Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess, speaking in the context of Tesla’s impressive third quarter results, says the German carmaker “will be able to produce electric vehicles as good as Tesla’s and at half the price by 2020.” A fine-sounding statement that simply reiterates the motor industry’s determination to continue contributing to the planet’s problems.
Let me spell it out in capital letters:
VOLKSWAGEN, WE COULDN’T CARE LESS ABOUT YOUR ABILITY TO MAKE ELECTRIC VEHICLES: WHAT WE WANT TO KNOW IS WHEN YOU’RE GOING TO STOP MAKING THOSE THAT AREN’T.
To be honest, Mr Diess, few of us care about your company’s competitiveness in the coming years. That’s a problem for Volkswagen’s managers, worried about their annual bonus, and for its employees, who don’t know whether they’ll have a job. The rest of the planet’s problem is that Volkswagen has spent years lying about its vehicles’ emissions and poisoning our environments in the process, and that 99% of its vehicles continue to do so. If our governments really cared the situation, internal combustion engines would be banned tomorrow.
The simple truth is that there is no sense of urgency about the problems climate change has created for us. Volkswagen and the rest of the…
