After my second Volkswagen car with second-generation EA888 engine passed its 7th birthday, despite using a second-level oil and gas separator, the extent of oil burning had reached the level of 1 liter per 1000 kilometers due to excessive “cosmetic” treatments, making it a “hybrid” model. It’s worth noting that this is not a criticism, as the 2.0T engine with 290 horsepower on the wheel had no mechanical failures during its operating 100,000 kilometers, which was a rare achievement at that time.
In April 2021, Volkswagen officially released the ID.6 model at the Shanghai Auto Show, only a month after the delivery of the ID.4. Obviously, despite many people still loving the emotional car models created by Volkswagen in the era of fuel-powered vehicles, Volkswagen must press the fast-forward button on its electrification roadmap due to the pressure of the times, even announcing that it will stop developing internal combustion engines.
From the quick layout of the product line, we can see that Volkswagen’s attitude towards driving change is very determined, with clear goals and specific actions. Recently, I test drove the SAIC Volkswagen ID.6 X, so today I want to discuss the understanding of a senior Volkswagen fan towards Volkswagen’s transformation to electrification.
Super-size it!
Many people think that the ID.6 X is just an extended version of the ID.4 X, and this statement is not a big problem because many people also say that the Bentley Flying Spur is just an elongated Golf.
However, from the actual driving experience, the Flying Spur is the Flying Spur, and the Golf is the Golf. Even if the Golf is made longer, it cannot achieve the same effect as the Flying Spur.
As for the ID.4 X and ID.6 X, they do look very similar.
Whether it’s the driving experience, the sound insulation, or the fact that if you don’t look carefully, you may not notice the difference in exterior design between the two cars, but this is Volkswagen’s consistent style.
Of course, I think the visible difference between the two is still the difference in the positioning of the models: the extended ID.6 X has two additional seats in the third row, becoming a 7-seater SUV, which turns the ID.6 X into a dad car that focuses on family travel.
Interestingly, Volkswagen released the ID.6 X in response to the government’s policy of allowing couples to have a second child. Of course, there is a detail here: since it is a 7-seater SUV, the second-row seats must support front-to-back and seat-back adjustment, otherwise the third row won’t be accessible. Unsurprisingly, all second-row seat adjustments are manual.However, I don’t think you should immediately complain about Volkswagen cutting costs, as my seven-year-old Volkswagen, which cost nearly 400,000 yuan, only came with electric adjustment for the driver’s seat. As for the passenger seat, I can only say that it’s not equipped with it because manual adjustment is more convenient for second-row passengers to get in and out!
This is Volkswagen’s product philosophy, cutting many costs they deem unnecessary, and then matching modular production platforms such as MQB and MEB, various “nesting dolls”, and diluting costs to form economies of scale.
Of course, if it’s a necessary cost, Volkswagen will still spend it. Because if you look carefully at many other brands and models under the Volkswagen Group, you can also find the same philosophy. For example, a car with a guiding price of up to 700,000 yuan uses large areas of “hard” plastic material in areas that drivers don’t usually touch, but is wrapped in Alcantara in areas where drivers usually touch.
The world of ice and fire is integrated into each Volkswagen car like this.
In fact, on the ID.6 X, I also found some similar “cost decisions.” Taking the model with a guiding price of 264,900 yuan as an example, although it reduces some comfortable configurations, such as electric adjustment of the second-row seats, the ID.6 X is equipped with an 83.4-degree battery, and the NEDC range can reach 588 kilometers. Today, when the energy supplementing system has yet to achieve “charging is more convenient than refueling,” “long legs” are of course more important.
In addition, as a mission for a 7-seat SUV, it is more important to make the space large enough. Due to Volkswagen’s MEB platform for pure electric vehicles, the battery and electric drive system can be arranged according to mutually independent modules, which greatly simplifies the chassis structure of the ID.6 X.
