#Volkswagen

Volkswagen Group has decided to increase spending on the development of electric and digital technologies over the next five years to 60 billion euros ($66 billion USD). The automaker estimated the revised strategy amounts to slightly more than 40 percent of its investments in property, plant and equipment, and all research and development costs during the planning period.

Of that sum, 33 billion euros are expected to go directly toward the development of new electric vehicles. The increase allocates roughly €12 billion annually for hybridization, electric mobility and digitalization. The old plan set aside 8.8 billion euros per year.

Recently I reached out to you, dear readers, for some suggestions on replacing a 2012 Subaru Outback. The wagon has occupied my driveway for the past two years, but, for reasons outlined previously, it’s time for it to go. My initial idea for a replacement was a Kia Niro, but that didn’t seem like it was going to pan out. So I turned to the real experts around here.

Comments poured in, and four suggestions were clear. Let’s narrow things down a bit.

TTAC’s own Sajeev Mehta gets the credit for discovering today’s Rare Ride. It’s the most special version of the Porsche 924, and it’s for sale in his hometown in the tiny republic of Texas.

Rare Rides featured one of Porsche’s 924s a couple of years ago, with the Martini Championship Edition (a steal at $7,000). This 924 is much more obscure — and much more expensive. Is this one-of-17 car worth the cool $925,000 asking price?

Volkswagen’s investment into its U.S. manufacturing presence doesn’t end with an expansion of its only domestic assembly plant. The battery packs needed to power a new range of fully electric models will originate at the same site.

The automaker announced the kickoff of construction Wednesday, detailing how it plans to spend its $800 million.

The Justice Department has issued civil subpoenas to the four major automakers’ that voluntary agreed to adopt a Californian compromise on vehicle emission requirements. The antitrust investigation seeks to determine whether or not BMW, Ford, Honda, and Volkswagen were in violation of federal competition laws by agreeing with each other to adhere to stricter emissions standards penned by California.

With the Trump administration working for years to roll back emissions standards, California has been doing everything in its power to maintain its ability to self-regulate and gain support for higher emission standards. Under the agreement with the Golden State, the companies promised to meet annual emission improvement targets of 3.7 percent and defer to the state’s authority to set its own emissions standards.

First off, this writer can’t speak enough to the grossness of purposely misspelled words, and that goes for recording artists who hate vowels in their name, too.

With that out of the way, there’s wagon news to share. Volkswagen, whose electric MEB platform is slated to underpin a wide variety of future models, has revealed its latest creation: the ID. Space Vizzion, an all-electric long-roof that will one day make its way to America.

While it remains to be seen whether non-performance versions of the next-generation Volkswagen Golf make their way to the U.S. (Canadians can expect the basic unit), Europeans now know exactly what to expect.

Launching Thursday at the brand’s Wolfsburg, Germany home base, the new Golf comes packed with technology while retaining the unmistakable profile of Golfs past. Like Jeep’s Wrangler, the Golf isn’t something to be tinkered with by some brash youngster with “big new ideas.” It’s a product of evolution, not revolution.

Readers might not nod their heads in agreement after seeing this headline, knowing full well it denotes the appearance of another crossover on the avenues and byways of America, but Volkswagen would respectfully disagree. For the automaker’s American arm, it most definitely is a good thing.

Eager to make new friends following the brand’s disastrous diesel affair, Volkswagen changed course, pledging to give Americans more of what they claim they want. And it seems the effort paid off. Arriving at dealers in May of 2017, the mid-size, made-in-America Atlas crossover has proven a sales coup. Through September, more than one-fifth (21.5 percent) of Volkswagens sold in the U.S. in 2019 bore the Atlas name. Volume is up 39 percent, year to date.

If having one Atlas is a good thing, surely having two is better? From a sales and revenue perspective, Volkswagen certainly hopes so.

The Volkswagen Golf has been a mainstay on the compact car scene since approximately the dawn of time, ringing up sales on multiple continents and introducing a world of new drivers to the sweet taste of freedom. They say if you line up all the Golfs ever produced, you’d create a line of cars from here to Deep Space Nine, or something like that.

Later this month, a new version will appear in Wolfsburg. Set to be the models’ eighth generation, it’ll cut a new shape while still being immediately recognizable as a Golf. Today, Volkswagen released a few sketches of the new car for the world to peruse.

Volkswagen has revealed an updated R logo that it says will still symbolize performance while also representing the brand’s “fresh start” — its refocus on electric vehicles, rather than the diesel ones that got it into trouble back in 2015.

VW similarly rejiggered is brand’s main logo, eliminating its three-dimensional aspects for a streamlined version highly reminiscent of the symbol used through the 1970s, debuting the new (old?) design at this year’s Frankfurt Motor Show. But the R’s transformation has resulted in something entirely novel, abandoning the leftmost vertical line in favor of an abstracted representation of the letter.

However, tweaking the visuals of a single character doesn’t have much meaning in itself. All we really care about is whether or not the R badge will still denote the maximum performance available from various VW models.

Before Audi revolutionized rallying and four-wheel drive cars with the Ur-Quattro circa 1980, the company made front-drive vehicles underpinned by Volkswagen platforms (some things never change). Today’s Rare Ride 5000 hails from the waning days of Audi’s front-drive era, not long before an all-new 5000 set the template for aerodynamic sedan design.

While Volkswagen Group’s diesel lawsuits are more or less settled in the United States, 470,000 diesel owners in Germany are still fighting to see their payday. Unfortunately, the courts aren’t certain they’re deserving.

The court hasn’t settled on anything, but Monday’s introductory hearing concluded with presiding Judge Michael Neef wondering what customers actually lost by having their vehicles equipped with emissions-cheating software. The court claims its primary goal is to assess whether or not any loss in value can be attributed to vehicle bans that came years after VW’s diesel scandal broke. It’s concerned that drivers’ ability to continue using the automobiles doesn’t warrant awarding owners damages.

“It doesn’t make sense to us that drivers should be granted the right to use cars for free,” Neef said on behalf of the three judges hearing the case, according to Bloomberg. “Otherwise, we would have to grant punitive damages that do not exist under German law.”

A year and change after his ouster as president of the Cadillac brand, Johan de Nysschen has returned to a familiar place: Volkswagen of America, where, many moons ago, the executive sat on the automaker’s board while serving as Audi’s U.S. boss.

This homecoming sees de Nysschen take on the role of chief operating officer for the VW brand’s recently-created North American region. However, it will probably not, as one TTAC writer opined in a chatroom discussion, lead to the renaming of the Jetta GLI as the Q220.

Methodical German prosecutors have finally made their way to the top of Volkswagen’s executive ranks, charging CEO Herbert Diess and Chairman Hans Dieter Poetsch with stock market manipulation.

On Tuesday, the prosecutor’s office in Braunschweig indicted Diess, Pötsch, and former CEO Martin Winterkorn, accusing the men of withholding information of a looming emissions scandal from investors. Winterkorn, already indicted by U.S. authorities and slapped with a fraud charge in Germany, stepped down shortly after the scandal broke in September 2015.

Diess vows to stay on as VW’s boss as the charges play out.

In the recent Shelby CSX Rare Rides entry, long-term commenter 28-Cars-Later suggested some sporty competitors to the Shelby, all of which cost the same according to the state of Michigan. Japan, Germany, and America are well-represented in today’s trio.

Which one sets your sporty-small-car heart aflame in ’88?