Volkswagen seeks to counter rivals with budget EV model

Sorry but reading Volkswagen and "crappy products" in the same sentence means either you never drove one or you've got very high standards, but then you're happy with BYD...

These new Chinese cars are literally flooding the market with the usual way we are used nowadays to think: buy cheap, change again in 2 years. (Which we didn't do before this cheap manufacturing existed.)

In this context it makes totally sense.

Cars, though, at least how we're used to think, are made to last. A car is not just a bunch of features, it's also a lot about the quality of the components, and there are videos showing how poor BYD quality is. If you're happy with that, that's OK.

> Sorry but reading Volkswagen and "crappy products" in the same sentence means either you never drove one or you've got very high standards

The rest of the car is fine I suppose but the infotainment unit in my brother's ID.4 is most certainly crappy.

The touch is horrible, the unit is slow AF both in latency and update rate, and the menus kinda suck.

Sure it's a small part of the car, but it's pretty integral to the operation of the car given they removed most knobs and buttons.

I think this is what makes this new model different - they apparently work with another software company which (probably) should be better.

Having driven an Audi A3 for a while... and that's the "premium" VW, it was not really great at all.

And having been to China and sitting in plenty of BYDs... they're on par. Decent.

The cars can be obviously cheaper, and yet aren't. Chinese market may be subsidized, but international? Not really. Coming back to VW, ID3 in China was half the price compared to the one in Europe, so there were even people trying to import them back and sell for less than official distribution - that effort was shut down thanks to VW's lobby.

I've worked on car infotainment, I know VW's is crap, but serious question: why give a shit? It's not what cars are for and all of them are good enough to play some music or listen to the radio while driving. You can use a phone holder for navigation.

Because, thanks to removing buttons and such, it's an integral part of operating the car.

In my Renault Megane e-Tech, if my windshield suddenly fogs up I can hit a physical button[1] to max the heater and blower. In the ID.4 it goes via the touch screen.

So, you press the "button" on the screen, nothing happens, so you press it again, except it turns out the system registered the first time it was just slow and so now you've turned it back off again. Or, you press it and nothing happens and you press another 5x times and still nothing because your finger is too dry...

I see the 2024 variant[2] kept the all-touch approach, but I haven't tried it so perhaps it works better in practice.

[1]: https://www.megautos.com/nuevo-renault-megane-e-tech-electri... (row below the center console screen)

[1]: https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/volkswagen-id-buzz-cargo-te...

I see. "Car things user interface sucks" is quite bad indeed.