boemJob losses likely at VW as the people’s car brand becomes uncompetitive
I’m fairly neutral about my 2017 VW, it’s not the best car I’ve owned, but it’s comfy, gas mileage is good, it still has physical knobs/buttons for everything, and it hasn’t had any major issues yet.
But VW decided to switch their newer vehicles to the digital cockpit gauges with a goddamn screen in your face - so now I’ll never buy another VW.
Reliability is either stagnating or declining, complexity is increasing, costs are increasing, and new features being added are either useless or straight up anti-user. Why would anyone continue to make the choice to subject themselves to that?
I want to say companies that enshittify get what they deserve, but realistically we’ll just be left with fewer companies that are free to make worse products because there aren’t many alternative options. Google and Amazon both come to mind.
Late stage capitalism isn’t fun.
I feel pretty similar about the changes at VW. We bought a used 2020 Golf this year and are really happy with it so far. I was kind of tempted by the SportWagen, but we don’t need the extra space right now. I’d consider that as our next vehicle, but here in Canada they discontinued that a few years back. They had the Alltrack which might still tempt me but this year they stopped selling that as well as the baseline Golf. So now the closest options to what I would want in the future are the ID.4, the Golf GTI, or the Jetta, none of which appeal to me!