Vizzion Quest

Although Volkswagen of America is calling it a crossover, the I.D. Space Vizzion concept vehicle displayed at the 2019 Los Angeles Auto Show, on a fast track to become a production car in few years, is actually a wagon.

The I.D. Space Vizzion's name refers not to outer space (though it does look like a car George Jetson might drive if the cars on "The Jetsons" didn't fly) but to the vast space inside - plenty of room for four with space for additional third-row seating.  The seats themselves are upholstered with a faux-leather made of waste from apple-juice processing mixed with 20 percent polyurethane.  Outside, the sleek styling produces a drag coefficient of 0.24. Its performance as been rated at 275 horsepower from an electric motor on the rear axle that propels the I.D. Space Vizzion to 60 mph in five seconds, with an 82-kilowatt battery that can travel 300 miles on single charge.

But the fact that it's a wagon may be the biggest news . . . rivaled by the bombshell Volkswagen of America CEO Scott Keogh dropped at the Los Angeles Auto Show.  He thinks a backlash against sport utility vehicles is coming, and it's going to be led by the younger buyers entering the auto market against the older Baby Boomers and Generation Xers who made the SUV the modern American family car.  And the I.D. Space Vizzion - and its companion I.D. Vizzion sedan, first displayed at Geneva in 2018 and planned for production as the ID.5 - demonstrate how flexible the MEB electric platform is and how adaptable in can be to changing trends.

Volkswagen may very well be in good standing in the new-car market if Keogh's prediction comes true - and I obviously hope it does.  Incidentally, the MQB gasoline-powered platform is also adaptable to different models and styles, as it underpins both the Golf and the Tiguan, for example. I only hope the anti-SUV backlash comes sooner rather than later, the better to ensure more sensible electric cars for the U.S. market - and the base eighth-generation Golf. ;-)

Continue to keep with the Mark 8 Golf and its chances or inclusion in VW's U.S. lineup at my new blog.

Under Water

Last night's "60 Minutes" edition featured a report from Bill Whitaker on rocks at the bottom of the ocean containing precious metals and rare-earth compounds and the race to harvest them.  Though there are environmental concerns, Whitaker's report explained how companies from different countries were trying to stay within environmental parameters in removing the rocks from the ocean floor.  The goal of harvesting and processing these metals is to make the batteries necessary for making electric cars.

As always, though, the United States isn't part of this bold expedition.  It seems that the seabed that is the most ripe for these metals to be harvested is in an area of the eastern Pacific governed by the Law of the Sea treaty, a treaty I've referred to before on this blog and - like so many multilateral treaties - a treaty that the U.S. wants no part of.  Actually, the Senate would ratify it - pro-treaty senators have more votes than they need - but 22 Republicans are preventing it from going through, and you can bet your sweet candy bar that Mitch McConnell is one of them.

Their argument against it? It cedes too much authority to the United Nations, and Americans don't cede authority to anyone.  But we are ceding our economic advantage and what's left of our scientific credibility to everyone by not being able to harvest these rocks for electric-car batteries.  Oh, right - apart from outsider-automaker Tesla, American car companies are paying little more than lip service to developing and selling electric cars.   

It should be noted that American aversion to multilateral treaties managing the planet's affairs and resources go back to long before Trump came along - the Law of the Sea treaty was written in the early 1980s, when Trump was busy destroying the old Bonwit Teller store in Manhattan to build his stupid tower.  And there are several other treaties of similar nature that the United States refuses to ratify.  Since 1945, we Americans have seen ourselves as being so powerful and so omnipotent that we don't need no stinking treaties to tell us how to run the world.  Which is exactly why we don't deserve to run it.  Democratic presidential candidates talk about restoring America's leadership in the world, but I'm not sure that's such a good idea.  We only ended up being the leader of the world after the Second World War for two reasons:

• The U.S. was one of only two industrialized countries not partially or totally destroyed by the war.
• Canada didn't want the job of world leadership.

