Jarring Juxtaposition

By
eric
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If you watch the Super Bowl (something that has become kind of like watching a combination Black Panther rally/”family friendly” drag queen show) the weekend after next, you will see VW’s latest ad campaign touting the battery powered devices it was effectively forced to transition into manufacturing after it was conveniently discovered the automaker had “cheated” on government emissions certification tests.

More like necessarily discovered.

As this column has observed in the past, the TDI diesel-powered vehicles VW was selling lots of at the time were an existential threat to the EV push that was beginning around the same time (this was circa 2015-ish). VW wasn’t just selling diesels. VW was selling affordable diesels. You could pick up a new TDI-powered Jetta back then for less than $22k. VW’s plan was to make its clean diesel engines the basis of a return to the company’s roots as the maker of people’s cars. That is to say cars most people could afford. Cars that were inexpensive to buy and to drive and to keep.

Kind of like the Beetle and its spin-offs the company built its empire on.

And that was an existential threat to the plan to push devices on the people – so VW’s clean diesels had to go, by framing them as being not “clean.” In fact, all they were was noncompliant – a very different thing. But never mind.  They are gone now, so the transition can proceed.

It is more like a reversal.

The first Beetles (two of them) were brought to the United States in 1949. A few years later, the famous importer Max Hoffman began bringing over hundreds of them, including (by 1955) the Type II bus that became affectionally known as the hippie bus. Hippies weren’t the only ones who liked the bus, though. It was a remarkably versatile vehicle that VW offered in various iterations, including – also iconically – the camper bus iteration, which had a raisable roof section, built-in ‘fridge and pretty much everything needed to live in the thing, if you needed a cheap place to live.

And because it was a Beetle under its bodywork – with a Beetle engine and shared running gear – it was almost as simple as a Beetle to maintain and repair. A hippie with no money could keep one running (most of the time). There were also Fastbacks and Squarebacks  and Karman Ghias – all based on the Beetle, too. They were cars fore the people – not just affluent people.

Which brings us to what VW will be trying to sell people during the Super Bowl: Devices that are not for the people – who cannot afford them. Including a device made to look like a Type 2 bus that is for rich hippies only. It is called the ID.Buzz  -perhaps suggesting the need to get high before you take a look at what it costs, which will  reportedly be “in the mid-to-high $50,000 range.”

Speaking of range. This pushing $60k device will go about 260 miles before its battery wilts and you get to wait 30-45 minutes to recover a partial charge. A 1970 Type II bus carried about 16 gallons of gas and burned about a gallon to cover about 18 miles (the bus got about 16 MPG in city driving and low 20s on the highway). Do the math and you will discover that a Type II bus had a range of 288 miles on a full tank. And its tank could be refilled (to full) in about three minutes. If you ran out of gas before you got to the station, you could hump a gallon or two back to it. Good luck trying to carry a jerry can of kilowatt-hours back to your device when it runs out of juice.

A Bus also cost around $2,700 when it was new – which works out to about $21,000 in today’s money. Which works out to less than half what the ID.Buzz will reportedly cost. The ID.Buzz also weighs about twice as much (5,300 lbs.) as a Type II bus (2,670 lbs.). In fact, it weighs about the same as a current full-sized SUV such as a Chevy Tahoe (5,473 lbs.) so you’ll need a whole crew of hippies to push it down the road when it runs out of range.

But of course, the ID.Buzz is not for hippies – unless they’re ex-hippies who are now affluent enough to afford what the Man wants the people (some of them) to drive.

Speaking of that. Back in 1970, VW sold more than 71,000 Type IIs – and well over a million cars, because there were that many people who could afford to buy a new VW. How many devices such as the ID.Buzz does VW think it will be able to sell, given there are only so many people who have the means to purchase a device with a price approaching $60,000?

Perhaps VW hasn’t thought about this enough. Or perhaps VW is no longer much interested in selling cars to the people.

In which case, what is VW?

