Connected cars are great—at least until some company leaves unencrypted location data on the Internet for anyone to find. That’s what happened with over 800,000 EVs manufactured by the Volkswagen Group, after Cariad, an automative software company that handles much of the development tasks for VW, left several terabytes of data unprotected on Amazon’s cloud.
According to Motor1, a whistleblower gave German publication Der Spiegel and hacking collective Chaos Computer Club a heads-up about the misconfiguration. Der Spiegel and CCC then spent some time sifting through the data, with which allowed them to tie individual cars to their owners.
“The security hole allowed the publication to track the location of two German politicians with alarming precision, with the data placing a member of the German Defense Committee at his father’s retirement home and at the country’s military barracks,” wrote Motor1.
Cariad has since patched the vulnerability, which had revealed data about the usage of Skodas, Audis, and Seats, as well as what Motor1 calls “incredibly detailed data” for VW ID.3 and ID.4 owners. The data set also included pinpoint location data for 460,000 of the vehicles, which Der Spiegel said could be used to paint a picture of their owners’ lives and daily activities.
Cariad ascribed the vulnerability to a “misconfiguration,” according to Der Spiegel, and said there is no indication that anyone aside from the publication and CCC accessed the unprotected data.
Enlarge/ A VW worker on the assembly line at Emden in Germany.
Volkswagen
Volkswagen will wait to see what electric car demand is like before building out all six of its previously planned battery factories. Thomas Schmall, VW’s board member in charge of technology, told a German newspaper that “building battery cell factories is not an end to itself” and that a goal of 200 GWh of lithium-ion cells by 2030 was not set in stone.
It’s a bit too simplistic to say that all new technologies conform to the now-infamous Gartner hype cycle, but it’s hard not to think of that squiggly line when discussing EVs. After years of hearing lofty goals of all-electric lineups and an end to internal combustion engines from OEMs, Tesla’s skyrocketing valuation got investors interested in electrification, and for a while, things just went mad.
But the promised fall in battery costs never really materialized, and in the US, EVs still command a price premium, at least for the first owner. The initial hype, coupled with the limited availability of new models, saw dealers load the cars and trucks they could get with hefty markups, further alienating potential customers. And now, when those markups and inventory shortages are mostly a thing of the past, interest rates have soared.
All of that makes it pretty hard to escape thinking we’re in the trough of disillusionment, and the automakers are reacting accordingly. Both General Motors and Ford have already made their electrification plans more modest, with more hybrids and fewer EVs in their roadmaps now.
For VW, the previous goal of 200 GWh by 2030 from six factories (through a new subsidiary called PowerCo) could now be just 170 GWh capacity from three already-announced plants in Valencia, Spain; Ontario, Canada; and Salzgitter, Germany. If necessary, Schmall said that the Spanish and Canadian battery factories could be expanded to meet additional demand.
This battery news follows another sign of slowing confidence in EVs at VW. Last week, it emerged that the company has pushed back plans for the ID.4’s successor, which now may not see showrooms until 2032.
Volkswagen is committing $5 billion to upstart EV company Rivian, with $1 billion in cash upfront and $4 billion over time. The companies aim to use this joint venture to deliver new vehicles “in the second half of the decade,” according to the announcement, and the cash will likely help push along Rivian’s next generation of vehicles, including more affordable models.
Enlarge/ Oliver Blume, left, CEO of Volkswagen Group, and RJ Scaringe, founder and CEO of Rivian.
Rivian
Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that the partnership “brings Rivian’s software and zonal electronics platform to a broader market through Volkswagen Group’s global reach and scale.” VW Group, which also controls Porsche, Lamborghini, Audi, and Ducati, among others, has a lot to gain from working with Rivian, particularly when it comes to software and ride control. Ars and most other reviewers have been impressed by Rivian’s drive engineering and display software on the R1T truck, R1S SUV, and the second generations of them both, which majorly reworked the underpinnings and offerings, largely through design and software choices.
Rivian, which was valued at nearly $86 billion during its public stock debut, has burned through a lot of cash, making well-liked cars that cost a lot to build. In the first quarter of 2024, it sold its cars for an average of $38,784 less than it cost to make them before expenses like research, development, sales, or marketing. Having paused production on a $5 billion truck plant and gone through rounds of recent layoffs, the firm lost $1.51 billion last quarter. Rivian reported $7.86 billion in cash on hand and $4.43 billion in debt.
Hence the likely very useful first $1 billion from VW to Rivian, a convertible note that becomes Rivian common stock after regulatory approval. Two more $1 billion payments should arrive in 2025 and 2026, with a $2 billion loan tied to the joint venture available in 2026.
Have electric vehicles been overhyped? A casual observer might have come to that conclusion after almost a year of stories in the media about EVs languishing on lots and letters to the White House asking for a national electrification mandate to be watered down or rolled back. EVs were even a pain point during last year’s auto worker industrial action. But a look at the sales data paints a different picture, one where Tesla’s outsize role in the market has had a distorting effect.
