Going to second and extend TheAdamAndChe's assessment in the US to include the Audi division as well. It seems electrical/electronics are the main quality area.
I had an S5 with dash lighting issues, console control issues, premature clutch failure (to be fair the previous owner could have roasted it), a nearly new SQ5 with a failed cabin blower fan and more console issues. My sister-in-law had a Jetta with aggregate months in the shop for variety of engine management and other electronics issues. My nephew had a CC that broke a seal and the resulting oil leak wasn't detected by the oil pressure sensor and he seized the engine (also had a fuel pump failure). These are the only VWs in the extended family.
Now I have an F150 with way too many electronics in it for a pickup truck...fingers crossed.
Here in Germany VW is also considered pretty reliable and obviously has a huge network of service stations. But I'm pretty sure that's a pretty biased perspective.
A friend in Germany said he trusts VW even more after the scandal, because it showed their engineering cleverness. And also because they cared for their customers and gave them even better performance than the government allowed.
In general, VW has a good, somewhat inflated reputation in Germany + parts of EU. In my experience, the cars are quite solid and reliable, albeit considered a bit boring. But you can also buy a Seat or Skoda which is basically the same car with a different exterior but cheaper...
Maybe the issue is that they are different cars in the US. VW didn't have a Jetta in Germany for years. I owned a Golf MK3 convertible in the US, and I felt it was of lesser quality than similar VWs for the European market.
Your flaw is the assumption that all, or even most, customers prefer the non-tangible idea of "reducing pollution" to the tangible experience of greater performance.
That's exactly the problem with the public's understanding of pollution [1]. If they can't see people dying in front of their eyes, they won't believe it...
Different pollution, not necessarily more. Tuning the engine for more fuel efficiency generates more nitrogen oxides (above the legal limit in this case) and less carbon dioxide.
Name a German brand that isn't expensive and difficult to maintain. German car manufacturers have the strongest marketing departments in the world and people will swear blind that their vehicle is reliable and costs nothing to maintain. It's incredibly difficult to get car owners to be honest about how much it really costs them and how reliable their vehicle really is.
Another problem is people don't know any better. It's not like the average person has owned cars from all the major brands for enough time for things to go wrong with them. Most people own only a few cars over their entire life. I think this is particularly true with brands like VW. People just don't know any better and think it's normal for a car to be a money pit.
Cars are a strange thing. Very quickly after getting a car it becomes an essential part of life. When the bill comes through to repair whatever has gone wrong, there's no choice but to pay it. You can't just choose to not pay because it's too expensive. People take their car to the garage where it's essentially held captive until they pay the ransom.
I own a VW myself but I'll never own one (or any other German car) ever again. I will be going back to Japanese cars next time. Honda or Toyota.
I think a lot of people's opinions on cars continue to be based on anecdotal experiences.
I owned 2 VWs in my life, my first, a 1999 Golf was an amazing car. It felt solid and was super reliable right up until I T-boned someone who made an illegal turn and it got written off. I drove an Acura Integra for years after that and had just tonnes of quality issues where it was needing constant maintenance. As soon as I was able to, I bought another VW, a 2003 GTI which I drove with only 1 major repair (AC Compressor) in the 200,000kms I put to it (sold it to a friend at 330,000kms, it still hasn't needed repairs).
I went to a Mazda most recently, but I can't say anything about its reliability since I just bought it in December and only have 5,000kms on it so far.
But my experience, and those among my friends (I was part of a local VW enthusiast club) is that the cars are fine. But the kicker is you need to stay on top of your maintenance. If you skimp on the regular work, you end up paying for it in the end. I had to do various work on the car merely due to its age, but ultimately I loved the VW GTI. It was solid and reliable for me.
"But my experience, and those among my friends (I was part of a local VW enthusiast club) is that the cars are fine. But the kicker is you need to stay on top of your maintenance. If you skimp on the regular work, you end up paying for it in the end. "
This is the absolute truth about most modern cars. The main thing I look for now in a used car is parts availability and how well the car has been maintained.
you also have to ask "reliable compared to what?". my first car was a golf tdi. the only maintenance cost was the annual service. it never got close to 100k miles though because vw had to buy it back from me in the dieselgate settlement. statistically, I'm sure a toyota corolla is a much more reliable car, and I would have replaced it with one if that's all I cared about. but I've driven a few of those, and golfs are much more pleasant to spend time in, both behind the wheel and in the passenger seat.
there's an inherent tradeoff between performance, reliability, comfort, and price. once people find their preferred set of tradeoffs, they inevitably start making comments on the internet about how they don't understand why everyone doesn't buy their favorite brand.
Which Corolla did you drive as the new ones are pretty performant? I've got the 2 litre hybrid with 200nm torque from each engine and a combined bhp of 186 (could be ~305bhp and 400nm of torque if remapped as it has a 2 litre 200bhp petrol engine with 200nm of torque and a 105bhp electric engine with 195nm of torque but you'll lose linear acceleration and the fuel efficiency that Toyota equipped it with) with good mpg, MacPherson suspension at the front, and multi linked individual suspension at the back, lower centre of gravity and 52.5:47.5 weight distribution for better cornering (and cornering assist). All in all a nice car that is pretty performant and has good features.
last time I drove a corolla was several years ago, probably a 2017 model. it wasn't an awful car, but to me, it felt like a step down in driving dynamics over the tdi I was forced to get rid of. I believe that model made about the same peak power as my old tdi, but obviously at a much higher rpm. the steering felt vague, etc. I was also cross-shopping a gti (whose price was very depressed at the time), so it wasn't entirely a fair comparison.
2019 was the release of their first performance model. With the hybrid option there's no turbo lag (that gti's are notorious for) and the steering is very sharp in sports mode (can also create custom profiles to adapt steering, suspension and dampners to your own likings). The hybrid model is better compared against the gte which has very similar specs to the gti.
The gte when I tested seemed heavy and the brakes were spongy compared to the gti (regenerative brakes but the corollas aren't spongy like that) and it was evident when the electric motor switched off.
I didn't realize they now had a performance model, thanks for sharing. tbh I'm probably going rwd on my next car (very interested in the new brz/86), but I'll keep it in mind.
> Another problem is people don't know any better. It's not like the average person has owned cars from all the major brands for enough time for things to go wrong with them. Most people own only a few cars over their entire life. I think this is particularly true with brands like VW. People just don't know any better and think it's normal for a car to be a money pit.
This is odd coming from a person who is making a sweeping judgment based on owning one car. My family and I have owned mk4, mk5, and mk6 VWs. Never had to bring any of them in for anything other than standard maintenance. I have a newish BMW now and my folks have a lightly used Mercedes. So far everyone's happy there too.
VWs also have a pretty corporate, standard chassis of parts that's reused across almost all of VW's and much of Audi's cars. There should always be cheap parts available from third parties given the number of models interchanging the same parts under the hood. BMWs (and probably Mercedes too) definitely are more expensive to repair and maintain. IMO they tend to over-engineer, and that comes with both good and bad consequences.
I had a VW diesel. It was mostly a good car and got great mileage and then they paid me a great price to take it back. Probably my best car experience.
I'd consider a VW again, but I'm also kind of not interested in the models they have anytime soon; I replaced their wagon with a minivan and I'm not going back; the eBus is cute, but doesn't seem as useful. VW hasn't sold a pickup in a long time, and I don't expect to replace the low cost off-lease plugin hybrid with carpool stickers (VW had models with stickers, but nothing off-lease when I was shopping)
How much can you really taint a brand that just went successfully through 75 years of being the odd Nazi propaganda set piece that somehow nobody bothered to stop?
My bet is that it's an April's Fool with the twist that it's technically true. The name of the subsidiary that handles importing and the local factories just doesn't matter that much. They could rename that org to Ford Prefect and still go on selling cars under Volkswagen brand. It's a stunt to remind the public that they have BEV now and releasing slightly ahead of the date increases press coverage.
