alt Hacker News> Having ideas is difficult and expensive. Let's lobby instead!
> [..] spends around €10 million a year on lobbying – which sounds like a lot, but amounts to just 0.05% of VW's €21 billion R&D budget.
> The logic is clear: innovation is expensive and uncertain, whereas lobbying to keep current products on the road is cheap and reliable.
Complete non sequitur. This could more easily be read as "they don't care much about lobbying and are hard at work doing R&D instead", but then that would go very much against narrative the author is trying to spin for us here.
Also I distinctly remember industry voices being very much pro-electric, while it was dinosaur politicians fetishizing ICE cars and fighting to keep production going, long past the point VW even wanted to focus on them.
I don't think this one was a lobbying problem for once.
This. VW actually invested a lot into EVs and now they’re outselling every other EV maker in the European market. Mercedes and BMW also invested a lot. All of them have brand new and pretty competitive EV platforms. Heck, even Peugeot make decent EVs. The only manufacturers lagging behind at this point are the Americans. Tesla basically stopped investing into EVs and their tech is outdated, in Europe they get absolutely butchered by VW and in China they‘re only able to keep sales level because the market is growing so fast. But soon Tesla will get annihilated in China too. Other US car makers that build EVs on scale are nowhere to be seen, besides maybe Rivian.