Volkswagen translates – literally – as people’s car. Pushing $60k devices are that like drugs that don’t prevent you from getting or spreading a transmissible illness are vaccines. They are something else being marketed under a name that no longer applies.

“As we look forward to the next 75 [years],” said Rachael Zaluzec, Senior Vice President of Customer Experience & Brand Marketing, Volkswagen of America, “we will celebrate the real people and real-life moments that have made Volkswagen brand the people’s love story it is today.”

Really? Seriously? Am I high? Or are they?

Maybe a name change is in order.

. . .

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Related posts:
  1. $50,000 for a Passat?
  2. A Buzz for Rich Hippies
  3. Another $60k-plus to start EeeeeeeeVeeeeee
  4. Here We Go – Again
  5. The Battery “Breakthrough”

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59 COMMENTS

  1. 2024 ID Buzz EV about $55,000….A 1962 VW type 2 about $21,000 in 2024 dollars….

    A 1962 VW type 2 after 62 years……
    A 1962 VW type 2 sold for $231,000 at Barret Jackson in 2021
    Classic.com….the average selling price for a type 2 is $59,571

    A 2024 EV after 8 years, 100,000 miles when the battery is dead….residual value zero….

    The 1962 VW type 2 looks like a good investment….the 2024 EV looks like a total loss……

  2. It appears that Toyota is next. First, they pushed Akio Toyoda aside. Now it’s certification tests scandals, just like VW. Can’t have that anymore. EV is your future.

    Akio Toyoda (1/30/24): “In closing, I would like to express my deepest apologies to our customers and stakeholders for the inconvenience and concern caused by the successive irregularities at Hino Motors, Daihatsu, and Toyota Industries.”
    https://toyotatimes.jp/en/toyota_news/toyota_group_vision/001.html

    https://news.yahoo.com/toyota-chief-apologizes-cheating-testing-130405863.html

    https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2024/01/29/companies/toyota-halts-shipment/

    • Indeed, letmepicyou –

      The Beetle was in my estimation the ultimate in basic transportation. Not the Model T, which is not a practical car today. Or even 50 years ago. But it is still practical to drive a Beetle – a car designed almost 100 years ago – today. A Super Beetle can be driven in heavy city/highway traffic; I know because I did it, for years. My daily driver back when I first began working for The Washington Times in the early ’90s was a ’74 Super Beetle. I drove it on the DC Beltway, I-66 and I-95. You cannot do that with a Model T. At least, not with traffic. A T cannot hold 70 MPH or even get there. A Beetle might be working hard at 70. But it can do it.

  5. I grew up riding in my parents’ 70 VW Bus. They ran the ever living snot out of it, blowing the #1 cylinder 3 times. Mom got a speeding ticket in ’73 on I-64, when the speed limit was 70, lol! Lots of road trips and fighting with my brothers & family dog for the best seat (over the engine in winter, shotgun in the summer). We went everywhere in the damn thing!

  6. EV’s don’t work in cold weather…but the old air cooled beetles do….

    bring back the old air cooled beetles ….ban EV’s….

    With winds of up to 100 miles per hour and temperatures that go as low as -58 degrees Fahrenheit, the frozen Antarctic isn’t exactly a welcoming place …..

    several VW Bugs were used in Antarctica with much success….more info here….

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1udwUtUJxrs

  7. The king of them all..

    Audi’s Craziest SUV – The £155,000…$196,000… Q7 V12 6.0 lt. twin turbo DIESEL….. Exclusive Concept!
    738 lb ft torque detuned from 1000 lb ft…to save the transmission…

    The only V12 diesel in a road car in history….they are now a collector’s car….