“EVs are the future. Our numbers bear that out. Current challenges will be overcome by the industry and government, and EVs will regain momentum and will ultimately dominate the automotive market,” said Martin Cardell, head of global mobility solutions at consultancy firm EY.
Public perception hasn’t been helped by recent memories of supply shortages and pandemic price gouging, but the chorus of concerns about EV sales became noticeably louder toward the end of last year and the beginning of 2024. EV sales in 2023 grew by 47 percent year on year, but the first three months of this year failed to show such massive growth. In fact, sales in Q1 2024 were up only 2.6 percent over the same period in 2023.
Tesla doesn’t break out its sales data by region anymore, but its new US registrations were down by as much as 25 percent, month on month, as its overall marketshare of EVs closes in on 50 percent this year; by contrast, Tesla was 80 percent of the US EV market in 2020. (Overall, Tesla’s global deliveries fell by 8.5 percent.)
The other sick patient in addition to Tesla is Volkswagen. Despite local production of the ID.4 crossover in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the brand saw EV sales fall by 37 percent in Q1. It has also abandoned plans to bring the ID.7 electric sedan to North America, and the long-awaited ID. Buzz microbus has yet to reach US showrooms more than eight years after it was first shown here.
But all this noise has been enough to spook executives into action. Both Ford and General Motors took the embarrassing step of rolling back their electrification goals, all but admitting they bet on the wrong horse. Instead of turning away from new internal combustion engine products, we’re set for a new flurry of hybrids—just don’t expect any of them to show up before 2026.
GM’s difficulty in ramping up its new family of EVs built around the UItium battery platform has been well-documented. The end of production of the Chevrolet Bolt, which sold for less than $30,000, didn’t help; with the little electric hatchback (and the slightly stretched Bolt EUV) no longer contributing to the sales charts, GM’s Q1 EV sales fell by 21 percent.
The problems with assembling Ultium cells into battery packs appears to be in GM’s past now. Cadillac Lyriqs are starting to become a common sight on the road, and GM CEO Mary Barra told Bloomberg that GM expects to build between 200,000 and 300,000 Ultium-based EVs this year, a huge increase over the 13,838 it managed to ship last year.
Meanwhile, Ford’s EV “slump” is nothing of the kind. In May, it sold 91 percent more F-150 Lightnings than last year. E-Transit sales were up 77 percent. And the Mustang Mach-E showed growth of 46 percent. In total, Ford’s EV sales for the first five months of this year were up 87.7 percent on 2023, helped no doubt by the company’s price cuts.
High double-digit sales growth (in Q1 2024) has also been occurring at Hyundai and Kia (up 56.1 percent), BMW (up 57.8 percent), Rivian (up 58.8 percent), Mercedes (up 66.9 percent), and Toyota (up 85.9 percent).
“As anticipated, Tesla’s sales took a hit, influencing the overall market dynamics. However, a few brands saw significant EV sales increases, achieving over 50 percent year-over-year growth,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive. “As noted in January, we are calling 2024 ‘the Year of More.’ More new products, more incentives, more inventory, more leasing and more infrastructure will drive EV sales higher this year. Even so, we’ll continue to see ups and downs as the industry moves toward electrification.”
“We view the current headwinds that EV sales are experiencing in the US and Europe as short-term in nature. The buildup of charging infrastructure, availability of affordable EV models with a fall in battery prices, combined with government regulations, will drive sustainable BEV growth in the long run,” said Cardell.
Enlarge/ You don’t have to get a two-tone paint job on your ID Buzz, but it helps.
Jonathan Gitlin
Volkswagen’s forthcoming electric minivan couldn’t be better named. Simply put, in the years that we’ve been writing about cars, nothing on four wheels has created quite as much buzz as the VW ID Buzz with its adorably retro styling. But if all that attention translates into actual buyers, the electric microbus may end up being oversubscribed, at least to begin with.
Charlie Hall, chairman of the Volkswagen National Dealer Advisory Council, says the US may only see 20,000 ID Buzzes imported this year, according to an interview today in Automotive News. “It sounds like we may have the opportunity for additional European capacity if we need it, but we’re still trying to sort out where the demand is going to be globally,” Hall said.
Years in the making
VW’s plan to resurrect the iconic T1 Microbus goes back to 2001 during the industry’s flirtation with retro car design. While vehicles like the new VW Beetle, Ford’s porthole-a-licious Thunderbird, and the ever-customizable Chrysler PT Cruiser made it to production, the Microbus concept never did.
Enlarge/ The first VWs went on sale in the US almost exactly 75 years ago.
Volkswagen
A decade later, VW had another go. This time, the Bulli concept was a battery electric vehicle (Bulli being the German nickname for the bus). But the specs for BEV concepts from 2011 look rather underwhelming with the advantage of time. The Bulli made do with a 40 kWh battery pack—described by Wired at the time as “huge”—which gave it a range of 185 miles (297 km), with a top speed of 87 mph (140 km/h) and a 0–62 (0–100 km/h) time of 11.5 seconds.
