Sold my Audi when they started this, VWs are already overpriced basic shits.
Give me asian cars.
[laughs in 2013 era type-1 mod]
Sounds like a good reason to skip buying any car warranty going forward since I’ll be attempting to void that shit almost immediately.
Bad business decisions all around.
Das subscription
Die*
Is that in english or german?
Yes
From the same company that brought you test based emissions upgrades?
Consumer planning anything but Volkswagen subscription upgrade
Capped speed isn’t enough. I want it to slam the brakes on the highway and go “Tired of the ads? Get the Volkswagen Battlepass and enjoy an uninterupted drive!”
Every tine you bring the car to a stop it covers half the windows in ads like youtube does when you pause it to try and read something
Ooh, how about it accelerates really slowly at stop lights unless I pay for “turbo mode” to not get honked at?
I’m actually fine with that. People don’t need to go 0-60 in an intersection.
Drive for yourself not for others.
But what about 0-10? 0-5? Surely you’d be better off limited to 2 mph/kph for the first 10s after a stop.
Need a panoramic view instead of just a slit? Get the Extend-A-View™ subscription to instantly make the full surface of all your windows transparent!
Fuck you volkswagen!
If you pay a little extra a little corkscrew that raises up from the middle of the driver seat every half hour will only do so every two hours too.
🤔 💭 Our cars aren’t selling… Hmm… Should we make them last longer? No. Should we make the interior out of anything except hard plastic? No. Should we make our cars easier to repair and not have even the most basic shit require specialized tools? No. I got it! Subscriptions for basic shit that gauges the few customers still buying our shit!
I understand your point, but have you driven a VW in the past decade? They are reliable, relatively easy to repair and have comfortable interiors that aren’t with “hard plastic.” Perhaps you’ve confused VW with Ford?
EXCEPT the fuel pump for a Passat 2013 to 2017 is 400 to 600 dollars for the pump only. You can find some on eBay cheaper but when you can’t drive your car then you have to get what you can get.
I fix cars for a living every day.
reliable
Maybe, compared to a BMW or other “luxury” car marketed to rubes. But a Honda or a Toyota would totally eat VW’s lunch in regards to reliability, at half the purchase price.
relatively easy to repair
The VW Beetle is famously easy to repair, basically every modern VW model sucks ass. It needs some proprietary tool to access half the vehicle on more than half the models. I do not like working on them. We also get wonderful examples of German Manufacturing Precision™️ where you have a half a millimeter clearance to remove a part. This was worse in older VW’s in my experience (the Germans really took to AUTOCAD like fish to water when that became common, methinks) but it still happens.
comfortable interiors
Actually totally agree here, the interior of most modern VW’s is pretty nice. Shame that doesn’t extend under the hood.
VW also got caught straight up lying about their emissions testing a few years ago so that also destroyed basically all trust that I had in their brand. They’ll sell you a car that runs, but there’s really no knowing if the numbers that it reports are actually accurate.
Yeah. I think my car has a pretty decent build overall but the (I shit you not) 14 recalls ive had to bring it in for ranging from door handle replacements, firmware updates, back hatch issues makes me raise an eyebrow to it. I let a few stack up before I bring it in because I never notice any issue before or after, but better to get the free service than not.
Evidence strongly counters my own feelings on the matter.
Ford is even worse than VW, but VW is overpriced shit.
option to pay $22.50 per month or $879 one time to gain 20 horsepower.
At least you can buy it outright, so not the worst scheme of this sort, but still a scheme.
Auto Express UK reported on the pricing but could not verify whether the subscription follows the vehicle or the user profile.
This is bad journalism, per EU regulation, if the option is bought it follows the car, if it’s a subscription, I doubt they can legally demand either the original and definitely not another owner to keep it. A subscription can be cancelled, otherwise it’s an indefinite contract.
…
Oh sorry I forgot for a second that UK is no longer in EU, so UK customers can be fucked in new creative ways, which probably also explains why this experiment is in UK. Ah well they chose to fuck themselves over I guess.
We imported all the consumer protection laws, so as long as this isn’t a recent change it will be the same in the UK.
AFAIK a lot of the EU citizen and consumer protections have been dismantled in UK after UK left EU.
