Opinion

As a die-hard classic Volkswagen Beetle enthusiast and owner, I couldn't be more pleased that the name won't return any time soon.

Don't get me wrong: I'm a huge fan of the Volkswagen ID Buzz, which strikes a neat balance between paying homage to its 1950s spiritual forebear and embracing new-age EV design cues. But it's reassuring to hear that Thomas Schäfer's battle plan doesn't revolve exclusively around similarly conceived retro revivals. 

Volkswagen CEO rules out Beetle revival as retro is "a dead end"

That's in part because it means Volkswagen won't come in for the inevitable social media firestorm that always meets such decisions. "It's nothing like the original!" keyboard warriors type furiously when a 'spiritual successor' to a revered '60s or '70s icon is revealed. "How can you call it that?!" they gasp, exasperated. 

For proof of this, look no further than the reaction to the recent news that Ford plans to revive the fan-favourite Capri as an electric five-door crossover based on a Volkswagen Group architecture... Hardly a warm reception.

But it's also a relief because tapping into the spirit of the original Beetle would be all but impossible in the modern era, as we know from the two cooly received, Golf-based Beetles that Volkswagen launched in the years following the original's demise. 

The MEB platform would at least allow for a new-age Beetle to be more authentic in its conception: rear-wheel drive, flat floor, boot at the front, etc. But this is a model name associated with utter no-frills family motoring, intrinsically linked with connotations of durability and dependability and, above all, charm. 

It's hard to imagine any new EV, no matter how compact, thoughtfully designed or competitively priced, adhering rigidly to those same values.

Look at the Fiat 500 and Mini Electric: these are luxury products that nod only loosely to their 1950s forebears (both close rivals for the Beetle in their day), and while they're remarkably well engineered and easy on the eye, it's their abandonment of the utilitarian principles that underpinned those diddy originals that has won them such acclaim.

Volkswagen is indeed developing a cheery and (relatively) cheap family city car for the electric era, but as a contemporarily styled EV replacement for the Polo, rather than a retro-inspired Beetle-alike. That's good news for anyone who values substance over style and means the long and colourful Beetle backstory can remain a chapter in Volkswagen's history, rather than a weight around its neck as the company chases its bold electric future. 

Competition is a bitch. Global competition in 2023, particularly. There has always been plenty of it in the car business, but now that Chinese-built EVs especially are beginning to put the squeeze on European car makers as they try to fully establish themselves in the brave new zero-emissions market, we can start to appreciate just how much of a bitch it is likely to be for some time to come.

I remember well the theory espoused about making profit from electric cars 15 years ago. It would be impossible to start with: too much R&D investment up front, too much cost in the cars, and not enough sales volume. But as the volume grew and the battery tech developed, so the margin, it was promised, should materialise.

Well, approaching 13 years since the launch of the Nissan Leaf and more than a decade after Tesla launched the first Model S, many manufacturers would tell you they are still waiting. If the margin is coming, it’s not distributing itself very evenly. Some luxury brands are probably seeing movement; some bigger-volume players too, perhaps, depending on their buying power and where they are building. But if you can manufacture in China, your chances seem to be vastly higher. In fact, if you want to be able to present a volume-selling electric car at a really competitive price, for the next decade at the very least, a Chinese manufacturing base may be the only way you can do it. Because you can stake your bonus that China’s own brands aren’t going to stop exporting to Europe - and, while so many European industry leaders argue for protectionism, the impact they are beginning to have by doing so is not small.

Of course, rather than driving down costs, the other way to ensure a margin would be to drive up the value in your new EV. We have seen firms doing that already with bigger batteries and longer range than the next, with appealing designs and novel premium brands, and by packing in the digital cabin tech.

Well, I don’t much care how big my infotainment screen is, or how many colours the ambient lighting can make. But I would like makers of EVs to think about the driver a bit more. Don’t believe the dogma: EVs can be made involving to drive, if they are given a proper chance. 

Drive battery packs need to be fitted around the occupants for a start, not just plonked underneath them to simply displace the cabin upwards by six inches. Brands like Porsche and Polestar already do this, but others need to follow - and when they do, we will see better-packaged EVs with the lower body profiles and centres of gravity they need to handle well.