2016 brought us the VW BUDD-e, the third concept to reimagine the T1 in 15 years. VW was mired in its diesel emissions scandal at the time, and the company had found religion, pushing the fast-forward button on its development of alternative powertrains. VW took BUDD-e to CES that year, and the company said we would “see a car that looks a lot like this” using a new “modular electric toolkit” (also known as MEB, or Modularer E-Antriebs-Baukasten in German) by 2020.
Less than 18 months after that, the fourth and final concept appeared. Now bearing the ID Buzz name, it stole the 2017 New York International Auto Show, complete with a magnetically levitating gnome on the dashboard.
2020 was perhaps an ambitious goal for the ID Buzz to go into production; that was the year that VW’s first MEB-based BEV, called the ID.3, went on sale in Europe. The coronavirus pandemic didn’t help timelines, but the following year, the US saw its first MEB VW, the ID.4 crossover. But the question most people had was, “when’s the Buzz coming?”
Production starts
Enlarge/ I do wonder how well this light-colored interior trim will stand up to family life.
Volkswagen
In Europe, the answer was 2022, although with a shorter, two-row ID Buzz variant that won’t cross the Atlantic. We spent a day driving the Euro-spec Buzz, which was a definite attention-getter, if a little expensive—as much as 64,581 euro ($67,981 in 2022) for the five-seater passenger model before incentives.
The US-spec Buzz has a wheelbase that’s about 10 inches longer, and VW has used that extra space to add a larger-capacity battery (91 kWh) and a third row of seats. There’s also a new rear motor that’s larger and more powerful than before, giving a total output of 330 hp (246 kW), and VW did some small tweaks, like adding sliding windows and ventilation to the rear compartment.
VW tells Ars that the ID Buzz will “most likely” arrive here in North America in the fourth quarter of 2024, and we’ll have to wait until Q3 to find out how much the US version will cost. The automaker wouldn’t be drawn on production or supply numbers, so for now, we just have Hall’s comments to go by. Here’s hoping a mismatch between supply and demand doesn’t result in hefty markups at the dealerships.
This year’s Consumer Electronics Show got underway in Las Vegas today. For nearly a decade, automakers and their suppliers have increasingly expanded their presence at CES, such that today, it’s arguably a more important auto show than the once-proud, now-sad, extremely underattended events held in places like Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Volkswagen is one of the first automakers out of the blocks with CES news this morning. Working with the voice recognition company Cerence, VW is adding ChatGPT to its infotainment system.
We first experienced Cerence’s excellent in-car voice recognition at CES in 2016—back then, it was still part of parent company Nuance, and the system was called Dragon Drive. Nuance spun Cerence off in 2019, and its conversational AI and natural language processing can be enjoyed in current Mercedes and BMW infotainment systems, among others. I remain in the minority here, but I think it makes a good alternative to poking away at a touchscreen.
From mid-2024, we can add the VW ID.3, ID.4, ID.5, ID.7, Tiguan, Passat, and Golf to the list of cars with decent voice commands. Using “Hello IDA” as the prompt, VW drivers will be able to control their infotainment, navigation, and climate control by voice, and there’s also a general-knowledge search built in. VW notes that ChatGPT doesn’t get access to any vehicle data, and search queries and answers are deleted immediately. The feature should come to VW electric vehicles if those vehicles already have the latest infotainment system, VW told Ars.
“With software at the core of the Volkswagen of the future, it’s critical that we quickly deploy meaningful innovation powered by advancements in AI,” said Thomas Ullrich, a member of VW’s management board responsible for new mobility. “By leveraging Cerence Chat Pro, we are able to bring added value and a fun and engaging experience to our drivers with minimal integration effort and on a short development and deployment timeline, ensuring our customers are benefitting from new AI-powered conversational technology.”
“We’re proud to build on our automotive expertise and our long-term partnership with Volkswagen to continue to bring new innovation to customers, even post-vehicle purchase,” said Stefan Ortmanns, CEO of Cerence. “It was impressive to see the agility and speed of the Volkswagen team as our companies collectively sprung into action to bring this project to life in just a few short weeks, marking our shared commitment to leveraging advancements in AI to enhance to the in-car user experience.”
VW isn’t the only automaker to think about adding ChatGPT. In March, we discovered that General Motors was experimenting with the tech, and last summer, we demoed a similar implementation in a Mercedes-Benz.
That automaker began a beta program that allowed customers with its MBUX infotainment system to try the improvements to the system’s natural language processing from OpenAI’s tech. I was already a convert to MBUX’s (and therefore Cerence’s) speech recognition capabilities, so I found the improvements took a system that was already better at understanding my voice than either Siri or Google’s and further refined it. I just don’t know whether that will be enough for skeptical car drivers to start talking to their cars.