    It sold terribly, only about 50 units over the full course of production of 4 years.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAcjeGOVwWQ

  8. Here’s a TSB from VW that details how the EPA tests the range of all EV’s.
    Here’s some excerpts,

    3. All testing is done in a laboratory on a dynamometer.

    4. The city and highway driving ranges determined from this testing are adjusted to account for real-world factors that are not represented on the laboratory test procedures. These factors include such things the impact of air conditioning, of cold temperatures, and of high speed and aggressive driving behavior. Although the regulations allow some optional approaches, the most common approach is to use a factor of 0.7 to adjust all the test parameters, including range. For example:

    An EV achieves 200 miles on the highway laboratory test. Real-world highway driving range →
    200 x 0.7 = 140 miles to account for aggressive driving and HVAC use.

    https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/tsbs/2023/MC-10242896-0001.pdf

  9. Did anyone notice that VW changed their logo a bit? It used to be like a three-dimensional medallion. Now it’s 2D flat monochrome looking like a cell phone icon. No doubt the designer spent all of 6 minutes drawing it.

    • I have, Alex-

      I love old VWs – and have owned several. I also admire newer models such as the GTI and all the TDI-powered models. I got to drive a V10 diesel Touareg back in the early 2000s; that thing was a beast! Close to 600 ft.-lbs. of torque.

      All shat down the toilet.

      • My.first car was a ’72 Beetle bought new, cash, $1998 with leatherette, on my HS graduation with the money i saved working as a dishwasher in a steak house! (Try that today). Drove that sucker all over the country. It had a million mile odo when most cars rolled over at 100k. I sold it to my ex girlfriend when I went in the Navy. She ended up wrecking it at 375k miles.
        In ’75 I was on leave at home. Planned to get another one for my relocation to the west coast. The new Rabbit hit my fathers friends dealership. The car was brilliant. Amazing. Blew minds left and right. He wasn’t supposed to sell it to me for another month before the official roll out. I played the military card and a week later I was on the road from Florida to California.
        The car was gawked at in every gas stop. When I got to San Francisco it was time for the break-in oil change. The dealership had never seen a live one and tried to buy it from me.
        The car freaked out many of my motor head buddies on base. One said it cornered like a slot car. And its light weight gave it stunning performance especially in comparison to abominations like the Mustang II.
        By the time it rolled out on the west coast there was a 7 month waiting list.
        I left it home for my first overseas deployment and my father drove it across country to greet me on my return. His plan was to fly back but he loved it so much he managed to buy one in San Diego and drove it home.
        At ~450k miles I gave it to my little sister and bought the new diesel model. I couldn’t get one in California so I bought it on leave in Florida. I got way over 50 mpg on the trip. It wasn’t as sprightly as my.bright orange slot car but more like an Army tank. Unstoppable.
        They were impossible to buy in California. The waiting list was insane.
        This was during the first Carter oil crisis but we had an advantage. You could get diesel in Tijuana fir 11 cents a gallon. I, like many had an aux fuel tank fitted into the spare tire well. Filling up in Mexico meant trips across the border once a month for your $2 fill
        -ups if you drove a lot. At any one time you could see oceans of VW Rabbits sagging in the back lined up at the border check.
        11c was in TJ proper, go a few miles south and Pemex had it for 8-9c.
        That car would not frikking quit.
        Once I started having kids I needed more room I sadly.sold it to a young guy needed cheap transportation. (Try that today) I developed an interedt in Pontiacs for a few years hiatus from my beloved VW.
        When the Toureg came out it was perfect for my needs. Dad had that V10 TDI. It was insane.
        I ended up treating myself to a 2014 Cayenne Diesel in 2014. 185k miles so far. Oil, brakes tires, wipers is pretty much all it ever needs and does well over 30 highway (post ‘fix’) even with my lead foot. On a trip from. Jacksonville to Denver I had to fill up once, 29 gallon tank, fo the math. Its a mountain goat playing in the hills above Red Rocks in Denver or Breckenridge with that “offroad” mode, if I never needed a bug out vehicle this is the one. Which is why I will probably leave it in my will to someone.
        Anyway. My business vehicle is a 2018 Atlas. Great car. I love it. Super roomy. V6 120K no issues. I only wish it had the 3.0 TDI and it would near perfect. Not as fancy inside as some others but I prefer the no-nonsense interior, clean and uncluttered.
        But sadly VW just has nothing for me anymore.
        I rented a Diesel Polo while in Italy a couple of years ago. Damn thing turned in an honest 80mpg from Rome to Naples and Naples to Florence, Milan. Lake Como Venice a day back to Rome.
        My wife asked me why we couldn’t have one at home. A long story.
        Yeah the logo change is more than just aesthetics. It is a message. “Today we make generic devices like cell phone apps and our new logo reflects that new direction.”
        I always felt comfortably at home when I was in front of a wheel bearing that logo. But today I get no emotional rush from it.
        I guess you can never go home again.

