Volkswagen Drops Diesel, Goes Electric?

It looks like Volkswagen might now be turning their attention to electric powered model after the huge diesel scandal.

Volkswagen Group Board of Management revealed that they will be working on developing modular electric car platforms in the future adding they are working to change some of their plans and to reset them after the whole diesel scandal.

Volkswagen also added that we will be seeing the new MED Modular Toolkit which also means that we will be seeing both electric and plug-in hybrid in the future. According to Volkswagen, the upcoming Volkswagen Phaeton will be coming in as an electric model.

As for the MED Toolkit, Volkswagen added that the new tech will allow them to adapt electric tech into most of the models and that it will be able to offer between 150miles to 300miles.

However, that does not mean that Volkswagen will be ditching their diesel engines as it is believed that the automaker will still be working to improve the efficiency of the diesel engines along with the standard petrol engines.

Source: Volkswagen Drops Diesel, Goes Electric?

After pollution scandal, Volkswagen to focus on electric vehicles

Volkswagen says it will shift its focus toward developing electric cars.

It aims to develop new hybrid and electric vehicles in response to its emissions scandal.

The new steps were part of a plan to confront the company's scandal over cars that were equipped with computer software that let them evade U.S. emissions tests.

Volkswagen division head Herbert Diess said in a statement Tuesday the company would change its approach to diesel emissions in Europe and North America and adopt so-called selective catalytic converter technology, or SCR. That is a system that injects the chemical substance urea into the exhaust stream to neutralize harmful nitrogen oxides.

He said that change would come "as soon as possible."

Diess also said the company would reduce spending on investments by 1 billion euros ($1.1billion) and redouble efforts to cut other costs.

Volkswagen will expand its modular construction system — which involves sharing technical specifications and parts across different models to save money — to include new plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles.

The company additionally plans to turn the next version of its large Phaeton luxury sedan into an electric-only vehicle to demonstrate the company's technological competence.

The Phaeton, a project introduced by former CEO Ferdinand Piech, has been criticized as a money-loser. The Piech and Porsche families own the majority of voting shares in Volkswagen through a holding company.

"The Volkswagen brand is repositioning itself for the future," Diess said in a statement. "We are becoming more efficient, we are giving our product range and our core technologies a new focus, and we are creating room for forward-looking technologies by speeding up the efficiency program."

Diess is a recent hire from competitor BMW, where he oversaw development of new models including the i3 electric and i8 plug-in hybrid vehicles.

Volkswagen AG, whose other brands include Audi and Skoda, is facing a crisis after U.S. authorities said it evaded emissions checks on 482,000 vehicles. The company has set aside 6.5 billion euros ($7.3 billion) to cover the costs of recalls and fines. But analysts say the costs in terms of fines and lost sales will likely be considerably higher.

Earlier, the governor of Germany's Lower Saxony state, which holds a 20 percent stake in Volkswagen, said the automaker should have admitted earlier that it manipulated emissions data in the U.S. Volkswagen acknowledged the deception to U.S. regulators on Sept. 3, more than a year after researchers published a study showing the real-world emissions of two VW models were far higher than allowed.

Governor Stephan Weil told Lower Saxony's state legislature on Tuesday that "this confession should clearly have come a great deal earlier — another serious mistake," news agency dpa reported.

Weil sits on Volkswagen's board of directors. He has said that the state's representatives were "completely surprised" by the emissions scandal and vowed to work to protect jobs.

Source: After pollution scandal, Volkswagen to focus on electric vehicles

Elon Musk says he has a design for an electric jet

Asa Mathat | D: All Things Digital

If Elon Musk was not already running Tesla and SpaceX he might take up another big project: creating an electric jet. 

In fact, when asked during a recent Marketplace interview what Musk would be doing if Tesla didn't exist, he revealed that he already has a design for such an aircraft ready to go. 

"I do like the idea of an electric aircraft company. I think one could do a pretty cool supersonic, vertical, take-off and landing electric jet. That would be really fun... I have a design in mind for that," he said. 

"Then of course there is the Hyperloop, I'd probably be working on that," he casually added. 

Musk said that excluding rockets, he believes one day all vehicles will be electric, so he thinks it's a promising venture.

"Aircraft and ships and all other forms of transport will go fully electric. Not half electric, but fully electric. No question," he said.

