meaningfully dent the price of a car. It couldn't even charge the batteries for a week. Data is cheap and highly scalable, cars are neither.

> No. Your data isn't worth that much.

There's a multi-billion dollar a year industry around the buying and selling of it. Every single company you've ever interacted with in any way is going out of their way to collect and store every scrap of your data they can get their hands on and you can bet that it isn't because it isn't worth much. It's worth a lot.

The data collection isn't even about ads. Ads are what they want you think it's for because nobody cares about which ads they see. They'll sometimes sell your data to advertisers, they will even use it for advertising themselves, but the data being collected about you is being used for all kinds of things. It's increasingly used to set the prices you pay, the policies companies hold you to, even how long they leave you on hold when you call them.

Car companies in particular want to sell your data to insurance companies who will jack up your rates depending on where, when, and how you drive. Your location data is highly valuable for all kinds of reasons and where you drive to, when, how often, and how long you stay there can tell them a lot. Car companies are selling our location data to police departments and federal agencies. Some cars are even collecting video and audio of everything that happens in and around the cars.

A car is a one time purchase. Until recently they got your money once and had to wait until you got another car to make money off of you. By collecting your data and using it against you, or selling that data (often as a subscription service) for others to use against you, it means that you never really stop paying for the car. You'll pay again and again for as long as you have the car.

Right, as I said, it’s highly scalable. The overall industry is big but the value of any one person’s data isn’t.

Your location data is already being sold by your phone provider and various apps you use. They’ve got way more than your car ever will. Facebook knows more about your location than your car ever could if you use their apps, and again, they get on the order of a few tens of dollars a year from it. And they own their own ad network.

Cars start at over $25k, your data isn’t worth a meaningful percent of that. It’s simple numeracy.

I’d love to see widespread car sharing with vehicles like these in the US. Suburbs can’t reduce car dependency without tools like car share to bridge the gap until other options improve.

I’d love to be proven wrong but I think the only way to reduce car dependency in the suburbs would be to knock them down and start over again. Which won’t happen. So EVs are an environmental positive at least.

Suburbs have the density to support great transit. However the low density means they cannot support anything less. If the bus isn't very frequent or it doesn't have a good route where you want to go - cars are cheap enough and no traffic to they are not painful.

great transit is not cheap. It needs $200/month per family. This is less than the family is spending on one car (of 2-3), but still a lot of money (more than any transit agency in the world gets). You can't start smal either because until you have everything right driving is strictly better so nobody will try it. Even if you build it, expect several years for people to try it.

I was in SF recently for a friend's wedding in Marin and rented a little Chevy EV just for a weekend because I wanted to test out the experience. It was STILL nerveracking and impossible to find a rapid charger, and I STILL ended up spending 45 minutes in a whole foods parking lot at 1am in Mill Valley. You'd think in 2025 it'd be easier by now. Compared to China, it's comical how the tech capital of the world can't get this right.

Imo the big problem is that 'affordable mass-market EV' is just a contradiction - once you build a mass-market EV most people would willingly buy - one with >400km range with decent enough fast charging for road trips, you've very close in terms of hardware budget to something that's decidedly upmarket, like a Model 3 - just add a bigger chassis, some tech gadgets and a more powerful motor, all of which cost little compared to the battery and inverter.

For an ICE car, this issue doesn't exist - you can put in a 900cc 80hp engine into a tiny car with basic trim and the end result would still be a car that can take you everywhere.

With the negative PR that Tesla has, companies should be putting their best foot forward when it comes to EVs but Volkswagen somehow manages to find every rake and step on it.

It seems to be priced about the same as the BYD Dolphin with much less range. The surely low sales numbers will make it the 'Volkswagen ID. NO1'

Glad to see the UI on the screen looks different than the current system. Software is by far the major flaw in the ID line.

This software comes from Rivian, for which VW paid them a few $billion over a few years.

This influx of cash from VW is the only reason Rivian is still in business.

If Rivian survives, and VW gets a massive leap in software from it, sounds like a great deal for them _and_ the people.

A small electric car which can also double as a home battery. That would make a difference in my opinion.

Good that Volkswagen would finally have a car where they don't need to cheat to make emissions benchmarks.

Actually this is a good one.

Too little, too late!

Come make it in Canada.

Canada auto market is just america lite.

...in 2027, perhaps.

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