Second, if you can give the driver more control over the car, do it. Lots of new EVs are coming to market with little or no options to alter battery regeneration as you drive, for instance. That’s an easy way to engage, but also to deliver better real-world range. 

Also, while some do have simplified automatic gearboxes, none has made them manually controllable yet. So what about an EV in which you can change gear? 

And finally, what about torque vectoring? This was supposed to be the dynamic trump card of EVs, but we are still not seeing more affordable EVs that fully deliver it. If I want to trade some outright power, and put my twin-motor EV into a rear-drive mode, I should be able to. It should be easy to make happen.

The weight of EVs, and their ability to cover greater distances between charges, are factors that should improve incrementally over time. But even if they do, the driving experiences of these cars won’t get any richer unless manufacturers put the effort in by innovating - especially when it comes to the driving experience. If they do that, they can offer something the next company can’t – and that will be worth money to them.

Back in 2016, then Ford boss Mark Fields stood up at the Detroit motor show and said Ford was going to “go from an auto company to an auto and mobility company”.

While the car sales industry was worth $2.3 trillion a year, said Fields, transportation services around mobility (ride-sharing apps etc) were worth $5.4tn. In one of several interactions with Fields around that show, I recall his inability to properly articulate the plan but how he made it seem a given that Ford would get there. 

This was an era when many car makers were making similar statements, yet the goal always seemed quite vague and the execution unclear. 

It was also an era when car makers were putting down roots in Silicon Valley, and straight after that Detroit show we were taken to Ford’s new development centre in the tech capital. 

Yet we were a bit puzzled as to why: there just wasn’t anything to show, or even a clear message – simply being in Silicon Valley was enough to be a mobility company.

Perhaps it was all a bit top secret, but a similar trip around the same time to Volkswagen's own Silicon Valley site yielded nothing more than the ability to park your car with your smartphone. 

None of this is a dig at Ford or Volkswagen, more an example of how car makers were talking about mobility and wanting to diversify their businesses without really being able to articulate how or know what the end goal and prize is, while at the same time seemingly ignoring or talking down the core car-selling business.  

Even these days, car makers reach for the jargon to describe themselves and get bogged down in mobility. For every clear, reasonable statement like Honda’s (“dedicated to supplying products of the highest quality, yet at a reasonable price”) there’s one that drifts like BMW’s (“to become the world’s leading provider of premium products and premium services for individual mobility”).

Car makers seem to forget sometimes what they are: car makers. In the race to being seen as at the cutting edge of what’s coming next, there’s a perception they’re not reading the room with what’s in front of them, in making cars people want to buy at prices they can afford to pay, with technology and services that are actually useful. 

It was illuminating to talk to Fiat’s European boss Gaetano Thorel, who offered one of the more articulate appraisals I’ve heard on the now and the next, born out of a discussion around the imminent launch of Fiat’s virtual showroom, where you’ll be able to “chat to a real person live and experience the car” in a “metaverse store”.

Which to me frankly sounds like the kind of thing that is somewhere between a gimmick and a distraction. Thorel, though, says it’s one of a number of new digital offerings you need to be creating in case the market moves that way, yet you can only make such hedged bets for the future if your core car-selling business is strong. You simply have to be moving forward and creating new digital channels, in case you miss the boat – whatever the boat is.  

“We need a dual mindset. We need to be strong on internal combustion engines, that’s clearly important. If you are fundamentally strong, then you can look at things like subscriptions, the metaverse – stuff where you’re not strong [today] but will be at the forefront if the day comes,” he says.

Seven years on from statements like Fields’, car makers still don’t know how the digital world around the automotive industry is going to look and the kinds of products being launched like digital showrooms still feel highly conceptual, with questionable business models. Disruption has come most of all in the way cars are sold (the likes of agency and online brokers) and electrified propulsion methods, rather than any great digital mobility revolution. 

At least investments in electric vehicles can be planned; trying to predict which way the wind will blow in terms of the digital world around the cars still feels like guesswork.