Their brand isn’t tainted in the US at all. You’ll see the Atlas everywhere - 160,000 sold in the last 2 years. That’s about half of Ford Explorer sales and about the same as Chevy Tahoe.
if you want a 3 row suv, the atlas is like 8-10k cheaper for the same amount of car than the others. and it doesn’t look bad. they needed something bigger than the toureg and it works
It's not tainted in Europe either. Sales are healthy and you see cars from the full range (Skoda, Seat, VW, Audi) aplenty. The overlap between car buyers and outrage bubble subscribers might be limited.
> Their brand is so tainted in the US that they're renaming it.
If they changed the name because of how people perceive them, they would have pick a name which is different than the current name, not the same name changing only one letter :)
They do it, because they want to get the valuation of a electric car company
It's also going to look really silly in 20 years when every auto manufacturer is doing electric vehicles. It'll be like Ford boasting that they run on unleaded gasoline.
Very few Americans would even consider a diesel passenger car. They just are not popular here ouside of a tiny niche. That's the irony of the emissions scandal -- there aren't enough passenger diesel cars on the road in the USA that it made any real difference anyway.
Americans don't care about diesel cars, and they for the most part didn't care about the emissions scandal.
Hard to believe that most Americans care much about the Dieselgate.
If they did, how do you explain the massive amount of SUVs and pickups carrying a single lonely driver that you can see everyday on America's streets and highways?
Other than a highly educated and modernized young urban minority, I would bet that most Americans are not that worried about emissions.
Pronunciation doesn't go like that but that is a big discussion for its own thread
Funny remark though while watching the F1 Netflix show, Schumacher said his name like SchumaKer , hence the Engish Pronunciation which goes to show that he adapted to the audience.
This is an issue I face from time to time when I'm (native German) in international calls and am talking about a German colleague ... I could pronounce properly German (while it's not too easy always for my mind to switch) or adapt to the way most others do (which often is English with an attempt to Germanize)
Luckily due to video conferencing software printing my name on my image, I don't have to do that for my name, as I had to do in phone conference times.
If I were trying to say the word 'Volkswagen' to a German person, I would do my best to pronounce it in a way they would understand.
As most of the time I ever say the word 'Volkswagen' out loud it's to my fellow English speakers, pronouncing it in the expected English way seems way less pretentious and effective.
> Pronunciation doesn't go like that but that is a big discussion for its own thread
Honestly it kinda does. I wince every time I hear emoji pronounced like いmoji (where the e rhymes with tea) instead of えmoji (where the e rhymes with meh), or pluralize Japanese nouns (“emojis” “sushis”). That said, this is a me problem. People are going to pronounce words in whatever way makes sense to them, where the emphasis goes, how it is pronounced, which vowels get emphasized or contracted together will change over time. There is a reason we don’t all sound like Elizabethan-era Englishmen when we speak English.
Even proper nouns such as names get adapted. How many different variations and pronunciations are there for the name “John” in Europe?
Mate, that’s why I stated forthright that this is a me problem and made no bones about it.
The “e” is from 「絵」and “moji” from 「文字」, transliterated as 「えもじ」, “e” + “moji” gets you “picture message”. It was a stroke of luck that it was similar enough to emoticon to neatly fit into our existing lexicon and be understood at a glance by an English speaker, at least the gist of it. A picture message is a little bit different than an emote icon if you think about it because there’s many more pictures which are not emotes per se, but can be used within a message alongside the emoting emoji. :)
The odd thing I notice is how English speakers always want to put a stress in the middle of Japanese names (naRUto). Japanese pitch accent is different in different dialects but the standard one is always at the start.
Ei sink ju wud bi surpreist if Ei wud tok to ju leik sis.
(I think you would be surprised, if I would talk to you like this.)
German pronounced English. :)
"ju" would be pronounced the same as "you" when speaking.
And "Ei" would be just the same as "I".
"wud" = would
"leik" = like
"tok" = talk
"bi" = be
All of the above would sound exactly the same when spoken.
It has been adopted to a degree. Just like you don't need to say Paris as "Pari" in an imitation of the French pronunciation (which would probably sound rather affected and twee in English if you did)
Anyway, let's hope they make reliable electric vehicles (as their combustion engine cars have traditionally been) otherwise people may render it as Faultswagen
Typically the capital city has an English name, which is often not just pronounced differently but also spelt differently from the local name. But for almost every other town English speakers use the same spelling, or a transcription of it, and aim for something like the local pronunciation. So for France, there's "Paris" and "Strasbourg" and that's about it. For Germany, there's "Berlin" and "Munich" and that's about it. But for some reason loads of Italian towns have their own English name: Venice, Milan, Naples, Florence, Turin, ...
Note as well that Turin and Milan are the names in the local
(regional) language.
Edit: And Munich is almost identical to Munichen which is the old form of München. Cologne could have been a better example (but it also comes directly from French, like Rome, Florence or Naples).
Standard French pronunciation of "Strasbourg" has an /r/ but no /g/. Of course it's a German name, really, but the Germans spell it a bit differently, and neither French nor Germans pronounce the second vowel in the way it is normally, I think, pronounced in English.
Good point about regional languages in Italy.
"Cologne" is a good example, though some people, including me, usually say "Köln" in English, though I wouldn't say "München", except in the name of the football team "Bayern München", which for some reason is usually called thus in English.
Do you mean then that English speakers write the name of every French city, including Paris and Strasbourg, as French speakers do and also pronounce them as French speakers would except for Paris and Strasbourg?
Edit: I had never thought about Strasbourg, really. I see now that the adoption of the French spelling in English is relatively recent and also Marseilles and Lyons used to be written differently.
Edit2: Dunkirk seems to be the main (only?) example where the French name is not used.
Whilst it's interesting to think about your points, they feel somewhat orthogonal to my point about the word being adopted into English (so it can have a pronunciation the way native speakers feel comfortable with, which can vary to a degree from the original unadopted word). Was it meant as some kind of rebuttal or merely an interesting observation? (eg with the Italian names)
It is respectful to at least attempt to pronounce names from different cultures. In many cases, I totally understand it is difficult. In those cases, an attempt is great. In this case, the syllable F exists in Latin and I don't see why it.
I must say, I have seen many many times a lack of interest to even attempt to pronounce of even write a name properly. One example which comes to my mind is Ghandi instead of Gandhi.
To re-iterate my point, it's not about 'respect' (respect for whom, exactly and why?) it's about communication.
If I were trying to say the word 'Volkswagen' to a German speaking person, I would do my best to pronounce it in a way they would understand.
As most of the time I ever say the word 'Volkswagen' out loud it's to my fellow English speakers, pronouncing it in the expected English way seems way less pretentious and way more effective.
I'm going to avoid being snarky and point out this is merely the way you taught it. There is not hard and fast rule that says you have to do it this way.
Also, Vs are actually pretty consistent in English. Can't even think of a word with a V where the V doesn't sound like a V.
What's interesting here is that the exception proves the rule.
V is actually the only letter in English that is never silent.
Most other letters also have various possible renderings into pronunciation, especially the vowels—"i" for instance can end up being at least 5 different vowel sounds and also some consonant sounds.
So yes. As I pointed out, English is extremely irregular orthographically, in stark contrast to languages like German, French, or Italian, all of which have extremely reliable and simple pronunciation rules.
This is an unreasonable expectation. People should try but if they don't, there is no malice here.
There are many languages around the world and it is impossible to remember every nuance of how to pronounce things. Ghandi is common pronounciation even in Germany. The Japanese might pronounce it something else.
> Ghandi is common pronounciation even in Germany.
I don't think it is an unreasonable expectation to write the word "Gandhi" as "Gandhi". That's how he wrote the name, that's how he signed it and that's the actual spelling. I can understand the difficulty in pronunciation but getting the name right while typing it out is unforgivable in this century.
Also, learning to forgive is a rare virtue these days. Entitlement and expection creates conflict. Learn to forgive others and you'll have a better time with everyone else. No one who even spells it as Ghandi means any malice or offense. So, it is a matter of technicality. Let go.
I agree - learning to forgive is rare virtue. For example, I think we should also "learn to forgive" to people who point out that Gandhi is the right spelling. It's not meant as many malice of offence. So, it is a matter of technicality. Let go.
But for a brand definitely not. It's the job of the brand creators to make sure that the name can be read and pronounced in the various target markets.