Even democratic rights to protest have been limited, and privacy rights against government surveillance that is illegal in EU.
So I seriously doubt they haven’t cut user protections too, the conservative government was clearly a government that worked against the general population to benefit the rich and those in power. This was absolutely one of the main points for the extreme right politicians and media (mostly conservatives) to want out of EU.
Volkswagen is desperate and absolutely fucked. If this is their answer for every one of their shitty little cars being over taken by Koreans they are just fucked.
VW makes better EV’s than Hyundai/KIA IMO.
Also VW group has bigger sales.Hyundai and KIA have some good options too, but there is no way to call VW shitty by comparison, when they far outsell the competition in EU.
In Denmark where I live, Korean EV’s have dropped out of top 10, while VW group has 7 models in top 10!
Vw doesnt make better EVs than hyundai lol, their range is worse, their charge curve is worse, their software is worse, what they have is better brand still, people are sleeping on Hyundai/Kia even though they offer better equipped cars for cheaper and with better reliability and warranty.
That’s completely okay with me. i get to buy these as used cars at extremely cut price.
Go test drive a VW id.3 from 2022, I did, it’s a 3 year old car and everything is creaking
That’s completely okay with me. i get to buy these as used cars at extremely cut price.
I don’t know if you saw I posted earlier, but I don’t dislike Hyundai, I’m even considering a second hand Hyundai for exactly that reason.
The Skoda Enyaq which is also VW group and based on the VW MEB platform is very well equipped as standard. I’d say that’s similar to Hyundai.
I cant think of anything that is extra on the Enyaq, that isn’t also extra on the Hyundai.
Also the small 60 kW Enyaq is very similar in range to a 64 kW Kona, and that’s despite it’s 400 kg heavier.
I bet there are many ways to compare, but the VW drive train is very efficient, so it generally manages to match Hyundai despite being heavier.
But you need to compare similar cars, you can’t compare Sport Sedan to SUV, and expect the SUV to be equally efficient at Autobahn speed.Go test drive a VW id.3 from 2022, I did, it’s a 3 year old car and everything is creaking
That’s anecdotal, but I agree it shouldn’t do that. Maybe it has been driven frequently on bad roads?
Last place I lived, we had a 1km dirt road to our house, that takes a toll.
Is $879 for an extra 20 horsepower even worth it?
For ice cars If you are outside warranty you can just have your ECU remapped and gain much more hp.
I am guessing these remaps will eventually be available for electric motors too
I’m not sure about other EVs, but on the BMW iX, a lot of the computer stuff is encrypted now, and has to be signed with BMW’s private key (i.e. they’ve actually implemented encryption correctly). Apps like Bimmercode don’t work on it.
Not really IMO, but I would personally never buy it, since it’s an artificial limitation only meant to extort buyers for more money, for something that cost them nothing, and I would never reward artificial limitations and such shenanigans.
I’d probably look for some third party hack to unlock it for free instead, or probably buy another brand of car.
more horse power means more stress - the car will break more. Not only wouldn’t I buy it I’d pay less for a used car if anyone ever paid for it.
Fair if you care about it. No other upgrades will get you that much.
No. Switching from 140 to 160 hp isn’t something you’d really even notice on everyday commuting. More is more of course, but unless your driving style is very aggressive that doesn’t really make any difference on the driving experience. What it might do is improve your range slightly, but that depends heavily on multiple different things and if your driving style and conditions on most common routes aren’t suitable it might even reduce the range you’ll get out of the thing.
Do you notice the power difference when your AC is on?
This 20 hp should be similar tbh.
Our family was looking for a newer car. We found a listing for a VW, went to the dealership with intent to buy and was told that the car (which was standing RIGHT there) was available for sale in 3 months. Now we enjoy our new Toyota.
The car has to ripen.
You dodged a bullet.
VW has gone down the drain.
Yeah, he dodge-d a bullet. Good for him he could af-ford something better.
Had a 2023 VW ID4. They literally go out of their way to make your experience worse in many cases.
They have an app, they can read locked state, but can’t lock the car.
Their app/website makes you completely re-sign in and re-accept cookies every month or so that breaks any API usage mildly like HomeAssistant.