Forget ratifying the Law of the Sea treaty now.  America is a sinking ship going down for the third time.

A Tale of Two Volkswagens

If you need any proof that the United States can never become a country like the nations of Europe, by all means consider the cultural, not political, differences between them.  Don't bother with the differences between private health insurance and single-payer health insurance.  Instead, consider football versus soccer.  Sugary cereal versus muesli.  Clown-suit fashion versus stylish leisurewear.  Blockbuster movies versus cerebral dramatic films. 

The Volkswagen ID.3 versus the Volkswagen Atlas Cross Sport.   

The Volkswagen ID.3 electric hatchback, which commenced production earlier this week in Zwickau, Germany, is designed to become for electric vehicles what the Beetle was to cars powered by aircooled internal-combustion engines and what the Golf and Rabbit have been to cars powered by watercooled internal-combustion engines.  It is meant to define and set the standard for motoring going into the 2020s and beyond.  Power from its battery is rated at 150 kilowatts producing 200 horsepower and 310 pound-feet of torque, on par with similarly sized gasoline-powered cars.  The transmission is a single-speed gearbox, and ranges are expected to be anywhere from 205 to 340 miles. This looks to be the world car that the Beetle and the Golf have been.

Except, of course, we Americans won't get it.

Volkswagen of America CEO Scott Keogh nixed the prospect of the ID.3 being sold in the United States, saying that there was no way for Volkswagen of America to make a decent profit from it.  Keogh says he thinks he made the right call; alas, this may be true.  Americans don't like to bother with smallness and efficiency when it comes to gas-powered compacts, so an electric compact priced at the equivalent of $33,000 is hardly going to get American car-buyers excited except us Europhile weirdos.  What's really galling is how the Germans see the ID.3 as a source of national pride and forward thinking - German Chancellor Angela Merkel was even on hand to witness the first ID.3s roll out of the Zwickau plant - while we wouldn't see such a similar American car as that.  If Ford or Fiat Chrysler ever comes up with a competitor for the Chevrolet Bolt, don't expect Donald Trump to be on hand for its debut.  (The Bolt debuted a month before Trump was elected President.)

Ironically, Trump would have felt right at home at the debut of a very different Volkswagen model that debuted at the firm's American factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee - the Atlas Cross Sport.

The Atlas Cross Sport is a smaller version of the standard Atlas sport utility vehicle, and it offers seating for five instead of seven.  Fuel economy with the two-liter turbo four is a respectable 22 miles per gallon (mpg) rating in combined city/highway driving. Don't let all of that fool you, though; the Atlas, whether in standard or Cross Sport form, is still a big, bulky SUV with a high-riding chassis, and its optional 3.6-liter VR6, which is likely to be a popular choice, delivers 19 mpg in combined city/highway driving. Despite the German brand name, this Volkswagen is very American - made, as Volkswagen of America and Keogh himself claim, by and for Americans.  Not for this American.  And, as I noted before, not for any American VW die-hard who prefers drivers' cars over monster wagons.  To me, the Atlas, whether in standard or Cross Sport form, feels and looks like an Explorer.  If you want an Explorer, you should go to Ford.

To be fair, Keogh is pushing electric vehicles as much as his boss in Germany, Volkswagen AG chairman Herbert Diess, is, as I've noted before; other electric vehicles are coming for America.  Also, Europeans are buying more SUVs, notably the Volkswagen Tiguan but also other VW models like the T-Roc and the T-Cross.  But the electric Volkswagen coming to our shores, the ID.4., is yet another bulky, cumbersome crossover with an awkward design that emphasizes size over agility, while the T-Roc and the T-Cross are SUVs that are smaller and, by sport-utility standards, more sensible - maybe too small and sensible for Americans.  The smaller SUVs Volkswagen has promised for this market look to be not so small and not so sensible.  

