ZWICKAU, Germany – Five years and nearly $ 50 billion in the car industry’s biggest bet on electric vehicles, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess and his guest, Chancellor Angela Merkel, were waiting as the first ID.3 Germany’s long-awaited Tesla has come off the assembly line.
The event at the company’s EV pilot plant just over a year ago marked a “systemic shift from a combustion engine to an electric vehicle,” said Thomas Ulbrich, leader of the ID.3 effort.
However, the car did not work as announced.
He might drive, turn around and stop for a penny. But the luxury technology features promised by VW were either absent or broken. The company’s developers had not yet figured out how to update the car’s software remotely. The futuristic head-up display that was supposed to illuminate speed, directions and other data on the windshield did not work. The first owners began to report hundreds of other software errors.
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 into service to have the new software installed.