> In many cases, it is unnecessary and only makes the speaker look foolish.
Comedic skits touch on this [1][2] and though a caricature, I think they capture the gist of how it's perceived when attempted.
I think it stems from a desire for "cultural wokeness" which is a good thing and has its place, but as you say when communication is the goal, speak the language of the receiver.
In practice, if a name has a common pronunciation within English, you show respect by using that pronunciation when speaking to native English speakers.
Otherwise you just cause confusion. The adapted names have their own history.
If you insist on saying København and not Copenhagen, you get to have a little pretentious discussion explaining what you meant to every person you talk to. Ditto for Folks-vagen.
> In practice, if a name has a common pronunciation within English, you show respect by using that pronunciation when speaking to native English speakers.
Here's how I read this. "We as an English speaking group will continue to not make an attempt to pronounce it right even if we can. Once we don't we will have a common pronunciation that doesn't fit the original one. Once it becomes common, we will get offended if it is not pronounced in the common way that we as a group chose to actively ignore in the first place. If the original speakers insist, we will call them pretentious."
> If the original speakers insist, we will call them pretentious."
Way to overreach way beyond what I originally said. If I was speaking to someone I knew was Dutch, of course I would (try to) say "København." Then they'd probably laugh at me and we'd agree to call it Copenhagen. :P
Or if I want to read your view in the worst possible way-- similar to how you've read mine-- "People who use the established pronunciation of a loanword or place in their native tongue are wrong. We should always seek to find where we are using words of foreign origin and correct them to be perfectly pronounced in their original tongue, even when this causes confusion and isn't helpful to people from the original place. Japanese gairaigo should be abolished and they should just say those words in the correct original English (or German or French).
And those damn Frenchmen should stop calling the place I live Californie dans les Etats Unis, which is nothing like how I say it, and should stop calling me 'Michel' which sounds a whole lot like the female version of my name"
I'd like to take a stock of how this conversation went.
1.0 (me) : "It is respectful to attempt pronunciation if
possible".
1.1 (you) : "There is a common English pronunciation. It's pretentious if you don't use the common pronunciation. Show respect to the English speaker!"
1.2 (me) : "The common pronunciation exists because of the lack of attempt in the first place. It's not pretentious. "
1.3 (you) : "It is established, we should use common pronunciation"
You turned the initial conversation about making an attempt to be kind and respectful towards non-English speakers into something else. Almost feels like victim blaming to me. Once again, to be clear - we should make an attempt. Just because there's an established pronunciation (or spelling) doesn't mean it is right. Overtime, established pronunciation can move towards the original pronunciation. The right pronunciation is what the speaker wants to have. You, me or the English society don't have any say in it. It doesn't matter if it is established or not. Going the extra mile in kindness helps; calling others pretentious because they ask you to empathise doesn't.
> you show respect by using that pronunciation when speaking TO NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS.
or
> If I was speaking to someone I knew was Dutch, of course I would (try to) say "København."
Because what you're accusing me of-- and the words you're putting in my mouth "There is a common English pronunciation. It's pretentious if you don't use the common pronunciation. Show respect to the English speaker!"-- make no sense in that context.
German is full of exonyms. All languages are full of exonyms and weird pronunciations of foreign words. It is OK.
I'm not sure if this is a joke I don't get but speaking about weird cultural mix-ups: Copenhagen is not related to the Netherlands. I'm actually glad that people are getting EU states all mixed up but we're not there yet, guys ;)
I know persons who are doing this in times. A example is a person I am knowing who say "Mexico" with Spanish accent. A first problem is this person is not a speaker of Spanish and so it is bothering on me for bad pronounsing and no interests in improvement and not in learning more Spanish. A second problem is it disruptes conversation when a person is slipping into different accent without reasoning. A third problem is it takes persons I am knowing who are not speaker of Spanish extra time for to process these remarks. I am not seeing any good reason. There exists also a difference between nation name, is fixed, and brand, for which the job is make friendly for a consumer.
Yah. It can also sometimes be difficult to distinguish between an attempt to use the native pronunciation out of respect vs. mockery. I know people that if I heard them saying "Me-hi-co" it would almost certainly be to exaggerate foreignness and to be racist.
I found a YT video saying it's "wo er wo". Which suggests they have a hard time pronouncing it, which shouldn't come as a surprise given how different their phonemes are.
Approximating it, because you can't pronounce it is one thing. Not giving a shit, even though you do have the same word (i.e. folk) is another one.
The worst part of English orthography is adopting the writing conventions of literally every other language in the world and then expecting people to pronounce the words "correctly." If you want English speakers to pronounce something a certain way, it should be written use our spelling system. There's no point in shaming people for not knowing literally every language. But that's basically the system we have now.
That "correctly" needs an extra pair of scare quotes. The spelling bee competition is, essentially, the "guess the mispronounced foreign word" competition. Pejerrey? "Pay-ray". Lol.
This is an interesting observation. As a non-native speaker I was surprised by how many German expressions are used in English (with the correct German spelling). Even when there is a perfect (or near perfect) English equivalent.
However, this is pretty different as VW is a brand name so you don't have much liberty in how you write it.
Toyota was toyoda in Japanese, but they changed the spelling to look better in English. It can be done. And why not? They change the names of cars all the time. Why not the brands too?
Because brands have a value. And probably VW doesn't really care that much if some people call them wolkswagen instead of folkswagen (even if they could pronounce the latter).
Also, I don't think FW would look better than VW ;). And well, Toyota didn't change their name to look better in English (or rather, written with the Latin alphabet). At least not according to wikipedia. Quite the contrary, it was about how it was written in Japanse:
"Vehicles were originally sold under the name "Toyoda" (トヨダ), from the family name of the company's founder, Kiichirō Toyoda.
[...]
In September 1936, the company ran a public competition to design a new logo. Of 27,000 entries, the winning entry was the three Japanese katakana letters for "Toyoda" in a circle. However, Rizaburo Toyoda, who had married into the family and was not born with that name, preferred "Toyota" (トヨタ) because it took eight brush strokes (a lucky number) to write in Japanese, was visually simpler (leaving off the diacritic at the end), and with a voiceless consonant instead of a voiced one (voiced consonants are considered to have a "murky" or "muddy" sound compared to voiceless consonants, which are "clear").
Since toyoda literally means "fertile rice paddies", changing the name also prevented the company from being associated with old-fashioned farming. The newly formed word was trademarked and the company was registered in August 1937 as the Toyota Motor Company.[31][32][33]"
Does it bother you when Germans say "zis"? German has no "th" sound, so "zis" is what they start with before they practice. It's similarly grating to Germans to hear their language mispronounced by others.
And yet, English has an "f" sound. German has an extremely consistent spelling and essentially all "v"s are pronounced as "f". We share (the latin) alphabet, and English has absolutely no authority, given how inconsistent it is.
Given that, I will say the voiced "V" when speaking English and the unvoiced, as necessary, speaking German.
'bother' me? No, not at all, the sounds are close enough I get the meaning, mostly from context.
I am not sure why there should be an emotional factor here, as expecting everybody to conform to some pronunciation ideal they have no experience with is arrogant, to say the least.
Well you claimed that Americans are pronouncing it "perfectly correctly," and Germans might disagree. It's a German word which has been Americanized. The company mostly doesn't care, but there is a single correct pronunciation in their native language. Insisting you are correct mispronouncing a foreign word because the letters look a certain way is just hubris.
> there is a single correct pronunciation in their native language
But see, that's the point. We're not speaking German when we use a borrowed word in English. It's no longer a purely German word, despite its origins, just as "xylophone" isn't a mispronounced Greek word, nor "Handy" a misused and miscapitalized English word.
I would follow your logic if the english pronunciation of the word Volkswagen was actually phonetically consistent. But while "Volks" is pronounced in an english way, isn't the word "wagen" pronounced in a weird German way?
"Wagen" on its own would probably be pronounced like way-gen, if my english intuition is not fooling me. Instead it is pronounced like wuh-gen.
I don't really care about this either way but if you are bothered by something the weird mixture is.. a bit annoying.
