Volkswagen’s CEO Herbert Diess isn’t intimidated by Apple, even though the tech company potentially has an electric car on the way. From a report: “The car industry is not a typical tech sector that you could take over at a single stroke,” Diess said in an interview with German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “Apple will not manage that overnight.” For years,…
Tag: Volkswagen
Global Sales of Electric Cars Accelerate Fast In 2020 Despite Pandemic
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Global sales of electric cars accelerated fast in 2020, rising by 43% to more than 3 million, despite overall car sales slumping by a fifth during the coronavirus pandemic. Tesla was the brand selling the most electric cars, delivering almost 500,000, followed by Volkswagen. Sales of electric cars more than doubled in…
Chip Shortage Hits Global Automakers
A semiconductor shortage is dragging on some of the world’s biggest auto manufacturers, costing Daimler, Nissan Motor, Honda Motor and Ford Motor production of a range of cars. From a report: Mercedes-Benz maker Daimler joined its German peer Volkswagen AG in announcing it’s affected by the industrywide supply bottleneck, without quantifying the impact. Honda said it will cut domestic output by…
Volkswagen CEO Says Apple Can Mount Major Challenge With Auto Push
Volkswagen AG Chief Executive Officer Herbert Diess said cash-rich technology giants invading the auto industry pose a much bigger challenge for the German manufacturer than traditional rivals like Toyota Motor. From a report: “We look forward to new competitors who will certainly accelerate the change in our industry and bring in new skills,” Diess said in a LinkedIn post when asked…
Electric-Car Companies Now Comprise Half the Worth of the World’s 10 Most Valuable Automakers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Electric-car companies are suddenly worth half of the total market capitalization of the world’s 10 most valuable automakers. That’s because money managers sized up the convergence of government policies and people’s preferences combating climate change and made alternative energy their biggest bet. Much was achieved by Tesla Inc., the Palo Alto maker of…
Illegal Tampering By Diesel Pickup Owners Is Worsening Pollution, EPA Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The owners and operators of more than half a million diesel pickup trucks have been illegally disabling their vehicles’ emissions control technology over the past decade, allowing excess emissions equivalent to 9 million extra trucks on the road, a new federal report has concluded. The practice, described in a report…
Volkswagen Seeks Open-Source Approach To Refine Car Operating System
Volkswagen wants to use an open-source approach to refine elements of a software-based car operating system being developed by the carmaker, Christian Senger, its board member responsible for digital services and software, said. From a report: With the advent of autonomous driving, carmakers have been forced to link up radar, camera and ultrasonic sensors and connect them to braking and steering…
This Was Supposed to Be the Year Driverless Cars Went Mainstream
Tech companies once promised that fully functional, self-driving cars would be on the road by 2020 and on the path to remaking transportation and transforming the economy. From a report: But a decade after Google unveiled an autonomous car prototype with global fanfare, the technology is still far from ready, and many investors are wary of dumping more money into it…
D-Wave Makes Its Quantum Computers Free To Anyone Working On Coronavirus Crisis
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: D-Wave today made its quantum computers available for free to researchers and developers working on responses to the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis. D-Wave partners and customers Cineca, Denso, Forschungszentrum Julich, Kyocera, MDR, Menten AI, NEC, OTI Lumionics, QAR Lab at LMU Munich, Sigma-i, Tohoku University, and Volkswagen are also offering to help. They will…
Automakers, Tesla and SpaceX Explore Working on Ventilators
“Just had a long engineering discussion with Medtronic about state-of-the-art ventilators,” Elon Musk tweeted on Saturday. Medtronic tweeted that the talks also involved Tesla. And TechCrunch notes that Musk tweeted on Friday that both Tesla and SpaceX employees are “working on ventilators…”:
His confirmation on Twitter that both of the companies he leads are working on ventilators comes a day after New…