The key unlocks the door if you walk to it, 50% chance to re-lock the door when you walk away without interacting with it.
Can detect tire pressure, but they don’t tell you what it is, only if there is “pressure loss”
Backup camera was horrific quality, especially the field of view of a telephoto camera, especially compared to my 2015 Nissan altima
The entertainmrnt console was terible, extremely laggy, and Android auto was the worst experience. It would take between 2 and 15 minutes to connect to android auto with multiple different phones, and it would choose 1 app per phone to not display. My girlfriends’ was her maps app which is insane. Sometimes I would be at my destination before it would connect.
Also putting a trailer hitch on it would have been like 1500-2000€…
For the tire pressure thing, that’s because VW doesn’t actually use sensors in the wheels. They calculate wheel circumference as you’re driving and warn you if it changes, meaning you have a flat. On the one hand, you don’t have to worry about sensors if you have winter tires, but on the other… having it show PSI would be nice.
Tell me more about the sensors & winter tyres. They arent a thing where I live.
If you buy a new set of wheels, the pressure sensors for the valve stems also cost extra, and I think have to be paired with the car using a scan tool, depending on the manufacturer. So if you’ve got separate winter and summer tires, the sensors have to get updated each time you change. (Maybe some manufacturers have figured out how to auto-pair based on proximity? but idk)
Of course! You change the entire (en-tyre?) wheel, not just the tyre. I kind of assumed it was a twice a year thing that you would do at a tyre shop.
I imagine its a pain but it must feel good going from slippery summer ones to something that sticks - to ice!?Many people do just have one set of rims and have a tire shop swap them out. In that case they wouldn’t have to charge the sensors, but you need to pay someone with a tire machine every time then. I have 2 full sets of wheels so that means I can change them out myself at home, which is particularly useful if there’s ever a surprise early snowstorm or I’ve been procrastinating swapping them.
Having proper snow tires with their soft rubber and special tread pattern definitely makes a huge difference in cold-weather traction. Even if the road is dry but below freezing, a winter tire will handle a bit better because a summer tire’s rubber is designed for higher temperatures and will go stiff in the cold. The tread pattern is designed to have snow pack in and stick to it, since snow sliding on snow is actually higher friction than rubber on snow. With the right tires you’ll bottom out your car in the snow before you get stuck from loss of traction. Pure ice is a bit of a different story. The only real solution for that is tires with metal studs in them, but they’re illegal to use on the public roads in the city because they tear up the asphalt.
Most car for the last decade or two already come with a lot of options built-in that are simply disabled by software in the factory. It’s cheaper to just build in a standard set of electronics and disable what’s not bought by the customer because many brands still like to milk the customer with options. Subscriptions just take the buying of options to renting.
VW here also also has the “lifetime subscription” for this. That makes it basically the same as you buying the option and they switch in it on in the factory. It’s just plain in your face that it’s behind a paywall while the old checking options didn’t feel as much as a paywall.
Anyway, I went with Hyundai. They didn’t do options and subscriptions. You only get to choose the model and looks, that’s it.
Fuck “lifetime subscriptions”. They’re taking a page from Tesla and I’m sure they’ll require any new owner to pay them separately should you sell the vehicle.
Simply avoid VW and any future brand that pulls this shit.
Tesla does not and has never had “lifetime subscriptions”. They have a single connectivity subscription (they still have basic connectivity for free for all cars that allows you to monitor and control the vehicle,as well as navigation). Any other upgrades are behind 1-time payments (or your choice of either).
Wouldn’t it be even cheaper to design the next version modularly and interchangeable?
Ah, wait, that would make it too easy to repair for unlicensed users.
Turns out, the car costs more so you can’t repair it yourself.
Wouldn’t it be even cheaper to design the next version modularly and interchangeable?
The extra labor to manage more components and check/verify each single vehicle fits it’s unique specs would eat up the saving really fast. It’s so much easier to do a single HW config and manage it through SW, and electronic components are generally cheap.
That would require more logistics to get different modules, checks to make sure the right ones are installed and labor to install them. Somewhere there is a cutoff point where modularity is cheaper.
