ZWICKAU, Germany – Five years and nearly $ 50 billion in the auto industry’s biggest bet on electric vehicles, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess and his guest, Chancellor Angela Merkel, were waiting for the first ID.3, the long-awaited answer from Germany on Tesla, rolled off the assembly line.
The event at the company’s main EV plant just over a year ago marked a “systemic shift from the combustion engine to the electric car,” said Thomas Ulbrich, ID.3 leader.
However, the car did not work as advertised.
He could drive, turn and stop on a dime. But the neat technological features that VW had promised were absent or broken. The company’s programmers did not yet know how to update the car’s software remotely. The futuristic head-up display that was supposed to flash speed, directions and other data on the windshield did not work. The first owners started reporting hundreds of other software bugs.
After years of development, Volkswagen decided in June last year to postpone launch and sell the first batch of cars without a full suite of software, pending a future update, now scheduled for mid-February. Tens of thousands of ID.3 owners will have to bring their cars in for service to have the new software installed.