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Volkswagen To Spend Over $40 Billion on Electric and Self-Driving Cars (reuters.com)
Volkswagen plans to spend more than 34 billion euros ($40 billion) over the next five years on developing electric cars, autonomous driving and other new technologies, it said on Friday. "With the planning round now approved, we are laying the foundation for making Volkswagen the world's number one player in electric mobility by 2025," Chief Executive Matthias Mueller said in a statement.
I took a *serious* look at the e-Golf last month. The only problem is that it has a 201 km range and the cottage is 250 km (like, within 10m of that number).There's a CCS on the route, but it's too close to the start point to be really useful, and there's not a lot of places in the middle to add one. So for me, something with 300 km range is pretty much a requirement.
The deal is pretty spectacular. Here in Ontario you get $14,000 back for buying an EV, and if you put in a Level 2 charger all your night time power is free (FREE). So after the payoff and taxes and everything else, it came to about $CAD25,000. That's actually less than the base model Golf, but you're getting the mid-level trim.
Upsides: looks like a Golf (which I prefer), drives like a Golf, has a CCS connection (does the Bolt or is it extra?), about the same size as my Civic so nothing to get used to there. Stereo remembers six BT devices (ugh everyone else with one).
Downsides:No remote of any sort really, so no way to know the charge status, get reminders, etc. More importantly, no remote "heat up now" which is pretty useful here in Toronto.
Odd: 0 to 60 in something over 9 seconds, which is really weird given its weight and torque. Maybe a typo in the specs?
I'd have thought they'd use mild or full hybridization, or even just more advanced actually clean diesels, at least as a transition.
They are. The new A8 is a mild hybrid. The luxury market can pay for the new tech, which will filter into the majority of their vehicles before any of these EVs come out. They're probably waiting until more of the car can affordably be 48V, which in turn reduces the size of the 12V system.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Electric cars are quick, efficient and quiet. Imagine NYC if the sound of engines were taken away. Imagine a small 40,000 person community. Imagine the tangible differences; less smog, less noise. This is a great solution for people that live in urban areas. I think people will find the ease of use, the different feel of being so quiet, and how little maintenance has to be done so appealing that it is going to become irresistible to almost anyone buying a new car, relatively soon.
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"Life is a journey. When we stop, things don't go right." - Pope Francis
In software development, it's called vaporware if you're announcing how great the shit is that you're going to develop. VW is behind the pack at the moment, that's why they're blabbering about this, in my opinion.
Right now, I'm driving a Renault Zoe. This is an extremely practical car. The NEDC range is 400 km (250 miles), which realistically is 275 km (170 miles). VW is getting closer, but AFAIK right now does not have anything like that.
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I'd prefer that they spent a few billions on the people they defrauded and also spend lots of years in jail.
Yeah let's close a few factories and throw a few thousand workers off their jobs so you can feel some vengeance
Well not in build quality or reliability.
They'd be behind Tesla by 5 years if the product could be purchased TODAY. It can't. They haven't even rolled out a prototype that can compete with a 2012 Tesla Model S, and a prototype is expected several years before a purchasable product.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Tesla fan by any means, they're a horrible, slimy company, but I drive a Model S because there is simply no competing vehicle on the road yet. I'll be first in line when someone comes up with an actual competitor.
Sadly, most of the VW models sold in North America are made in Mexico. For obvious reasons, VW doesn't publicize that fact.
Did you miss the part where the costs of the recall / remediation were more than $30B or more? http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/2...
VW Auto Group is one of the world's largest automakers, maybe the largest depending on how you count. They were in a unique position to make this happen, but not bothering to do so because they were profiting from business as usual. Now they're going balls-out into EVs in order to try to shake that reputation, which will benefit everyone.
I believe VW's products are amazing, however, their business ethics, imho, are borderline criminal; unfortunately on the wrong side of that borderline.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
I'd prefer that they spent a few billions on the people they defrauded and also spend lots of years in jail.
...spend lots of decades in jail. FTFY.
They should return all the money they cheated people of, plus 20% for the aggravation caused.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Electric and self driving cars are definitely a good area to be in. My guess is silicon valley will pave the way and the automobile industry will just buy them out at some point and market into their existing vehicles.
I have a VW Touareg TDI subject to the recall. I'm extremely sensitive to the diesel stench. When I'm on the freeway, I can usually tell when there's an old diesel Mercedes a quarter mile ahead simply by the smell. And I cannot ride on most diesel boats because the smell gives me a headache. I have never gotten that smell from the Touareg. In fact except for the 'D' in TDI, almost nobody has even noticed that it's a diesel.