So, while Europeans look to a more practical motoring future, Americans seem to think the days of big, muscular, imposing highway cruisers - designed to carry bodies that are big, and, well, one out of three ain't bad - will go on forever.  (Size does matter!)  No progressive legislation proposed by Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren is going to change such a pathetic cultural attitude as our atrocious taste in cars.  And Volkswagen seems to be resigned to that.

*

You will notice that I haven't said anything specific about the upcoming Mark 8 Golf in this post.  I will bring it up on occasion in this space going forward, but for the bulk of my comments about the car and my ongoing efforts to get VW to send the base version of the car here, go to my new blog, "Bring The Base Mark 8 Golf To America!", where I'm drumming up support for the car to be added to VW's U.S. lineup.

Bogeying the Golf

The Volkswagen Golf has been a hard sell in the United States since, back in its days with the Rabbit name, it gained a reputation for less-than-stellar reliability and Americans realized that they didn't really like hatchbacks once falling gas prices meant they didn't have to buy one. So my efforts to get Volkswagen of America to sell the eighth generation of the base Golf here are going to be tough - especially since I'm only one person and it's difficult to get anyone to join me.  The VW enthusiasts only care about the GTI or R, which are coming, and casual VW customers are too busy checking out Tiguans and Atlases.  And it turns out that Volkswagen may be undercutting its own product - not just in hatchback-hating America, but in Europe in other markets.  Its Tiguan SUV is actually gaining in  popularity in the Old Country, as is the European T-Cross SUV, and Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess is gambling more on electric vehicles, which threatens to challenge sales of the traditional, fossil-fuel-powered Golf.  And the inclusion of hybrids in the Golf lineup itself in Europe has muddied the waters further for the model, as evidenced by the very special Golf you see below.  

This is the all-new, eighth-generation Volkswagen Golf GTE, and as its name suggests, it's a plug-in hybrid high-performance model, and it may actually upstage the time-honored GTI.  Its 1.4-liter gasoline engine and 13-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery setup pack combine to produce 242 horsepower - more than the Mark 7 GTI produces - and its 0-60 time is supposed to eclipse the outgoing seventh-generation hot hatch.  The seventh-generation GTE was more of a sideline for VW than this one appears to be.  Rumors of the coming Mark 8 GTI's power are just that - rumors - and, though it's likely that the next GTI will be more powerful than the new GTE, the GTE suggests where Volkswagen is headed.  It's hoping to accentuate its electric-vehicle and hybrid portfolio in the coming decades as climate change becomes more of a reality and VW enthusiasts may start feeling guilty (you can't spell "guilty" without "GTI") over polluting the air with their hot hatches.

All of this suggests that VW's product is in flux as less traditional vehicles like SUVs and electric cars pick up more of the slack.  Hannover-based equity analyst Frank Schwope even said as much to Fortune magazine. "The Golf is falling behind and risks becoming obsolete, on the one hand due to the trend towards SUVs like the Tiguan and T-Cross and on the other with Diess betting so heavily on electric vehicles," he said.

So, VW seems to be undermining the very highway the Golf rides on.  But the Golf, still popular in Europe, isn't done yet - rumor has it that the possibility of Volkswagen of America president Scott Keogh adding the GTE to the U.S. lineup has been floated, though I'll believe it when I see it - and I still think the base version would do just fine if it's offered in the States.  American VW loyalist customers still regard the Golf as the embodiment of Volkswagen in the post-air-cooled age, and it showed in sales of the seventh-generation Golf in 2015, its first full calendar year of availability in the U.S. - 19,257 base Golfs were driven off the lots of American dealerships that year.  And though only 5,012 base Golfs have been sold in the U.S. so far for 2019, that may be due to a combination of the car's aging design, lack of advertising, and very limited availability - take it from someone who was considering a 2019 Golf and tried to find a dealership that had at least one (but I finally got the stalling problem fixed on my 2012 Golf, so I'm good).  As they did in 2015, American VW fans who want a quintessential European hatchback but don't want to cough up extra scratch for a GTI or an R will gladly purchase a new Mark 8 Golf the second it's available . . . if Keogh decides to offer it.  He hasn't made the final decision on that, and so the fight to bring it here goes on, thanks to my Facebook page.  