Musk, though, said he has enough on his plate right now. The visionary billionaire already runs his electric car company and SpaceX and has big plans for both companies over the next few years. 

One big goal of Musk's is getting Tesla's giant Gigafactory in Nevada into production. The company aims to make enough batteries to power 500,000 cars per year so it can finally begin production of its more affordable vehicle, the Tesla Model 3, which is expected to go into production in 2017 and be priced at $35,000. 

"We have the Model X, that we obviously have to ramp up production of. We have a complete model of the Model 3, we have the battery pack business... and so there is a lot of work that needs to be done," Musk said. "But I feel at this point Tesla is in a really solid position. And at this point it's a matter of how quickly can we bring an affordable electric car to market — how quickly can we bring affordable battery storage to market."

Read the original article on Tech Insider. Follow Tech Insider on Facebook and Twitter. Copyright 2015.

More from Tech Insider:

North Korea has the biggest sports arena in the world — here's a look inside

This photographer uses ordinary food to create a fantasy world we wish we lived in

The screen on the new iMac is so good, you have to see it to fully appreciate it

People are fired up about this 'Ellen Show' sketch blatantly making fun of Nicki Minaj's body

Elon Musk said when Tesla was founded, he thought the company would 'most likely die'

NOW WATCH: We took Tesla's brand new Model X for a test drive Please enable Javascript to watch this video
Source: Elon Musk says he has a design for an electric jet

VW Diesel News, Tesla Model Y, Electric Ford Ad: Last Week In Reverse (Video)

Which story, now in its third week, shows no sign of letting up on the news, technology, or massive public humiliation front?

And, what CEO tweeted about a mysterious new future model--and then deleted the tweet?

This is our video look back at the Week In Reverse--right here at Green Car Reports--for the week ending on Friday, October 9, 2015.

Friday, we ran down each model of Volkswagen TDI diesel car affected by the expanding emission-cheating scandal, and looked at how they might be fixed--and when.

The VW diesel-cheating story, in fact, continues to make news almost every day.

On Thursday, we revealed that not only did buyers of those deceptive VW diesels get about $50 million in Federal income-tax credits in 2009, but that Volkwsagen demanded its so-called "clean diesel" cars get the same Federal incentives as electric cars.

That didn't happen, and Volkswagen pouted. So much so, in fact, that it refused to take part in a 2011 announcement of future fuel-economy standards that included President Obama--even though pretty much every other carmaker was there.

We also noted that VW has withdrawn its application to certify its 2016 diesel models--though the company thinks a simple software fix will make the EPA happy.

The EPA later responded that it would make very, very, very sure it understood what those cars were doing under all circumstances before it certified them.

Wednesday, we asked what the Tesla Model X should be called. Is it an SUV? A crossover? A wagon? Maybe even a hatchback?

Commenters weighed in quickly, but they didn't seem to agree--with several arguing it was so incredibly new and revolutionary that it wasn't any of the above.

Ummmmm ... really?

On Tuesday, we discussed a tweet by Tesla CEO Elon Musk--soon deleted, but screen-captured for posterity--about a future Tesla Model Y.

We think will be the crossover utility version of Tesla's affordable Model 3 electric sedan. After all, Model Y would be the smaller brother of the bigger Model X, right?

We kicked off the week on Monday by noting that Ford has finally released its first video ad for the Focus Electric hatchback.

The ad doesn't say much, but after more than three years, it's at least a start. Maybe.

Finally, with more and more used Tesla Model S electric cars on the market--including many at Tesla Stores--we updated two highly popular guides this week.

One looks at all the hardware changes in the Model S since June 2012, and the other looks at the many software updates, large and small, that the Model S has had since then.

If you've bought a used Tesla Model S, by the way, let us know. We're curious to hear about your experience.

Until next week, this has been the Green Car Reports Week in Reverse update.

________________________________________________

Follow GreenCarReports on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Source: VW Diesel News, Tesla Model Y, Electric Ford Ad: Last Week In Reverse (Video)

Why Do Car Buffs Dislike Tesla?

Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks during an event to launch the Tesla Model X Crossover SUV on Sept. 29, 2015, in Fremont, California.