The advantages brought by this allow car companies to choose different power combinations when developing vehicles, avoiding the cost of developing a new chassis, and can also make the power module as small as possible, allowing the vehicle to have a longer wheelbase and shorter front and rear suspensions. For users, this means they can get more interior space.
So with a car length of 4,876 mm, the ID.6 X “elongated” the wheelbase to 2,965 mm. Of course, many people are not sensitive to these two data points. As a comparison, let’s take the 7-seat SUV Highlander for comparison. With a car length of 4,890 mm, the Highlander’s wheelbase is 2,790 mm.A “grocery and kid transportation” car should possess good manners by having a shorter car body but a longer wheelbase. So, I manually @Toyota here, even though I know that electricity in Japan is expensive, and traditional gasoline-fueled cars have a large supply chain and many stakeholders involved. But when the era abandons you, will it pass by your doorstep and say hi?
Now back to the ID.6 X. Apart from the advantages brought by the MEB platform for the entire car space, the interaction system on the ID.6 X left a deep impression on me, as it was very different from the traditional Volkswagen models that I remembered, which resembled an “aircraft cockpit”.
Entering the car, a 12-inch central screen integrates most of the functional buttons, and Volkswagen also retained several touch buttons with physical feedback under the screen, such as commonly used air conditioning and volume control. The ID.6 X can adjust them by touching the large touch screen on the center console, allowing drivers to operate blindly during the driving process without easily making mistakes.
Although these designs do not match Volkswagen’s previous personas, what surprised me the most was that the car navigation system actually used Amap. At this point, the picture in my mind was when I had to pry open the factory RCD 310 car machine with a flat-head screwdriver, and bought a 187 series host with Car Play program from an unnamed factory, just to obtain the right to use Amap and Bluetooth functions.
Of course, these demands, which are relatively basic in the 21st century, are finally made clear on the ID series, accompanying the tears of the corner of my eyes. To be honest, although the ID.6 X’s central control interaction logic still reveals a strong engineer’s thinking from the bottom, there are still many menu levels.
But I am still quite satisfied. It’s like when a foreigner communicates with you using “Trump”, even if their Chinese is not very standard, you will sincerely compliment them for their great Chinese!
In addition, when using the car navigation system, the AR-HUD of the ID.6 X will be linked with ID.Light, which I think is Volkswagen’s well-executed innovation. For example, when turning at an intersection, a huge arrow indicating the route will appear on the AR-HUD, reminding the driver of the road conditions. ID.Light uses a light change at a position in the car’s interior dashboard as an auxiliary reminder, but it does not steal the show during the process, instead gently reminding the driver with a very soft light. At that moment, I had an illusion that I was inside an Audi car.After experiencing ID.6 X, I firmly believe that with its combination of price, range, and 7-seater positioning, there are few competitors in this segment. However, many people might think otherwise, questioning the sales of Volkswagen’s electric cars and doubting their strategy.
Therefore, I want to emphasize that this article is not quite finished yet, as there are more things to say.
Scale First
After spending a day experiencing ID.6 X, I noticed a significant difference in understanding and approach to electric cars between Volkswagen and new electric vehicle startups. Volkswagen aims to attract a wider audience not through a singular selling point but by offering a more universally accessible product. In other words, they want a car that everyone, regardless of age or gender, can easily use.
Of course, there will be those who argue that this is a product of traditional automakers’ inertia, as they have been focusing on the advantage of scale and cost after decades of building gasoline vehicles, lacking innovation in their DNA. However, I believe that such a judgment might be biased, as it depends on the perspective taken.
Unlike new startups that have nothing to lose, Volkswagen has a massive user base built over years of selling gasoline cars. As a company that sold 9.3 million vehicles in 2020, when Volkswagen makes strategic choices, it definitely won’t choose to target only a specific market share, as startups do when they focus on intelligent or extreme user experiences. Instead, Volkswagen aims to cast a wide net by leveraging its cost advantages.
From an enterprise perspective, although such decisions may be marred by inertia, I think this will not be a big problem. After all, the ID series of Volkswagen has achieved great sales success in Europe, but it faltered in the highly competitive domestic market.