And it would be, to use Keogh's pet phrase, cool as hell if he did bring over the Mark 8 GTE while he was at it.  It would be the ultimate electric bunny. ;-)  

Keep On Truckin'?

I recently finished reading Bill Vlasic's 2011 book "Once Upon a Car," about the the bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler and the painful restructuring of Ford in the late two thousand zeroes, and while this blog entry is not a review of that book, I feel compelled to recount some tidbits from it that, though this all happened only a decade or so ago, seem like a much more distant past.

There are accounts of President Obama talking with Ford scion William Clay Ford, Jr. about a future of motoring that envisioned all sorts of electric cars, Robert Lutz of General Motors waxing rhapsodic about the then-all-new Chevrolet Volt, then the most advanced hybrid vehicle in the world, and Fiat's Sergio Marchionne being eager to help Chrysler, which his firm had just absorbed, by designing fuel-efficient Dodges and Chryslers based on Fiat platforms.  All of this looked oh, so promising as the Big Three recovered from near-extinction.

Well, what a difference a decade makes.  Today, the Big Three are back to pushing sport utility vehicles - a strategy that got them into such much trouble in 2009 in the first place.  The Chevrolet Volt is gone, GM and Chrysler have pared their sedans and hatchbacks in North America to one or two, and Ford has pared its sedans and hatchbacks in North America to zero.  Even Sergio Marchionne, who died in 2018, decided to emphasize Fiat Chrysler Automobiles' Jeep brand (earning Donald Trump's admiration) over everything else, while the Fiat brand, which promised an array of small cars with Italian flair, has given us ugly crossovers based on its only car model in the U.S., the Fiat 500 - and, like the crossovers, has proven to be as reliable as the original Fiat 500.  Gasoline, once four dollars a gallon, has gone back down.  And even as Volkswagen plans to start making electric vehicles in Tennessee (not the Golf-sized I.D. 3, alas) while Tesla continues to charge along, Donald Trump, now President, has killed fuel economy standards and is aiming to get rid of electric-car tax credits that promote sales of cars like the Chevrolet Bolt (not to be confused with the Volt, of course) and the Tesla Model 3 (below) to discourage anyone from buying them.  ("Mr. President, Chuck and Dave Koch on line two, still no word on sister Vera!") 

And it's not just Fiat Chrysler, GM, and Ford that have turned their backs on a future of more sensible and practical trucks in favor of mothertruckin' SUVs, crossovers and pickups.  Foreign automakers are riding the SUV gravy train without apology.  I can watch two hours of television at a time and see numerous commercials for SUVs from Chevrolet or Ford and foreign brands like Volvo, Infiniti and Honda and, apart from a BMW commercial, not see one commercial for one of the few sedans remaining tin the U.S. market going into the 2020 model year.  Hatchbacks?  Well, you can still get a Volkswagen Golf, though probably not for much longer.  Also, the Honda Fit is still available, but you'd never know that from Honda's advertising because it keeps pushing its Passport SUV by showing it in a commercial depicting a family going out to the great wilderness to the tune of Wolfmother's "Vagabond."  About the only good thing I can say about this ad is that Wolfmother, an Australian rock band, is getting exposure on the air in America that they otherwise might not get.  Too bad "Vagabond" is from 2005.  

What's going on here? What happened to the new golden age of automobiles we were promised when GM and Chrysler got restructured and when Ford started giving us the exact same sort of cars that Europeans had been buying from Ford and enjoying for decades?  Apart from bringing Alfa Romeo back to the States, what good has the Fiat Group done for us?  Why are we buying more and more crossovers and putting up with their cumbersome handling?  And why do Americans keep falling in love with gas-guzzling SUVs for off-road capabilities they'll never need?  And why do I even bother asking?

 And why are Europeans picking up our disgusting habits?