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

This question originally appeared on Quora, the best answer to any question. Ask a question, get a great answer. Learn from experts and access insider knowledge. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

Answer by Mike Barnard, I used to be a BMW loyalist, but now it's Tesla all the way:

Because car buffs are almost all nostalgia weenies. Most love a specific marque, often because of something that happened decades before. They obsess about the history. They've owned half a dozen of that marque and wish they could own a dozen more. I've known and know Porsche nuts, BMW nuts (my hand is up), Mustang nuts, and more.

They are obsessed with all the microscopic—and obsolete—details of why their marque is better than everyone else's. This is harmless, just like obsessing about baseball stats, and they'll happily kibitz with car buffs who love other marques, watch stuff on other marques, ride around in one another's cars, and generally be car nerds.

But there's a strong thread through car nuts: What works better gets attention. People who prefer something that works poorly are really saying that they are about a specific driving experience, not real and raw performance. People who don't like traction control aren't interested in the fastest lap times but the purest ones, whatever that means, or in getting their car sideways in turns as they burn a few sawbucks of rubber off of their tires. People who don't like dual-clutch automatics and paddle shifters aren't interested in the fastest 0-60 or lap times; they are interested in slower, but more nostalgically pure, shifting. People who don't like hybrid race cars and production supercars are saying that they don't like better all-around performance—they just really only love things with cylinders and pistons, make of that what you will.

And people who don't like the Tesla are mostly making shit up that justifies their aesthetic preference for being slower. The Tesla doesn't make noise like nostalgists enjoy because it doesn't waste energy making noise. They pretend this is a mark against it, when it's at best an aesthetic preference, like whether pastel or puce is better on the kitchen wall. It's completely immaterial, but they will not shut up about it. The Tesla doesn't get hot like cars they like because it isn't losing 70 percent of the energy in its fuel as waste heat. It doesn't require shifting like cars they like because electric motors are vastly superior. It has much better traction control because the motor delivers a very consistent and predictable amount of power to the wheels, which is variable in minute increments because electric motors are vastly superior. And it has more than adequate range for people who aren't trekking across the Sahara by themselves, but enables them to find something to disl ike.

The quickest two current production cars are gas-electric hybrids because they have to be electric in order to be in the game. They are both slower than a little electric car built by some college students that hits 60 in 1.779 seconds, and they aren't much faster than the current Tesla, which weighs twice what they weigh, seats five adults comfortably, and has a sound system that you can hear.

And in 2019, I can pretty much guarantee that they will be slower than the Tesla Roadster. I'm predicting 2 seconds to 60, skidpad, slalom, and braking of the gods, and 400 miles of range for the Roadster. Any takers?

People claiming to be true car buffs who don't like the ascendancy of electrics are really nostalgists. They like grease under their fingernails as a signifier—mostly to themselves and a subset of their males friends—of a certain type of manliness. They are stuck in the past, not even surfing the present, never mind inhabiting the future with Tesla. That's all fine. Like people who prefer classic French wines to the really amazing wines out of California, Venezuela, Australia, or New Zealand, there's room enough for both types in the world.

For a while. In the future, there isn't room for people who think that burning million-year-old dead plants and blowing a ton of pollution and carbon into the atmosphere in order to go slower is a good thing. There's just room to put them out to pasture with old YouTube videos and maybe analog amplifiers to make the sound fuzzy and distorted.

Source: Why Do Car Buffs Dislike Tesla?

Apple, Amazon, Tesla and the Changing Dynamics of the Car Industry

After I submitted my previous column to the Institutional Investor Magazine, on the financial innovation taking place at Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), I learned that Sprint, T-Mobile and now Verizon are all fighting to best one another's iPhone offers. What is really amazing about the situation is that no matter how this war among wireless carriers plays out, there will be one clear winner — Apple. And in the end, the carriers will be collective losers — they'll be killing their margins to out-subsidize one another. They will be spending millions of dollars on advertising to get customers to come to their stores to buy — yes, Apple iPhones. If consumers choose Apple's iPhone Upgrade Program instead of the carriers', then Apple will win even bigger (as I argued in that column). In the meantime, 2015 will likely mark the year that AT&T's and Verizon's U.S. wireless service businesses went from growth to stagnation.

