Volkswagen

Wednesday

Martin Vander Weyer

The cinema is back

The hottest car I ever owned was a 1982 Volkswagen Scirocco GTI in metallic dark green. I once drove it overnight from London to Tuscany with a blind date who never spoke to me again, but that’s another story. My point is that VW built my generation’s chariots of fire and some of us feel more sadness than schadenfreude at what the Telegraph calls ‘the downfall of a German giant’, as the flagship of its nation’s industrial armada contends with multiple impacts of geopolitical and technological change. But I’d say the image of VW ‘speeding towards a precipice as the Chinese move in’ is more than a touch overhyped. It’s a narrative of our era that the West collectively must always challenge.

Monday

Simon Heptinstall

How Volkswagen drove its own demise

I moved on from most of my father’s automotive prejudices. He refused to buy from the Japanese ‘who treated our prisoners so cruelly’, French and Italian cars would ‘always let you down in the end’ and Fords were gaudy creations of ‘big-headed Americans’. Instead, it was Volkswagen (VW) I never trusted. Stupidly stuck in a bygone era, I couldn’t get over that infamous 1938 photograph of Adolf Hitler, smiling with childlike delight, leaning over a miniature Beetle. Beside him, in a smart civvy suit, SS Colonel Ferdinand Porsche gleefully shows off the prototype. The foundation of Volkswagen is the definitive portrait of a dictator and his sycophants. Okay, it’s 88 years later and I don’t like hearing about people losing jobs, even at VW.

Friday

Robert Bryce

The drive toward electric cars has been a disaster

From our US edition

Just two years ago, Mary Barra, chief executive of General Motors, declared: “We believe in an all-electric future.” She went on to claim that the challenges her company was facing in the EV market were merely temporary bumps on the road to net zero. But as Bob Dylan famously observed, things have changed. On January 8, GM announced it would take a $7.1 billion hit in charges against its earnings, of which $6 billion is due to Barra’s failed EV strategy. In a filing with the SEC, the company also warned that it would take more write-downs this year as part of a “strategic realignment of EV capacity.” The car companies made 5.4 million EVs in three years – and incurred an astonishing $20,887 loss on each one GM’s move came less than a month after Ford Motor Co.