I bought it for towing, and was surprised at how fuel efficient it is. This is a 5000 lb vehicle rated to tow 7700 lbs, and I benchmarked it at 36.6 MPG on the freeway with cruise control set at 65 MPH over a circular route. I changed fuel additives recently to one with more lubrication (modern ultra-low sulfur formulations are very low in lubrication), and now I'm getting about 38 MPG on the freeway with occasional forays into 40+ MPG territory. I'm afraid that in their zeal to get stereotypical "dirty" cars off the road, environmentalists are going to wind up increasing fuel consumption and air pollution by eliminating some incredibly fuel-efficient vehicles.
Understand that the reason the NOx emissions are high on diesels is because the engines are so efficient. The more efficiently the engine burns, the higher the temperature and the less carbon (from the fuel) there is for atmospheric oxygen to bind to, so some of the oxygen ends up binding to atmospheric nitrogen instead. Diesel straddles the limit for acceptable NOx emissions (which contribute to smog). But if you artificially set the NOx limits lower than they really need to be for clean air, you'll trade off engine efficiency and wind up increasing fuel consumption and therefore pollution.
That may be true, but $40B buys you a lot of expertise to bypass at least a few of those years by bringing in outside people. It also will allow you to progress much faster than the resources Tesla has available to them, and leverage their name and supply chain.
WHOOSH
In many languages-other-than-English, the "J" is actually a "Y" sound, that is how we got from Yahshuah to Jesus and from YWYH to Jehovah -- see http://www.bing.com/videos/sea...
NOBODY will believe VW when they announce they've got a new, clean diesel. In addition, European countries are announcing future, across-the-board bans on diesels, because the soot they produce is so damaging to health and structures. There's no future in diesel cars, and spending any more money on developing a BETTER dead-end technology is foolish. You might as well tell Kodak to make a slightly cheaper film camera, as digital cameras loom large.
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Will these cars be rated to run 1,000 miles on a single standard D-Cell battery based on Volkswagon engineer testing?
Actually NOx emissions form, due to high air compression ratios with high temps. And diesel engines must have high air compression ratios to ignite the diesel vapor... In cars, smog is why they lowered the compression ratios after the early 1970's, They did this in gas powered vehicles, to reduce smog levels in the air from Nitrous Oxide emissions. And they lost horsepower.., It's very true that they now discovered diesel fumes can even effect the minds and mood.. And the soot is very carcinogenic. (Gasoline isn't a winner in cancer either. Poorly kept ones, stink with raw unburnt gasoline too.) Once in a blue moon, I too, drive behind a clean diesel car or bus. But If the: injectors, fuel pump, or governor go bad it starts to smell bad, or even visibly smoke. Even compression loss can cause this due to lower temperatures causing incomplete combustion. I don't know if they still do it. But some truckers used to run filtered, used, motor oil in their vehicles. And that stuff reeks! (Diesels are more powerful because diesel oil is more energy dense than gasoline.)
To condense your comment. NOx is generated any time you have a high pressure, high temperature environment in air. It actually doesn't have anything to do with the fuel being burned as it's a natural reaction at those conditions between the nitrogen and oxygen in the air. But diesel engines by their very nature need higher pressures and higher temperatures to ignite the diesel. This means any air passing through the engine is going to generate NOx at much higher rates than gasoline.
You can scrub NOx in a catalytic converter which is how the problem is solved in gas engines but diesel particulate emissions destroy catalytic converters. Big trucks get around this by using Urea which contains the NOx emissions by converting it. VW claimed to have solved the Urea problem on small diesels but in fact hadn't solved the problem, just found a way to cheat on the emissions. The result being the only way to get an effective diesel with low emissions will be to outfit the cars with urea tanks just like big rigs. This is a non-starter for residential drivers and VW has decided that rather than trying to switch to gasoline they will just jump straight to electric. It's the only real move they could have made after the diesel cheating was revealed.
Is it really about the soot? I don't see much about soot these days and it's more about the invisible particles (is that what you call soot?) and NOX gases. /Curious
Max.
I had my Audi A1 1.6 diesel "fixed" and they didn't add any urea device. I'm not sure what they did actually.
Max.
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Yeah, that's not new and I actually have one of the affected vehicles, but I personally can distinguish between what diesels used to produce - horrible thick black soot, kind of like what comes out of a chimney when you clean it, and what the produce now, which is pretty much invisible - until it becomes smog, that is.
Max.