Another observation about Apple: Its brand extends far b eyond technology and coolness. Over the years, the company has accumulated incredible goodwill with consumers. There is only one other company that comes to mind that has generated a similar amount of affection: Amazon.com. Amazon made shopping online easy, its customer service is impeccable, and it is transparent with consumers about pricing. After all, it allows other merchants to sell their merchandise through its website. Amazon will even ship it for them.

Consumers' trust in Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) pricing is so great that most people don't even bother with comparison shopping anymore; they skip Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (which is not good news for Google, by the way) and go directly to Amazon. I recently found myself willing to pay a few dollars more on Amazon than on a competitor's website because I knew that if I needed to return the product, the process would be seamless. That goodwill turns Apple and Amazon into "platforms" (a very trendy word on Wall Street no w), allowing them to launch a wide variety of new products.

When Apple comes out with the Apple car, rumored to be due in 2019, it will be able to grab a disproportionately large market share from the General Motors of the world because of that deep well of goodwill.

By the time my youngest child, Mia Sarah, who is almost two, learns to drive, internal combustion engines will likely be a relic consigned to museums (just like Ford's Model T). I had an "aha!" moment when I recently visited a Tesla store and saw its cars' power train. It looks just like a skateboard — it basically consists of a flat slab of metal (which houses the battery), four wheels and an electric engine the size of a large watermelon. That's it — the Tesla has only 18 moving parts. I don't know how many moving parts an internal combustion engine (ICE) car has, but it must be hundreds if not thousands. Interestingly, ICE cars also have more electronics than a Tesla.

Wall Street is going gaga over the stocks of dealerships (especially after Warren Buffett (Trades, Portfolio)'s Berkshire Hathaway bought Van Tuyl Group) and car makers. I am in the minority, but I think that party will come to an end. Just like Tesla, Apple is not going to be using a dealership model to sell its cars. It would not want the Apple car buying experience to be tainted by a sleazy car salesman. Just as with the iPhone, the company will want to have complete control of the buying experience.

If both Tesla and Apple bypass the dealership model, the GMs of the world will be at an even larger competitive disadvantage. They will have to abandon the dealership model too. Yes, I know, selling cars directly to consumers is not legal in many states, but if the U.S. Constitution could be amended 27 times, the law on car sales (which is an artifact of the Great Depression) can be amended as well.

The traditional dealership model is unlikely to survive anyway, as its economics drama tically degrade in the electric-car world. A car that has very few moving parts and minimal electronics has few things to break; and consequently, electric cars will need less servicing — throttling the dealerships' most important profit center.

The baby boomer generation romanticizes cars. Most boomers can recite the horsepower and other engine specs of every car they have ever owned. For the tail end of Gen X (my generation) and Millennials, a car is an interruption between Facebook and Twitter. We know the brand of speakers in our car, but if asked would have to google its horsepower. We feel little romanticism for our cars and have much higher brand loyalty to Apple and Google than to GM or Ford.

What is also amazing about electric cars is that they aren't that much different from smartphones. Smartphone prices have declined significantly over the years because their components became ubiquitous and commoditized. With the exception of spark plugs and tires, mos t components of a GM car will be different from the ones you'll find in a Ford. The opportunity for scaled manufacturing and so commoditization is very limited in the auto industry.

The simplicity of electric cars and the declining ambition of Tesla, Apple and whoever else enters that space to be known as a "car" company will likely lead to commoditization of components and thus lower prices. Tesla today is more a software and battery company than a car company. (As we recently discovered, Volkswagen is a lot more of a "software" company than we thought.)

Think back eight years ago to the day when Apple introduced the iPhone. No one suspected that it (and the smartphones that followed) would enable a service like Uber, which is busy putting cabdrivers worldwide out of business. The unforeseen consequences of the advent of electric cars will reverberate much farther than the demise of dealerships and significant shifts in market share in the auto industry.

Gasoline can only be made from oil. (Yes, there is ethanol, but the economics of ethanol in the U.S. are problematic.) Sources of electricity are diverse — natural gas, coal, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, oil (and I'm sure I'm forgetting something). Seventy percent of oil goes into cars and trucks. Just imagine for a second the shifts in global political alliances if oil lost its luster. The U.S. might forget how to spell "Saudi Arabia," and the Middle East might start looking very different.

