> [..] spends around €10 million a year on lobbying – which sounds like a lot, but amounts to just 0.05% of VW's €21 billion R&D budget.
> The logic is clear: innovation is expensive and uncertain, whereas lobbying to keep current products on the road is cheap and reliable.
Complete non sequitur. This could more easily be read as "they don't care much about lobbying and are hard at work doing R&D instead", but then that would go very much against narrative the author is trying to spin for us here.
Also I distinctly remember industry voices being very much pro-electric, while it was dinosaur politicians fetishizing ICE cars and fighting to keep production going, long past the point VW even wanted to focus on them.
I don't think this one was a lobbying problem for once.