Accent is an inevitable part of second language speakers. I've lived in US most of my life, but English is not my native language and I started learning it around the age of 5 and at the age of 25 after living here more than 20 years, I still have a distinct accent I can't get rid of. It's just the way things are, human brain seems to learn pronunciation differently when we're a child.
This same goes for English speakers too. I know how Volkswagen is supposed to be pronounced (I know some German) but that's not the way English speakers would say it.
I don't think there is anything to be bothered by any of this. This just adds to our diversity.
Vice versa, it's interesting to me why German speakers tend to approximate the pronunciation of e.g. "think" as "sink", rather than "fink" or "vink". There's even some British accents where it sounds more like "fink". English is hard :D
It just bothers the historical linguistics nerd in me that all the other Germanic languages (other than Icelandic) lost the beautiful Thorn and Edh sounds consonants :-)
I've always found it interesting that the German approximation is "z" here when it could be "t" or "d", since that is what "th" sounds turned into in Old Franconian.
No one cares what Germans think about people abusing their language. I personally have zero issues with accents or mispronunciations here and there by non-native speakers. That smells of "fear of the other" to me and taking easy potshots at people I consider my full equal isn't cool. If I feel a little "anger" then that's a fallacy in me not in their pronunciation. As long as I can understand we're good otherwise we'll work it out someway or other.
> It's similarly grating to Germans to hear their language mispronounced by others.
Americans are generally very tolerant and patient with non-native speakers butchering proper english. So no, it's not nearly as grating to an American to hear people mispronounce english words than it might be for Germans.
Sorry, but just noticed you were using an English-only term to describe the homeland of someone who doesn't live in your country. The correct term is Deutschland.
Nope. It's not about using similar phonemes instead of the actual ones a German would use. It's trying to pronounce the wrong word/name. The name doesn't start with a V but with an F. It's just written with a V. It's nothing Americans can't pronounce.
If you argued that you can't pronounce 'Wagen' as the Germans do ("'vaːɡn̩", according to Wikipedia), that would be a different thing. But we're not talking about that.
Indeed, the word, i.e. folk, you are not willing to pronounce happen to exist in English as well and can mean the same (or very similar) thing. "Volk" (i.e. "wolk") OTOH doesn't mean anything in either languages. (It does mean wolf in Russian, though ;) )
People's car or you could say "Folk's Wagon" (or maybe "Folks' Wagon"). Yeah, weird choice of words and won't exactly sound like it was German but close enough, kind of meaningful and nothing you couldn't pronounce. Just remember to write is as VolksWagen.
OK, so Germans are now free to call all American "Piters" Peter with two actual e's, and you will staunchly defend their claims that this is the correct pronunciation?
Or should we perhaps stick with the old rule that names are correctly pronounced as their owner wants them pronounced...?
They most certainly did not want Americans pronouncing it in German when they came to the US after WWII. Hell, they called them Victory Wagon at first.
Some Americans have pronounced it "Voltswagen", not sure why.
I wonder if it would be less confusing to Germans if we used "Fow Vay" to pronounce the abbreviation. Instead of "Vee Double-You." I'm not being sarcastic, but I don't think a change to the correct pronunciation is likely.
Do you actually pronounce it like "double-you" (with 3 syllables) in that context?
I'm a native speaker from the US South, and hadn't realized this until I read your comment. For me, the "W" always gets shortened to "dub-you" in AWS (or "dubya" if I'm not being picky about it). Standalone, I might pronounce "W" more like "dub-a-you if I'm emphasizing it, but not usually.
Anyhow, thanks for pointing this out. I will also now forever think that "double-you" is ridiculous.
Nearly, but unless I'm speaking with family members / other people with thick southern accent, I try to keep the "u" sound present - though it's more like the French "u" than the "you" sound. So typically it sounds like 'ay-dub-yuez", with a short pause between the "yu" and "ez". It's the sound that would be in between "Suez" (like the canal) and "swez". Replacing the "yu" sound with the "ya", does indeed end up sounding like slightly elongated "yes".
I’m a native speaker from the north and west US and it’s definitely “double-u”. A double-u S. In my experience only Southerners shorten it the way you describe.
No kidding! Do you even pronounce the "l" sound in "double" (and if so, dub-el or dub-ull or something else)?
It's always fascinating to be reminded that I'm still basically ear-blind to certain linguistic patterns (the "pen/pin" merger being one I still can't even hear as different, let alone say). For a long time, I falsely assumed that because I grew up watching the same TV shows as the rest of the country, and because I didn't speak with the same accent as my family members, that I didn't have an accent at all. Turns out I do - I just can't hear it.
Everyone I’ve been around says “dub-ull”. I moved from Michigan to Utah as an adult and pen/pin can be very close here, which I find annoying because I don’t want my kids to pick up the Utah accent... but of course they have.
I took Linguistics in college and my professor could tell where people were from in the US within a couple hundred miles by their accent. Anyone who thinks they don’t have an accent absolutely does. Except maybe Nebraskans — I read somewhere that they have the most neutral, “correct” American accent, though I don’t think it was a scientific source.
Make that 3. I'm not going to go out and buy their car, but I don't see how this is ridiculous in any way. 50 years from now, people may look back and think "yes, that was the moment that really marked their switch to EVs"
> The proximity of the name change to April Fool’s Day initially raised suspicions that it was just a joke. But VW insists that it’s a real thing, so here we are.
> "The company was apparently planning to make the announcement at the end of April but accidentally published a press release about the name change early Monday afternoon, which was first spotted by CNBC before it was taken down. The proximity of the name change to April Fool’s Day initially raised suspicions that it was just a joke. But VW insists that it’s a real thing, so here we are."
Sounds to me like a publicity stunt -- they "accidentally published" a press release a month early? Sorry, that doesn't happen.
Seems like trying to generate buzz on social media, then they'll quietly "decide" not to change the name after all, but people associating VW with electric cars more so -- mission accomplished.
Huh, why does the name change have to be announced 2-3 days before in your world? They would need to send new stationery and signage to dealers, so the chatter would start in the coming week or 2 anyway... Why not pre-empt that with a press release.
No, but I find it very hard to believe that a gigantic company had a press release finalized and sitting in a CMS a month in advance, just waiting for time to pass.
(Source: have worked in 3 large public companies and seen how these things come down to the wire with approvals from PR, Marketing, IR, Legal, Country Leadership, Corporate, etc...)
I think it's likely they're feeling that their EV product isn't compelling enough to stand out on its own, so they need to do something ridiculous to capture attention and hopefully gain market share in the EV market.
But Voltswaken, honstely if that isn't a joke it's sad. It is basically guaranteed to be a typo crisis. I can just say have fun, to all the banks and other companies doing business with it.
.com for example was only reserved today and is using a domain parking service. Things like this would have been prepared if it was a serious rebranding.
How so? The Taycan (and eTron GT) is an excellent car; the ID4 is receiving okay reviews despite choosing a different space in the compromise space than other makers, and they have a large slate of upcoming cars that seem decent to great. I think that within 5 years, VW AG will be selling more electric cars than Tesla.
If memory services, that marque is owned by General Motors and the modern version of the Speedwagon are GMC trucks. Would be catchy to actually release a new vehicle with the Speedwagon model name.
The same thought crossed my mind. Then I thought - could they have done this now to gauge feedback, stick with it if it works, and write it off as an April fools joke if there's too much backlash? That feels like the next level of chess here :)
(Yes this comment with be dead because dang is a sniveling, right-wing bitch)
Look at these hilariously stupid comments. During the same period while TSLA is languishing, VW has risen 60%+. They've gone all in on electric cars, and are committing to it.
Remember how i said "unrealistic" and not "lower"? WLTP is a rather unrealistic way to determine fuel consumption or energy usage on cars. If you look at sites which collect fuel usage for cars you often times see fuel usages considerably higher than what WLTP defines. Especially if it's a PHEV since WLTP expects a full battery all the time. Under 2L/100km for a 2 ton SUV is not realistic by any stretch of the imagination. The numbers on https://www.spritmonitor.de/ for example seem to allign more with EPA in my experience.