Apple may find its 2019 date for the Apple car to be a bit optimistic, but nevertheless, its entrance into the auto industry will likely be successful and very disruptive. After all, it has the much-needed software know-how to design a car (it is already working with car companies on CarPlay, the iPhone-centered car infotainment system), it boasts a global network of stores, it has a deep well of goodwill with a billion fans globally, it possesses unlimited resources ($150 billi on of net cash, and it generates $50 billion of free cash flows a year), and its imagination has not been damaged by decades of producing cars with internal combustion engines.

Let me stress that last point. There is a very good reason why Nokia, which at one time was the dominant cellphone manufacturer, failed to compete with Apple's iPhone. It had too much institutional knowledge. It had hundreds of engineers who tried to add IQ to a dumb phone. They were attempting to convert Symbian, a dumb phone operating system, into a smart phone operating system. Despite Apple showing Nokia how the smartphone should look, they couldn't see their product as a smartphone but rather just as the next iteration of a dumb phone.

General Motors' answer to Tesla was not any different from Nokia's response to the iPhone. GM came out with the Chevy Volt, which was really one of its internal combustion engine cars with an electric engine dumped in. Unless an ICE car company creates a silo unit isolated from the rest of the operation, it will be very difficult if not impossible to get engineers who have designed ICE vehicles all their lives to suddenly change the paradigm of their thinking and turn into electric-car engineers.

About the author:

Vitaliy Katsenelson

Vitaliy N. Katsenelson, CFA, is Chief Investment Officer at Investment Management Associates in Denver, Colo. He is the author of The Little Book of Sideways Markets (Wiley, December 2010). To receive Vitaliy's future articles by email or read his articles click here.Investment Management Associates Inc. is a value investing firm based in Denver, Colorado. Its main focus is on growing and preserving wealth for private investors and institutions while adhering to a disciplined value investment process, as detailed in Vitaliy's book Active Value Investing (Wiley, 2007).

Visit Vitaliy Katsenelson's Website

Source: Apple, Amazon, Tesla and the Changing Dynamics of the Car Industry

Shots Fired: Elon Musk Called Apple The 'Tesla Graveyard' And Scoffed At Rumored Apple Car

Elon Musk takes a dig at Apple's plans of developing a car. The Tesla CEO suggests that Apple is hiring Tesla employees who are not important to the electric carmaker.(Photo : Scott Olson | Getty Images)

Elon Musk, the CEO of electric carmaker Tesla, says that the company is least concerned about Apple's own electric car project. Musk says that the engineers who Apple poached from Tesla were not significant to the company.

Apple revolutionized the tablet and the smartphone market with the launch of its iPads and iPhones. The company is believed to be working on a project codenamed "Project Titan" that involves developing an electric car. Around 1,000 employees are said to be working on the project, some of whom are ex-Tesla employees.

Musk told Handelsblatt, a German publication, that the employees whom Apple poached from Tesla are not important to the electric car maker.

"Important engineers? They have hired people we've fired," says Musk. "We always jokingly call Apple the 'Tesla Graveyard.' If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I'm not kidding."

A February Apple Insider report highlighted that Apple was luring Tesla engineers with high salary of up to $250,000 per year along with hefty bonuses.

"Apple tries very hard to recruit from Tesla," said Musk. "But so far they've actually recruited very few people."

When asked about Apple's ambition of developing an electric car, Musk replied that it is good for a company to foray in the automotive industry. However, cars are complex in comparison to smartphones and smartwatches.

Musk added that a carmaker cannot just approach a supplier such as Foxcomm and ask them to build a car. Apple may think that developing a car would be an important innovation for the company and introducing an iPad pro or its stylus called Apple Pencil were not significant enough.

Many other market experts share Musk's opinion about Apple developing a car.

"Apple has no experience," said Bob Lutz, a former Vice Chairman of General Motors. "There's no reason to assume Apple will do a better job than General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen, Toyota or Hyundai. I think this is going to be a gigantic money pit."

Apple has not yet revealed any plans about its own car. Apple fans as well as the automotive industry will have to wait until Apple officially announces its plans on developing a car.

© 2015 Tech Times, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

Source: Shots Fired: Elon Musk Called Apple The 'Tesla Graveyard' And Scoffed At Rumored Apple Car