this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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Don't know what people expected from a company being forced to build the infrastructure against their will, they should have had to pay a fine and a State corporation should have been created from that to create charging infrastructure and reap the profit for the government's coffers.
You aren't wrong, but also it directly impacts the company reputation. Doing it as absolute crap as they did hurts them. Not the whole industry, because looks what's happened since, the charging standards in USA went from CCS to nacs, all the manufacturers switched to using Tesla network which, checks notes is your direct competition.
I think very few people realize that it's VW that built that infrastructure and the fact that major governments didn't come together to set a charging standard is a separate issue.
Which to me is also a failure. Everyone knows the Tesla network is Tesla. And it's hands down, better. People use Electrify America and have a bad experience (myself included) and they get mad at it. Even if they don't know it's tied to vw.
YouTubers and journalist talk about it and tie it to vw and suddenly your enthusiasts are panning vw for their garbage network.
It's a lose lose for Volkswagen the way they did this.
Not only that, but they had to create a company/infrastructure that they had little to no expertise in.
I guarantee if you asked someone in 2015 "of all the companies out there, who do you think has the knowledge and expertise in civil engineering, US planning law, electricity infrastructure, and wireless communications required to build out a US-wide charging network?", very few would have come back with "VW would be great at that!"
I can definitely see the logic in it - it pressured VW to pivot to EV platforms, which I guess was the goal. But expecting them to be able to properly run a completely different business to what they have expertise in was always going to have problems.