> Especially if it's a PHEV since WLTP expects a full battery all the time. Under 2L/100km for a 2 ton SUV is not realistic by any stretch of the imagination. The numbers on https://www.spritmonitor.de/ for example seem to allign more with EPA in my experience.
There's a question as to what you're trying to model; if you're looking at daily usage then relatively short distances from fully charged are probably relatively representative of a lot of usage (the mean and median distances driven on a daily basis are relatively short distances!).
In reality, I suspect what would be useful is to have a further cycle based on a 100km journey largely on a motorway, as a long-distance extra-urban cycle?
Very good question: WLTP has just a number for you.
PHEVs may not be a good idea depending on your driving style. There should be more discussion about what type of engine is the correct one for you before buying. Do you drive enough motorway regularly that a diesel would make sense? Do you drive shorter distances but you cannot charge? Can you charge but you sometimes need more range? Maybe even a PHEV diesel would make sense, but that is a type of vehicle that was rare and is now even rarer.
Technology was improved a lot over the last decades. If you'd record the WLTP tests you could maybe build a system which would accurately calculate your fuel usage for your type of driving and define if a PHEV or a diesel would make any sense for you.
So your criticism is actually in the context of ICE and PHEVs - I assumed you meant pure EVs since that what this thread seemed to be about, and for those autonomy numbers seem to be strictly lower, hence my confusion why WLTP would be more doctored in this regard than NECD.
I have looked at the Model 3 and Hyundai Ioniq and even there the energy usage seems to be rather off. 15 kWh/100km WLTP vs 19 kWh/100km according to spritmonitor on the Model 3. 11 vs 14 with the Ioniq.
So yeah, it seems like WLTP is not really accurate for EVs either.
From what I have seen VW had a sort of genuine reckoning with the whole diesel issue. They have reinvented themselves, shed cruft, cut all fuel vehicle development and completely devoted themselves to an electric future (vehicles, batteries, chargers). They have turned things around wholesale and are now producing amazing, relatively affordable electric vehicles (their new id.4 SUV will debut in the US for just a little more than a tricked out Honda CR-V, once you factor in the federal tax credit).
I was excited by Tesla but they remained expensive. Now feel like VW will have a chance to bring electric vehicles to a much larger group of people... a group I fit into and I can't wait.
It's going to take a lot more than going completely EV for me to for me to believe they have changed. Of course they went to EVs, it's the market. Of course they changed course, they were dealing with one of their worst scandals of all time. Of course they say they've changed, but how can we really trust them anymore?
If they ran a campaign of donating to environmental protection charities, carbon capture, or some other means of protecting the planet, with a value equal to that of the money of the revenue of their diesel cheating vehicles sales, I would say they have changed.
Until then, I still think they are doing what they do for the sake of profit.
I would, but also, if they can rectify the damage they have done, then it becomes easier to forgive. I understand all companies seek profit and need to. I'm not against that, but I am against doing it illegally while harming our health and environment.
A full blown social media crucifixion and cancellation to appease the frothing masses. Then [user] can reap the feel good vibes of knowing that even though they missed out on the Summer of Love, they were there when VW got served.
Good grief, no one believes in contrition anymore. No one even believes in the past or the future. They were always this way, they're this way now, and they always will be! There are no mistakes, only lapses that expose your "true" eternal character.
Despite all the focus on Tesla, companies that makes a minimal, good and inexpensive electric car/truck will win big as far as I'm concerned. Bonus points for an iconic look.
Both of those are hard. A big powerful sedan is the best case for electric. You get the big power for free, and you don't end up that heavier or more expensive than a powerful gasoline drivetrain.
Small low power cars and trucks that need to be able to tow are the worst case. Giving up the big power doesn't really save you any mass or cost, and trucks need a bigger gas "tank". But perhaps if the tabless and structural battery thing works out, it will get us to both of those cases.
Base model ID.4 SUV for approximately $33,000 (price taking US government tax break into account. $39,995-$7,500) is getting very close to that. A mid-20's priced EV would be amazing but low 30's is starting to get within range of a lot of people (and it ends up being nearly $10,000 less than nearest competitor Tesla's Model Y... best price I could find was $41,290... which sadly no longer qualifies for the same tax break. If it did I would probably say the Tesla is a better deal).
So can I now go into a VW / Audi dealer in North America and buy an EV off a lot?
Because every time I look (and I've looked constantly since I traded my Jetta TDI for cash in dieselgate) I still can't. And they are issuing a new press release every few months promising mass production EVs next year.
Back in 2017/2018 when this all went down they actually removed all electrified cars from their lineup. Stopped making new Audi A3 e-Trons, removed the hybrid Jetta from their lineup, and only made about 500 outdated (several year old design) eGolfs with a small battery for all of the Canadian market with a year and a half waiting list to get in one. All the while trumpeting how committed they were to electrification and how this was the future. So, I bought a GM EV instead.
And, yep, I just went to the local VW dealer's website and they have only one car with an electric motor in it, the 2019 eGolf with a 35kWh battery. That's it and I know exactly how it would go down if I were to call the dealer and ask to test drive one.
And last I looked the id.3 isn't coming to North America and the id.4 is a "maybe next year" kind of deal and the electric van they've been promising since about 2015 is now projected for 2023 when I recall in previous press releases talk about it coming out several years ago.
I'm sorry, they're greenwashing, they're desperate, and they're trying to milk as much out of the ICE while they can while playing a PR game. People trash GM's EV efforts as "compliance cars" but at least I can actually buy a Bolt.
> And last I looked the id.3 isn't coming to North America and the id.4 is a "maybe next year" kind of deal and the electric van they've been promising since about 2015 is now projected for 2023 when I recall in previous press releases talk about it coming out several years ago.
This is false, the ID4 is already being sold in US. ID3 is in fact not going to US.
What I've read is: very limited quantities for 2021. At least for us here in Canadia. I've seen this enough with VW to know that that means a few hundred almost all sent to Quebec (which has California-like EV quotas while other provinces don't).
Well to be honest the cheating was pretty much only done so the cars wouldn't be unbearably slow. And every other european car manufacturer basically did the same. Once the targets become impossible to reach for everyone, you start cheating.
Yep, you have bureaucrats at the EPA pulling numbers out of their asses that become impossible to meet and still have a car that people would want or can afford. So they find a way to meet the "letter of the law" and pass the tests. Sort of like what CPAs do when they prepare your tax return.
That isn't true. It was done so they didn't have to install NOx cleaning technologies. Modern US based diesels have SCR, and EGR systems that help remove NOx and particulates from the exhaust (or prevent it from forming). However, they add thousands to the cost and complexity.
SCR systems are very expensive in modern VWs as well. Especially to repair. With the additional pressure on the engine because of restrictive exhausts engines also don't last as long. EGR systems on diesels are known to gunk up. VW used SCR systems since 2009 if you didn't know.
This is what happens in a meeting when someone says "there are no bad ideas". This is the sort of three beer spitballing that normally you come up with as a gag and yet they're committing to it, and whilst it's US only the likelihood is they'll do some aggressive product placement and get some global recognition around it.
I felt this way when Apple removed ‘Computer’ from their name. Years later we see that it wasn’t just a name change but alignment to their company strategy.
I’m cautiously optimistic that Volkswagen is signaling a similar change in their mission and leadership’s intent to change.
If WV's point is that they are emphasizing their they make electrical cars, and the assumption is that those are better for the environment than all other cars, then it's fair to question that assumption. If 90%+ of our power came from zero-carbon sources like nuclear then it would be a fair point but we're a LONG way from that.
Gasoline will always come from dead dinosaurs and plants but electricity doesn't come from 100% coal. And the ratio dropping changing fast as other forms get more inexpensive.
Gasoline also comes from corn or anything else that can be distilled to ethanol. For greater calorific efficiency we should be looking to biodiesel as the environmental side effects are as minimal, you get more miles per gallon (km per liter), and the production of biodiesel via algae can happen efficiently in places not currently used for livestock grazing or growing crops.
Assuming this is a good faith question, the pollution generated by ICE cars driving 1+ metre away from me pollutes the air I breathe in a much more concentrated way than the pollution generated by a power plant 10+ miles away.
