Volkswagen seeks to counter rivals with budget EV model

That's way too expensive for an "affordable EV".

The BYD Seagull retails here in Uruguay for less than that and we tax cars at about 100%. On China it seems to go for 10-12k.

It's a proper, basic city car. 4 to 6 air bags, ~300km range (more than what this article's car indicates), all basic security features and standard gadgets out of a modern car.

Our EV infrastructure is not viable if you don't have a charger at work/home and yet these have sold like hot cakes.

Legacy carmakers are making increasingly worse ICE cars for the most part (btw does GM sell a C-segment hatchback on any market, anymore?) and their EVs are simply uncompetitive. What's it going to take for them to wake up to the fact they're going to have to stop fleecing their customers with crappy products? Bankruptcy?

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.