At least in European countries, though, you still can buy a small car or a sensible sedan if you want to.  Or nothing at all; after all, there are plenty of mass-transit options.  In America, thanks to our pathetic mass-transit network, everyone is expected to own and drive a car whether they like it or not, and your only choice of car style is increasingly either an big ugly wagon or a big brutish truck.  And for someone like me, that's all far more than merely annoying.

Driverless cars?  Please, don't get me started . . ..      

(Update on the Golf: I wrote Volkswagen of America CEO Scott Keogh to beg him to please keep the base Golf model in the U.S.  Soon after that, a VW representative contacted me to acknowledge Keogh's receipt of my letter and to say that no decision has been made about it yet.  More about that later.)  

An International Plot

Late word is that Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is looking into a partnership with the French automaker Renault in an attempt by both companies to find their way through a rapidly changing global auto industry.

Both Fiat Chrysler and Renault are looking for a way to pool their resources to produce greater car sales for both.  Fiat Chrysler is making a killing off trucks and SUVs in North America but its product is less than reliable and it has no respect in Europe.  Renault is a powerhouse in France and the rest of Europe, and it's benefited from its associations with Mitsubishi and Nissan (Renault has a partnership with Nissan; if I ever said on this blog that Renault owned Nissan, I was wrong about that), but it's had no presence in the U.S. since it quit the American market in 1987 (and never had much of a presence here before that!).  The Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi partnership has taken a turn for the worse lately, with former Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn having been arrested then fired in November 2018 for underreporting his earnings to Japanese authorities while Nissan had been flagging.  Also, Fiat Chrysler is way behind in producing electric cars, and Fiat Chrysler CEO Mike Manley probably understands that the light-truck craze can't last forever (even if it feels like it can, and has).

While this possible deal likely won't have Renault return to the U.S. market with cars like the snazzy new Clio (above), it means that the two companies are eager and willing to address each other's deficiencies while consolidating their strengths.  Fiat Chrysler and Renault sell enough cars between them to, as a partnership, sell more cars globally than Volkswagen or Toyota, and their sharing of resources will enable them to dominate new and evolving market segments.  This is the new era of the car business; with Volkswagen, which makes great cars but comes up short in producing top-notch trucks, and Ford, which dominates in both light and heavy trucks but is still struggling to stay profitable, apparently agreeing to make vehicles for each other now, it's obvious that automakers will need each other more than compete with each other.  This is due in part to the costs of developing electric and autonomous cars, which are coming whether we like them or not.  As Jessica Caldwell, an industry analyst at Edmunds, told the Washington Post in January 2019, "Automakers aren’t just competing with each other anymore.  They’re under intense pressure from well-funded tech companies who are eager to get in on the future of mobility."

It's Not Easy Being Green

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a woman on a mission.  With a brazen effort to seize the moment and hit the ground running, she unveiled a proposal for a Green New Deal - a Roosevelt-style economic policy that emphasizes the creation of jobs and the implementation of policies to benefit the environment and fight climate change while putting people to work.

Her proposal, which she put out with climate hawk and congressional veteran Edward Markey, the junior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, would incentivize the creation of jobs to help the poor, underemployed and unemployed - jobs to expand renewable energy, get the United States on track to depend entirely on a 100% renewable, zero-emission energy grid, encourage the development of electric cars and high-speed passenger rail, and promote sustainable farming.

In other words, Ocasio-Cortez wants America to do what other countries have been doing for quite some time now.

Let's get something straight.  This Green New Deal proposal is not going to become law in this Congress, so long as the Republicans, who still control the Senate and the Presidency, scoff at anything that cuts into the profitable businesses of refining oil and selling SUVs.  Even if there is a Democratic sweep in the 2020 elections, we might still have to deal with moderate Democrats who laugh off the idea of going all-renewable and call it a "green dream" (to cop a phrase from Nancy Pelosi's reaction to the Ocasio-Cortez/Markey proposal).  But it does do something Republicans detest - it gets an issue they don't want to talk about in the public discourse.  Ocasio-Cortez is betting on the Green New Deal  to galvanize progressive, millennial and minority voters to become more politically active and demand change to our insane energy and transportation policies, which gave us electric-power plants belching carbon into the sky and an unsustainable overreliance on cars.  Not to mention the incentivization of mechanized farming based on petrochemical fertilizers.  The idea is to get enough voters riled up to the point where they make Washington pursue a path to a cleaner and greener economy.

