WSJ: How Volkswagen’s $50 Billion Plan to Beat Tesla Short-Circuited

Oh boy. With a headline like that, you know the story’s gotta be good: ZWICKAU, Germany—Five years and nearly $50 billion into the auto industry’s biggest bet on electric vehicles, Volkswagen VOW 2.05% CEO Herbert Diess and his guest, Chancellor Angela Merkel, stood in anticipation as the first ID.3, Germany’s long-awaited answer to Tesla, rolled off the assembly line. […]

Aaron Greenspan Attempts to Hack into Whole Mars

As we continue to publish the story of Aaron Greenspan and his fraudulent charity PlainSite’s harassment campaign against Tesla customers, it appears that Greenspan spent Christmas attempting to hack into the admin interface for this website. Ostensibly, he hoped to gain unauthorized access to Whole Mars to remove the story, disrupt this site, or preview […]

EV Transition Divides Volkswagen

The recent drama between Herbert Diess and Volkswagen is emblematic of larger schism driving the legacy automaker apart. While executives like Diess want to set aggressive goals and transition the entire company to zero emissions as soon as possible, workers and unions want to take it slow. This fundamental tension is what forced Diess to […]

Auto News Interviews Herbert Diess

Herbert Diess made a few interesting comments in his latest interview: VW is moving toward battery-powered electromobility more resolutely than other long-established automakers. Why? You have to do it consistently if you want traffic to become CO2-free. If you don’t develop combustion and electric vehicles on the same platform, the electric cars will be really […]

Volkswagen Shits the Bed on Emissions Targets Again

Volkswagen loves to give big fancy speeches about their transition to electric vehicles, but can they actually meet their European emissions targets? In a word, no. Volkswagen Group expects to be fined by the European Union this year for failing to achieve its CO2-reduction target for its new-car fleet — despite the automaker’s deal to […]

Diess on Thin Ice

As much as Volkswagen tried to make Diess’s new role look like “a normal part of the brand’s evolution”, it’s been clear to pretty much everyone watching that there’s a lot of drama going on behind the scenes of Germany’s largest automaker. Christiaan Hetzner spills the tea for a story in Automotive News titled “Diess […]

Volkswagen finalizes investment in Ford’s Argo AI one year later

Remember Argo AI, the self-driving startup Ford invested in? No? Well, look at the picture at the top of this post, that’s their car wearing the ugly LIDAR hat. Those who have been following the autonomy horse race closely may remember that Volkswagen announced they would invest in Argo about a year ago. Good news: […]