Air pollution in cities is a real problem that nobody really talks about because there's no easy solutions.
I don't drive an EV, because it's not practical / affordable for me yet. I hope this changes soon.
Besides the fact that a coal-burning plant is more efficient, one difference is a cleaner city. Another difference is that it can be charged from other sources, e.g. solar at home. Another difference is that the grid is typically a mix, not just coal. And another difference is that the battery is basically an abstraction which abstracts away the power supply so this becomes a different (easier) problem to fix.
If you want to know there’s plenty of reliable sources like the doe (and if you want confirmation bias rather than facts, there’s plenty of unreliable sources)
Last time someone made a comment like yours, I actually tried googling and there’s a doe site that actually tells you the carbon emissions by state for an ev, hybrid or normal gas car given that states specific energy sources.
Even W Virginia, the worst state I could find, having about 90% coal, gives much lower emissions for an ev than a gas car. And that’s with the current mix. It’s only getting better from here. And that’s the worst state!
In dirty electricity regions, driving on electricity creates similar climate pollution to gasoline.
Regions that burn mostly coal and natural gas to generate electricity create high levels of climate pollution for each kWh. In Alberta, for example, a Plug-In Prius will cause a similar amount of climate pollution driving on gasoline as it does driving on Alberta's electricity.
Some electric car owners have worked around this problem by putting up their own solar panels, or by purchasing cleaner electricity directly from their utility.
The Voltswagen text badge will be on EVs only, but the gas cars will still be sold through the Voltswagen US branding. The gas cars will keep the classic VW logo.
631 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 351 ms ] threadTheir brand is so tainted in the US that they're renaming it.
I imagine it's going to be the only place they'll do it.
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/vw-being-rebrand...
I've got a diesel VW Jetta. It has been nothing but a money pit. I'm in the US for reference.
I had an S5 with dash lighting issues, console control issues, premature clutch failure (to be fair the previous owner could have roasted it), a nearly new SQ5 with a failed cabin blower fan and more console issues. My sister-in-law had a Jetta with aggregate months in the shop for variety of engine management and other electronics issues. My nephew had a CC that broke a seal and the resulting oil leak wasn't detected by the oil pressure sensor and he seized the engine (also had a fuel pump failure). These are the only VWs in the extended family.
Now I have an F150 with way too many electronics in it for a pickup truck...fingers crossed.
I think the reputation problem is limited to the US.
In general, VW has a good, somewhat inflated reputation in Germany + parts of EU. In my experience, the cars are quite solid and reliable, albeit considered a bit boring. But you can also buy a Seat or Skoda which is basically the same car with a different exterior but cheaper...
Maybe the issue is that they are different cars in the US. VW didn't have a Jetta in Germany for years. I owned a Golf MK3 convertible in the US, and I felt it was of lesser quality than similar VWs for the European market.
My understanding was that this performance came at the expense of more pollution, which is what the gov is regulating?
That's exactly the problem with the public's understanding of pollution [1]. If they can't see people dying in front of their eyes, they won't believe it...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/09/fossil-f...
Another problem is people don't know any better. It's not like the average person has owned cars from all the major brands for enough time for things to go wrong with them. Most people own only a few cars over their entire life. I think this is particularly true with brands like VW. People just don't know any better and think it's normal for a car to be a money pit.
Cars are a strange thing. Very quickly after getting a car it becomes an essential part of life. When the bill comes through to repair whatever has gone wrong, there's no choice but to pay it. You can't just choose to not pay because it's too expensive. People take their car to the garage where it's essentially held captive until they pay the ransom.
I own a VW myself but I'll never own one (or any other German car) ever again. I will be going back to Japanese cars next time. Honda or Toyota.
I owned 2 VWs in my life, my first, a 1999 Golf was an amazing car. It felt solid and was super reliable right up until I T-boned someone who made an illegal turn and it got written off. I drove an Acura Integra for years after that and had just tonnes of quality issues where it was needing constant maintenance. As soon as I was able to, I bought another VW, a 2003 GTI which I drove with only 1 major repair (AC Compressor) in the 200,000kms I put to it (sold it to a friend at 330,000kms, it still hasn't needed repairs).
I went to a Mazda most recently, but I can't say anything about its reliability since I just bought it in December and only have 5,000kms on it so far.
But my experience, and those among my friends (I was part of a local VW enthusiast club) is that the cars are fine. But the kicker is you need to stay on top of your maintenance. If you skimp on the regular work, you end up paying for it in the end. I had to do various work on the car merely due to its age, but ultimately I loved the VW GTI. It was solid and reliable for me.
This is the absolute truth about most modern cars. The main thing I look for now in a used car is parts availability and how well the car has been maintained.
there's an inherent tradeoff between performance, reliability, comfort, and price. once people find their preferred set of tradeoffs, they inevitably start making comments on the internet about how they don't understand why everyone doesn't buy their favorite brand.
The gte when I tested seemed heavy and the brakes were spongy compared to the gti (regenerative brakes but the corollas aren't spongy like that) and it was evident when the electric motor switched off.
This is odd coming from a person who is making a sweeping judgment based on owning one car. My family and I have owned mk4, mk5, and mk6 VWs. Never had to bring any of them in for anything other than standard maintenance. I have a newish BMW now and my folks have a lightly used Mercedes. So far everyone's happy there too.
VWs also have a pretty corporate, standard chassis of parts that's reused across almost all of VW's and much of Audi's cars. There should always be cheap parts available from third parties given the number of models interchanging the same parts under the hood. BMWs (and probably Mercedes too) definitely are more expensive to repair and maintain. IMO they tend to over-engineer, and that comes with both good and bad consequences.
I'd consider a VW again, but I'm also kind of not interested in the models they have anytime soon; I replaced their wagon with a minivan and I'm not going back; the eBus is cute, but doesn't seem as useful. VW hasn't sold a pickup in a long time, and I don't expect to replace the low cost off-lease plugin hybrid with carpool stickers (VW had models with stickers, but nothing off-lease when I was shopping)
German cars have a bad rap in the US for being unreliable and expensive to fix.
Which is totally accurate...
My bet is that it's an April's Fool with the twist that it's technically true. The name of the subsidiary that handles importing and the local factories just doesn't matter that much. They could rename that org to Ford Prefect and still go on selling cars under Volkswagen brand. It's a stunt to remind the public that they have BEV now and releasing slightly ahead of the date increases press coverage.
If they changed the name because of how people perceive them, they would have pick a name which is different than the current name, not the same name changing only one letter :)
They do it, because they want to get the valuation of a electric car company
I don't think most Americans know about or remember the emissions scandal.
That said, there's plenty of precedent for a product being so tainted that it got renamed.
Comcast becoming Xfinity comes to mind.
Americans don't care about diesel cars, and they for the most part didn't care about the emissions scandal.
Edit: This German apologizes for an attempt at a humorous / sarcastic comment and will revert to work-machine state at once. Beep boop.
Funny remark though while watching the F1 Netflix show, Schumacher said his name like SchumaKer , hence the Engish Pronunciation which goes to show that he adapted to the audience.
Luckily due to video conferencing software printing my name on my image, I don't have to do that for my name, as I had to do in phone conference times.
As most of the time I ever say the word 'Volkswagen' out loud it's to my fellow English speakers, pronouncing it in the expected English way seems way less pretentious and effective.
Honestly it kinda does. I wince every time I hear emoji pronounced like いmoji (where the e rhymes with tea) instead of えmoji (where the e rhymes with meh), or pluralize Japanese nouns (“emojis” “sushis”). That said, this is a me problem. People are going to pronounce words in whatever way makes sense to them, where the emphasis goes, how it is pronounced, which vowels get emphasized or contracted together will change over time. There is a reason we don’t all sound like Elizabethan-era Englishmen when we speak English.
Even proper nouns such as names get adapted. How many different variations and pronunciations are there for the name “John” in Europe?
