ZWICKAU, Germany – five years and almost $ 50 billion in the auto industry’s biggest bet on electric vehicles, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess and his guest, Chancellor Angela Merkel, stood out as the first ID.3, the long-awaited response from Germany to Tesla, left 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 vehicle,” said Thomas Ulbrich, leader of the ID.3 effort.
The car, however, did not work as advertised.
He could drive, turn and stop on a dime. But the sophisticated technology features that VW had promised were missing or broken. The company’s programmers had not yet figured out how to update the car’s software remotely. Its futuristic head-up display that was supposed to show speed, directions and other data on the windshield didn’t work. The first owners started to report hundreds of other software bugs.
After years of development, Volkswagen decided in June last year to delay the launch and sell the first batch of cars without a full range of software, pending a future update, which is now scheduled for mid-February. Tens of thousands of ID.3 owners will have to bring their cars in for repair before the new software is installed.