      • I really like the older VW’s…..

        I owned…

        1973 Porsche 914 2.0….with a VW 2.0 lt air cooled engine

        1992 VW mk2 diesel 5 spd…60 mpg highway…

        2000 Mk 4 VW Jetta tdi diesel with stage 1 tune 60 mpg highway

        1984 Mk1 VW GTI with a 2.0 lt block and 1.8 GTI head with headers….a very fun car and fairly quick….

        1998 Mk3 VW GTI 2.0 lt with headers and a 9A close ratio transaxle..a great car….

        1998 Mk3 VW Jetta 2.0 lt 4 cyl. with high lift cam, headers, close ratio transaxle, coilovers and many other modifications…a fun car….

        1995 Surf green…Mk3 VW GTI with an Audi 1.8 20 valve turbo, stage 2 swap..25 lb boost….240 hp, 280 lb ft torque….2300 lb curb weight …9.6 lb/hp……coilovers…..a quick, responsive car…fully analog, no ABS, no airbags, no traction control… nothing…..a cool sleeper…great at intersections…..huge low end torque…..

        2024 Golf R has 10.7 lb/hp……

      • Eric, I refurbished a 2004 V8 Touareg. It was a tank and immediately became the favorite of all my vehicles (past and present).
        One of the best vehicles that I ever driven!
        VW has sold out.
        (I did just snag a 2003 Passat Wagon however…86K…)

        • Good stuff, Frankie!

          The Touareg was one of VW’s greats that many of us didn’t appreciate at the time. We – many of us – have taken too much for granted, for too long. We’ll soon learn just how much they intend to take away.

    • That flat, 2D logo thing has been a thing for a while now (not including VW’s logo.) Sports teams have been using those awful 2D corporate looking logos. I think they’re disgusting looking.

  10. I dunno. I see $15/hr factory workers and store clerks driving brand new cars. Between all of the redistributed taxpayer money being doled out and people’s love of debt, I suspect VW will sell plenty of their neo-hippy devices here. If it remotely has any connection to anything retro (even if it’s diametrically opposed to the everything that the original thing on which it was based stood for), and it’s shiny and touts “the latest technology”, it’ll sell just fine to all of the slaves. It’s “only $1000 a month”.

  11. While in Germany last year, I saw a total of one privately owned I.D. Buzz. This was a work truck used for local jobs. Granted, this was in Kaiserslautern which is not representative of the entire Country but when the VW UP! was introduced, I saw a good number on the streets after it was introduced. The local handler had several I.D. Buzzes for sale and the there were several in town with dealer plates but I saw zero driven by everyday people.
    There were a few at events in Hockenheim, Boeblingen, etc. but all of these were service vehicles used by Porsche, VW or Hosts of whatever event was going on. It was also notable, the Buzzes used by the Hosts had removable vinyl logos/lettering so they were probably not owned but were loaner vehicles.
    From my observations, the I.D. Buzz is a loser in Germany – at least while I was there. I guess VW are losing a little on each electric offering but they intend to make it up in volume.

    • the air cooled crowd only buy an air cooled VW…or Porsche…. for the sound….these won’t sell…..no air cooled sound….zero interest…..