I understand your pain(and also have very similar pain when English words were put into katakana) but for that example, it does make sense as for native English speakers, my assumption was that the emo- part of the word came from emote. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emote
The “e” is from 「絵」and “moji” from 「文字」, transliterated as 「えもじ」, “e” + “moji” gets you “picture message”. It was a stroke of luck that it was similar enough to emoticon to neatly fit into our existing lexicon and be understood at a glance by an English speaker, at least the gist of it. A picture message is a little bit different than an emote icon if you think about it because there’s many more pictures which are not emotes per se, but can be used within a message alongside the emoting emoji. :)
"ju" would be pronounced the same as "you" when speaking. And "Ei" would be just the same as "I". "wud" = would "leik" = like "tok" = talk "bi" = be All of the above would sound exactly the same when spoken.
Anyway, let's hope they make reliable electric vehicles (as their combustion engine cars have traditionally been) otherwise people may render it as Faultswagen
https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results/?doma...
Note as well that Turin and Milan are the names in the local (regional) language.
Edit: And Munich is almost identical to Munichen which is the old form of München. Cologne could have been a better example (but it also comes directly from French, like Rome, Florence or Naples).
Good point about regional languages in Italy.
"Cologne" is a good example, though some people, including me, usually say "Köln" in English, though I wouldn't say "München", except in the name of the football team "Bayern München", which for some reason is usually called thus in English.
Edit: I had never thought about Strasbourg, really. I see now that the adoption of the French spelling in English is relatively recent and also Marseilles and Lyons used to be written differently.
Edit2: Dunkirk seems to be the main (only?) example where the French name is not used.
I must say, I have seen many many times a lack of interest to even attempt to pronounce of even write a name properly. One example which comes to my mind is Ghandi instead of Gandhi.
If I were trying to say the word 'Volkswagen' to a German speaking person, I would do my best to pronounce it in a way they would understand. As most of the time I ever say the word 'Volkswagen' out loud it's to my fellow English speakers, pronouncing it in the expected English way seems way less pretentious and way more effective.
Or you could help do your part in normalizing pronouncing things correctly instead of perpetuating the perception that it's somehow "pretentious".
Expecting non-German people to speak with German pronunciation is plain arrogant.
Also, no, English is not very reliable when it comes to spelling vs. pronunciation.
(Former diction teacher, here.)
Also, Vs are actually pretty consistent in English. Can't even think of a word with a V where the V doesn't sound like a V.
V is actually the only letter in English that is never silent.
Most other letters also have various possible renderings into pronunciation, especially the vowels—"i" for instance can end up being at least 5 different vowel sounds and also some consonant sounds.
So yes. As I pointed out, English is extremely irregular orthographically, in stark contrast to languages like German, French, or Italian, all of which have extremely reliable and simple pronunciation rules.
There are many languages around the world and it is impossible to remember every nuance of how to pronounce things. Ghandi is common pronounciation even in Germany. The Japanese might pronounce it something else.
I don't think it is an unreasonable expectation to write the word "Gandhi" as "Gandhi". That's how he wrote the name, that's how he signed it and that's the actual spelling. I can understand the difficulty in pronunciation but getting the name right while typing it out is unforgivable in this century.
Also, learning to forgive is a rare virtue these days. Entitlement and expection creates conflict. Learn to forgive others and you'll have a better time with everyone else. No one who even spells it as Ghandi means any malice or offense. So, it is a matter of technicality. Let go.
But for a brand definitely not. It's the job of the brand creators to make sure that the name can be read and pronounced in the various target markets.
In many cases, it is unnecessary and only makes the speaker look foolish.
"Hyundai" is pronounces its own brand name differently in American and Korean TV commercials. Is Hyundai being disrespectful to Koreans?
The goal is to communicate. Making communication more difficult is the opposite of the goal.
Comedic skits touch on this [1][2] and though a caricature, I think they capture the gist of how it's perceived when attempted.
I think it stems from a desire for "cultural wokeness" which is a good thing and has its place, but as you say when communication is the goal, speak the language of the receiver.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKGoVefhtMQ
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWMp_z7Jnxw
Otherwise you just cause confusion. The adapted names have their own history.
If you insist on saying København and not Copenhagen, you get to have a little pretentious discussion explaining what you meant to every person you talk to. Ditto for Folks-vagen.
Here's how I read this. "We as an English speaking group will continue to not make an attempt to pronounce it right even if we can. Once we don't we will have a common pronunciation that doesn't fit the original one. Once it becomes common, we will get offended if it is not pronounced in the common way that we as a group chose to actively ignore in the first place. If the original speakers insist, we will call them pretentious."
Way to overreach way beyond what I originally said. If I was speaking to someone I knew was Dutch, of course I would (try to) say "København." Then they'd probably laugh at me and we'd agree to call it Copenhagen. :P
Or if I want to read your view in the worst possible way-- similar to how you've read mine-- "People who use the established pronunciation of a loanword or place in their native tongue are wrong. We should always seek to find where we are using words of foreign origin and correct them to be perfectly pronounced in their original tongue, even when this causes confusion and isn't helpful to people from the original place. Japanese gairaigo should be abolished and they should just say those words in the correct original English (or German or French). And those damn Frenchmen should stop calling the place I live Californie dans les Etats Unis, which is nothing like how I say it, and should stop calling me 'Michel' which sounds a whole lot like the female version of my name"
1.0 (me) : "It is respectful to attempt pronunciation if possible".
1.1 (you) : "There is a common English pronunciation. It's pretentious if you don't use the common pronunciation. Show respect to the English speaker!"
1.2 (me) : "The common pronunciation exists because of the lack of attempt in the first place. It's not pretentious. "
1.3 (you) : "It is established, we should use common pronunciation"
You turned the initial conversation about making an attempt to be kind and respectful towards non-English speakers into something else. Almost feels like victim blaming to me. Once again, to be clear - we should make an attempt. Just because there's an established pronunciation (or spelling) doesn't mean it is right. Overtime, established pronunciation can move towards the original pronunciation. The right pronunciation is what the speaker wants to have. You, me or the English society don't have any say in it. It doesn't matter if it is established or not. Going the extra mile in kindness helps; calling others pretentious because they ask you to empathise doesn't.
> you show respect by using that pronunciation when speaking TO NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS.
or
> If I was speaking to someone I knew was Dutch, of course I would (try to) say "København."
Because what you're accusing me of-- and the words you're putting in my mouth "There is a common English pronunciation. It's pretentious if you don't use the common pronunciation. Show respect to the English speaker!"-- make no sense in that context.
German is full of exonyms. All languages are full of exonyms and weird pronunciations of foreign words. It is OK.
This is really pretty sad on my part. I was just in Copenhagen for 3 weeks a year ago, just before COVID. :P
Approximating it, because you can't pronounce it is one thing. Not giving a shit, even though you do have the same word (i.e. folk) is another one.
However, this is pretty different as VW is a brand name so you don't have much liberty in how you write it.
Also, I don't think FW would look better than VW ;). And well, Toyota didn't change their name to look better in English (or rather, written with the Latin alphabet). At least not according to wikipedia. Quite the contrary, it was about how it was written in Japanse:
"Vehicles were originally sold under the name "Toyoda" (トヨダ), from the family name of the company's founder, Kiichirō Toyoda.
[...]
In September 1936, the company ran a public competition to design a new logo. Of 27,000 entries, the winning entry was the three Japanese katakana letters for "Toyoda" in a circle. However, Rizaburo Toyoda, who had married into the family and was not born with that name, preferred "Toyota" (トヨタ) because it took eight brush strokes (a lucky number) to write in Japanese, was visually simpler (leaving off the diacritic at the end), and with a voiceless consonant instead of a voiced one (voiced consonants are considered to have a "murky" or "muddy" sound compared to voiceless consonants, which are "clear").
Since toyoda literally means "fertile rice paddies", changing the name also prevented the company from being associated with old-fashioned farming. The newly formed word was trademarked and the company was registered in August 1937 as the Toyota Motor Company.[31][32][33]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota#1920s%E2%80%931930s
And yet, English has an "f" sound. German has an extremely consistent spelling and essentially all "v"s are pronounced as "f". We share (the latin) alphabet, and English has absolutely no authority, given how inconsistent it is.