Of course, some of these ideas have been around for awhile (*cough cough*, high-speed rail, *cough cough*), and the political realities of the present make the Green New Deal a heavy lift.  But it's not impossible to get it done; it's just difficult.  Here are a few other things that were heavy lifts - health care reform, civil rights legislation, old-age pensions, women's suffrage . . . I could go on.  I won't, because we have to start getting the Green New Deal off the ground.  And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the perfect person to instigate it.  This is not unlike the idea of putting a man on the moon within ten years, which, you'll remember, happened.  Ocasio-Cortez's and Markey's plan happens to envision a ten-year transition to an all-renewable energy grid. And Ocasio-Cortez is firing up voters and inspiring the American people to find their can-do spirit and get this thing done.

With a little luck, we can make this whole damn thing work out. A little push, please.  ;-)    

Bye Bye Beetle (and Scirocco)

Volkswagen recently confirmed that the current iteration of the modern, watercooled Beetle (below) will be the last.  The company has decided that Beetle nostalgia has played itself out.  Volkswagen plans instead to let the I.D. Buzz, its electric retrograde Microbus (more about that later), pick up the nostalgia market.  It's probably for the best; twice I had the opportunity to buy a modern Beetle, but in each case I found the a Golf to be a more practical, more up-to-date car.  But it's still a shock.   

Meanwhile, in the Old Country,  VW has also decided to discontinue the third-generation Scirocco, a car that, unlike the watercooled Beetles, never made it to the United States or Canada. 

Well, cross this car off the list of potential additions to VW's North American lineup.

The truth of the matter is that Volkswagen is discontinuing the Scirocco in Europe for the same reasons that it wouldn't sell it in North America - SUVs are growing ever more popular at the expense of coupes, and the Volkswagen Golf GTI offers real rear-seat room with the same performance at a cheaper price.  A fourth-generation Scirocco is possible, though, as part of VW's upcoming electric-car model lineup.  It should be noted that Chevrolet still offers its 2 + 2 sports model, the Camaro, while Ford and Chrysler's Dodge brand continue to offer the Mustang and the Challenger, respectively, even as both marques otherwise flee the traditional-car market, like vampires fleeing from a cross, to make and sell more SUVs.  So we might see an electric Scirocco on both sides of the Atlantic just yet.

But probably not a Golf convertible.  As if the cancellation of the Beetle weren't enough, a planned convertible version of the eighth-generation Golf has, at least for now, been put off, the victim of, all things, Brexit.  Great Britain has been, believe it or not, a big market for VW's convertibles, but the decline of the British car market in the aftermath of the country's decision to leave the European Union made it not worth VW's while to go ahead with a Mark 8 Golf convertible . . . and the previous droptop Golf has since been discontinued.

Does this mean there'll be no Volkswagen convertible left when the Beetle is gone?  Maybe the Beetle convertible will continue after the elimination of the Beetle hardtop until a proper Golf convertible replacement is readied.  I hope so.  A Volkswagen lineup without a convertible model?  That's like cake without frosting. :-(

It's safe to say, though, that unless there is a Golf convertible in the future, two-door VW cars of any sort are kaput.  I have a feeling that the Mark 8 Golf will come without a two-door hardtop model, as the dwindling number of people who want a traditional sedan or hatchback on both sides of the Atlantic opt for rear passenger doors.  Already dropped from the U.S., the two-door Golf should disappear elsewhere in a matter of time.  Bearing all that in mind, maybe VW's upcoming models - gasoline-powered or electric - will be more advanced and more in keeping with the times, but they likely won't be as fun. :-(