      Also light weight, easy to work on, simple, totally reliable….and very cool….

      an over weight, rolling bomb EV is not cool….the buyers are low IQ, misinformed, morons……

      • I had a dream of buying the brand name in the coming bankruptcy liquidation, dredging the Beetle tooling out of ling term storage in Mexico and Brazil and restart the legend.
        If course we will have to wait for DC to finally dissolve, not an impossible dream

    • While in Munich over the past summer, had an opportunity to Uber several miles in an ID Buzz.

      The driver pushed the van to its limits.

      I was very impressed by the speed and acceleration, and the heft, as it is a very heavy vehicle for its size.

      The Polizei either didn’t care about enforcing speed limits, or have a hands off policy for electric vehicles.

      It reminded me very much of a carnival ride, point van and ZZZOOOOMMM…to the Moon, Alice!!

      Of course, the two Liters of Radler Beer consumed with lunch helped make it even more enjoyable, I must say.

      But, I can’t imagine having to use such an impractical ride for daily use, with the charging requirements, and the amount of tires a pig like this will eventually need.

      But…Fun to Ride??? Oh Yeaaahhh, as the Kool Aid man would say…just like riding a chubby girl or a tricycle, great fun, until your friends see you…

  13. VWs were the definition of counter-culture. The owners thumbed their noses at the consumer lifestyle. Or at least that’s what they devolved into. But far more of them were sold as second vehicles, mom’s car.

    But then there’s the Karman Ghia… a girl in high school’s dad was a VW mechanic and gave her one for her birthday. Much like her, it didn’t really look like much until you really looked at it. Then, holy smokes, what a looker!

    • My father had a Karmann Ghia before I was born in the late sixties. I think it had a four speed; it might have been orange in color. All I’m certain of is my mother crashed it in our rather short driveway! She started it in gear and it slammed into the back of their Plymouth Fury totaling it.

      • Hi Bill!

        The Karmann Ghia is one of the few old VWs I have not owned. It looked like a fun (and inexpensive) little sort-of sports car. I will always have a soft spot for Beetles, though. Such an ingenious, practical car. A “Model T” that can still be a daily driven car.

        • They were insanely tough. One winter in upstate NY cold like only Buffalo and Siberia usually see. The bugs were the only thing on the road.
          I sometimes had to chip the ice from the door seam to get in.
          That winter my clutch cable broke. I had no garage and no way going to fish that cable in that weather I just learned to do without it. With a little practice you could drive it perfectly without the clutch.
          Try that with almost anything else.

  16. The Trabant was the car that the government in communist East Germany allowed people to buy. Around 1990, Volkswagen took over the old Trabant plant in Zwickau in former East Germany and started making Polos and Golfs.

    From 2019 onwards, Volkswagen decided to make Zwickau its hub for EVs, and stopped making cars with internal combustion engines there.

    The EV is the Trabant of our time – the type of cars our commie overlords allow us to buy – so now Volkswagen has gone full circle, from taking over the Trabant plant to becoming a Trabant manufacturer itself.

    (Volkswagen should reconsider the naming scheme of these EVs, though. Instead of calling them e.g. ID.3, they should be called DDR.3.)

    • Great point. German labor is too expensive to make a cheap vehicle. German electricity is too expensive to produce any cheap product. They had a window of time after the collapse of the Soviet Union but before East German integration where they could update the factories in the east but get cheap labor. Now that’s all over and the children and grandchildren of the East Germans are expecting a Western paycheck. Oh, they’ll be productive (more than their US counterparts) but unfortunately not productive enough to produce a $20K EV.

      • The slaves in china are compliant/fairly low paid and the country has the slave owner control group’s favorite control system…communism….so all vehicle production is being given to china…..non compliant slaves in the G7 will starve…….

    • Off topic but summer 2029 my friend in Bratislava got me real tour, not the public one of the VW there. ( he worked there as actestbdriver) They were making Touregs that day but also would run Cayenne on some days.
      Beautiful plant. Amazing how the put them together.
      Like Eric said, they shat it all away.