Volkswagen became successful in the gasoline vehicle era by using the MQB platform to achieve comprehensive modularized production. They aimed to simplify the research and development process, reduce the variation and complexity between parts by implementing standardized assembly procedures, and uniform installation plans to achieve cost and efficiency goals.
Therefore, based on the successful experience gained from the past, Volkswagen, when embarking on electrification, would inevitably prioritize cost and scale. That’s why, since the emergence of the MEB platform, it has been determined that it would not be alone, but that it would achieve cost effects by quickly developing a large number of models such as ID.3, ID.4, ID.6, and the yet-to-be-produced ID.BUZZ. For example, Volkswagen CEO Diess has mentioned that compared to the e-golf model, the manufacturing cost of the Volkswagen ID.3 has decreased by about 40%.Expanding Product Matrix and the Coverage of the C-side Market
The huge product matrix not only brings stronger economies of scale to production and manufacturing but also indicates that it can cover a wider range of people in the C-side market. In short, they hope that in the era of electric vehicles, they will still be the familiar Volkswagen Group.
After all, although Tesla has integrated the domestic parts supply chain, this can enable all electric vehicle manufacturers to find most of the parts needed to make an electric vehicle domestically. But to make the cost of the electric vehicle supply chain comparable to that of a fuel vehicle, it is estimated that the time period will be infinitely extended just by relying on Tesla and domestic new carmakers.
Traditional automakers like Volkswagen who are entering the electric vehicle industry theoretically can quickly increase the scale of the industrial chain by relying on their massive scale and volume, enable industrial chain cost to reach the level of fuel vehicles.
However, reality is somewhat bony.
You Win Some, You Lose Some
Following the famous saying “you win some, you lose some”, the decision of Volkswagen’s electrification transformation has indeed brought “side effects” to Volkswagen, such as broad people definitions. Behind the need for the product to have higher universality and reasonable costs, it means that the product’s individuality becomes weaker and differentiation is difficult to achieve.
It’s like rice balls produced on the factory assembly line, which aren’t comparable to sushi handcrafted by Japan’s three-star chef Jiro Ono, which has a more delicious taste.
Combined with various factors such as limited cognitive communication, energy substitution system, and production costs, electric vehicle market sales are still in a state of dumbbells, which means that Volkswagen, a backbone in the consumer market, has not yet fully opened up. If it is only for the replacement and upgrade of people with higher product differentiation requirements, the intelligent advantages emphasized by new forces will be further amplified.
After all, as pioneers in the electric vehicle market and following the principles of “first come, first served,” new forces have also formulated a set of rules for playing the intelligent electric vehicle industry, breaking the era of discussing heroes based on horsepower, with an Internet-based user operation, multi-scene intelligent experience, and energy-supplying experience, leaving traditional carmakers to exclaim “this is fun”.
And Volkswagen is clearly aware of this problem. According to the “German Business Daily”, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess resigned as chairman and member of the board of directors of Skoda and Seattle brands on April 29 and will focus on establishing a stronger software development team in the future.
It is evident that this reformer still needs to work overtime.
Final Thoughts
Throughout history, during the period of change in the times, there have always been companies that have adapted to the needs of the upcoming era and continued to flourish. Of course, there are also many companies that have missed the golden time of transformation and have been struggling ever since.
For Volkswagen, this transformation battle has just begun, and as for whether the Volkswagen of the electric vehicle era will still be the Volkswagen of the fuel vehicle era. I believe that as observers, it is difficult to make it clear just by a few words, perhaps only the parties involved can explain it.Just as mentioned in “How Volkswagen Transforms” personally written by Diess, Volkswagen is unique and presents a significant challenge for any manager due to its vast and complex conglomerate. As the largest car manufacturer in the world, Volkswagen is currently undergoing the most comprehensive transformation in economic history. It is my responsibility at Volkswagen to successfully steer this giant ship towards the future, representing the biggest challenge in my career!
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.