    • Here in the Detroit suburbs people are excited the Detroit Lions could get into the Stupid Bowl if they win on Sunday. I couldn’t name one person o the Lions. The last football game I watched was in a NYC stadium when Joe Namath was quarterback. It seems to me that football has about 15 minutes of action in a three hour game.

      Basketball has a lot of action. Soccer has a lot of action but little scoring. so it is boring. Hockey has a lot of action but I can never see the puck on my TV

      US BEV sales in 2023 were up over +50% from 2022. I suspect many people have no idea of their many disadvantages and faults.

      EVs are a terrible investment with high initial costs, higher insurance costs and fast depreciation. The good news is fast acceleration, fast warm up with the heater and batteries will have no problem lasting the life of the EV (over 200,000 miles). I still wonder why people buy them.

      Every fault of EVs eventually turns out to be worse than we initially thought. Besides being expensive.

      There have been conservative sources reporting Ford is cutting Lightening production in half. That is a myth, but it seems they will not be able to increase 2023 production by much. 2023 Lightening sales were about 20,000. They had been planning to produce about 160,000 in 2024 and then cut their target to 80.000 (that’s the “cut in half”) which seems to be delusional wishful thinking.

      I worked in Ford product development for 27 years until retiring at age 51 in January 2005.
      Ford and GM management seem grossly overpaid and incompetent for the past decade, or more.

      It has been known for years that batteries are least bad in tiny, cheap city cars as sold in China. Worst use is for trailer trucks, busses and pickup trucks. Any heavy vehicle that may be used to carry a heavy load. Busses may be the worst case because they are heavy, ften carry a heavy load and have a large interior space to keep heated in the winter.

      There have been three EV bus fires in London in the past month.

      https://dailysceptic.org/2024/01/25/third-electric-london-bus-catches-fire-in-month/

      • Just wait for an electric school bus to catch on fire, what a disaster that will be. Kind of like another product the FED GOV was pushing that was “safe and effective.”

      • batteries will have no problem lasting the life of the EV

        The lifetime of the EV in most cases will be determined by the lifetime of its battery, so that makes sense…

  18. Never have been a fan of the yippies or the hippies. They steadfastly opposed “the man” when it was behaving a lot more conservave than it is today. The “man” used to urge the country to explore space, keep third world countries in line so that the natives werent killing each other (“power to the people and all that rot’), pushed other scoentific discoveries and pushed the envelope of technology to some end. The “man” didnt interfere in the right to travel too much and let automakers build high performance cars for real people. That had to be opposed. The man, bad. The automotive expression of yippies is was the 18 hp VW bus.

    Now, the yippee has to. To split wiyh 60k foran electric bus. Too bad.

    The vety creepsthat sang about “immigration man” and rattled on about “poluuution” havekids oplaining about cliiimate chaaaange, saaaaaaafety, and vaaax mandates. Im pretty suretheir parents, the yippies would approve with a wink and a nod.

      • Some people were wondering what would be the outcome of the hippies drug use….they all turned into communist tyrants….permanent brain damage….weaponized….

        It worked….the rolling stones, etc….. were a tool to get the young people on drugs….a slave that can think might rebel…

        the slaves are bred to be stupid and weak…..

    • When I was young. . .”the man” was the psychopath drafting children to ship to a SE Asia meatgrinder to deplete MIC inventory so it could milk taxes to build more weapons.

      Six decades later still goes right over sheeples head.

      • Rain, that was my view, too, after I returned from my “tour” of duty in VN. After my discharge I was mostly unsuccesful in accessing the joys of the “free love” movement, but like numerous other vets I was firmly in the camp of the anti-war movenment. That was how I grew to despise “the man.”

  19. Perhaps Volkswagen should change its name to GOVWAGEN, BUREAUWAGEN, or even UBERWAGEN, as the types of vehicles they’re making are what unelected government bureaucrats are decreeing, which only uber wealthy people will even be able to afford.

  20. The oppression of VW should be a case study.

    The lesson should be on how tyrannical government is, but will probably be used as a template on bending companies to government will.

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