Given that, I will say the voiced "V" when speaking English and the unvoiced, as necessary, speaking German.
I am not sure why there should be an emotional factor here, as expecting everybody to conform to some pronunciation ideal they have no experience with is arrogant, to say the least.
But see, that's the point. We're not speaking German when we use a borrowed word in English. It's no longer a purely German word, despite its origins, just as "xylophone" isn't a mispronounced Greek word, nor "Handy" a misused and miscapitalized English word.
That's not hubris, it's just descriptivism.
"Wagen" on its own would probably be pronounced like way-gen, if my english intuition is not fooling me. Instead it is pronounced like wuh-gen.
I don't really care about this either way but if you are bothered by something the weird mixture is.. a bit annoying.
A) It's not an English word, it's a name. A German name.
or
B) You're misspelling it. The English (at least the American) word you're looking for is "Volkswagon".
Nope.
This same goes for English speakers too. I know how Volkswagen is supposed to be pronounced (I know some German) but that's not the way English speakers would say it.
I don't think there is anything to be bothered by any of this. This just adds to our diversity.
It just bothers the historical linguistics nerd in me that all the other Germanic languages (other than Icelandic) lost the beautiful Thorn and Edh sounds consonants :-)
I've always found it interesting that the German approximation is "z" here when it could be "t" or "d", since that is what "th" sounds turned into in Old Franconian.
Americans are generally very tolerant and patient with non-native speakers butchering proper english. So no, it's not nearly as grating to an American to hear people mispronounce english words than it might be for Germans.
Pein, not pei.
It's not "peh," it's "pān" unless you're a gringo.
If you want to get technical: hæləˈpeɪnjoʊ, hä″lə-pān′yō, or xa.laˈpɛ.ɲɔ.
FYI: "Shan't" means "shall not," not "should not." Maybe don't use archaic language if you don't know how to use it. ;-)
If you argued that you can't pronounce 'Wagen' as the Germans do ("'vaːɡn̩", according to Wikipedia), that would be a different thing. But we're not talking about that.
Indeed, the word, i.e. folk, you are not willing to pronounce happen to exist in English as well and can mean the same (or very similar) thing. "Volk" (i.e. "wolk") OTOH doesn't mean anything in either languages. (It does mean wolf in Russian, though ;) )
People's car or you could say "Folk's Wagon" (or maybe "Folks' Wagon"). Yeah, weird choice of words and won't exactly sound like it was German but close enough, kind of meaningful and nothing you couldn't pronounce. Just remember to write is as VolksWagen.
Or should we perhaps stick with the old rule that names are correctly pronounced as their owner wants them pronounced...?
Americans learned how to pronounce "Volkswagen" from 50 years of Volkswagen's own advertising. They didn't just make it up on their own.
https://youtu.be/kkdmz0XRrS4?t=26
Edit: more complete version.
I wonder if it would be less confusing to Germans if we used "Fow Vay" to pronounce the abbreviation. Instead of "Vee Double-You." I'm not being sarcastic, but I don't think a change to the correct pronunciation is likely.
I'm a native speaker from the US South, and hadn't realized this until I read your comment. For me, the "W" always gets shortened to "dub-you" in AWS (or "dubya" if I'm not being picky about it). Standalone, I might pronounce "W" more like "dub-a-you if I'm emphasizing it, but not usually.
Anyhow, thanks for pointing this out. I will also now forever think that "double-you" is ridiculous.
It's always fascinating to be reminded that I'm still basically ear-blind to certain linguistic patterns (the "pen/pin" merger being one I still can't even hear as different, let alone say). For a long time, I falsely assumed that because I grew up watching the same TV shows as the rest of the country, and because I didn't speak with the same accent as my family members, that I didn't have an accent at all. Turns out I do - I just can't hear it.
I took Linguistics in college and my professor could tell where people were from in the US within a couple hundred miles by their accent. Anyone who thinks they don’t have an accent absolutely does. Except maybe Nebraskans — I read somewhere that they have the most neutral, “correct” American accent, though I don’t think it was a scientific source.
Does the name change still make sense in German?
I noticed that the German site hasn't changed anything, seems to be a US thing only.
I dig it ... (speaking as someone who still sees their average cars as steam engine, emission test defeaters)
At least there's two of us amongst the sea of ridiculue.
They could have made it WOKESWAGON for the youth of today powered by the minds of tomorrow.
> The proximity of the name change to April Fool’s Day initially raised suspicions that it was just a joke. But VW insists that it’s a real thing, so here we are.
Sounds to me like a publicity stunt -- they "accidentally published" a press release a month early? Sorry, that doesn't happen.
Seems like trying to generate buzz on social media, then they'll quietly "decide" not to change the name after all, but people associating VW with electric cars more so -- mission accomplished.
VW themselves said they didn't plan to put out the press release for a month. They didn't say anything about the timing of "stationery or signage".
Did you mean to reply to a different comment...?
(Source: have worked in 3 large public companies and seen how these things come down to the wire with approvals from PR, Marketing, IR, Legal, Country Leadership, Corporate, etc...)
If I had a dollar for every press release at every public company that was written and finalized a month in advance...
...I'm pretty sure I'd have zero dollars.
They're still called Long Blockchain; they even changed their ticker symbol to LBCC. I wonder if VW will be as committed.
In the latest tz, it's currently:
05:44:48 UTC+14 Wednesday, March 31, 2021
But Voltswaken, honstely if that isn't a joke it's sad. It is basically guaranteed to be a typo crisis. I can just say have fun, to all the banks and other companies doing business with it.
https://nypost.com/2021/03/30/vw-says-voltswagen-rebrand-was...
[0] https://www.vw.com/en/models/id-4.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26637476
Supposedly Volvo owns the name now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REO_Speedwagon
(First two options are the rock band, and the proto-truck from the early 20th century which the band was named after.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-aZBwOj94w
General Electric will follow-suit by doing nothing.
Look at these hilariously stupid comments. During the same period while TSLA is languishing, VW has risen 60%+. They've gone all in on electric cars, and are committing to it.
"Hurrr, is it April fools....gurrr gurrr"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_Harmonised_Light_Veh...
There's a question as to what you're trying to model; if you're looking at daily usage then relatively short distances from fully charged are probably relatively representative of a lot of usage (the mean and median distances driven on a daily basis are relatively short distances!).
https://www.spritmonitor.de/en/overview/0-All_manufactures/0... shows that data is somewhat all over the place v. manufacturer data, with some being close and others very far away from it.
In reality, I suspect what would be useful is to have a further cycle based on a 100km journey largely on a motorway, as a long-distance extra-urban cycle?
PHEVs may not be a good idea depending on your driving style. There should be more discussion about what type of engine is the correct one for you before buying. Do you drive enough motorway regularly that a diesel would make sense? Do you drive shorter distances but you cannot charge? Can you charge but you sometimes need more range? Maybe even a PHEV diesel would make sense, but that is a type of vehicle that was rare and is now even rarer.
Technology was improved a lot over the last decades. If you'd record the WLTP tests you could maybe build a system which would accurately calculate your fuel usage for your type of driving and define if a PHEV or a diesel would make any sense for you.
So yeah, it seems like WLTP is not really accurate for EVs either.
I was excited by Tesla but they remained expensive. Now feel like VW will have a chance to bring electric vehicles to a much larger group of people... a group I fit into and I can't wait.
Until then, I still think they are doing what they do for the sake of profit.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/triple-bottom-line.asp
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFgBFYkBZ6E
Good grief, no one believes in contrition anymore. No one even believes in the past or the future. They were always this way, they're this way now, and they always will be! There are no mistakes, only lapses that expose your "true" eternal character.
Small low power cars and trucks that need to be able to tow are the worst case. Giving up the big power doesn't really save you any mass or cost, and trucks need a bigger gas "tank". But perhaps if the tabless and structural battery thing works out, it will get us to both of those cases.
Maybe not iconic, however.
Because every time I look (and I've looked constantly since I traded my Jetta TDI for cash in dieselgate) I still can't. And they are issuing a new press release every few months promising mass production EVs next year.
Back in 2017/2018 when this all went down they actually removed all electrified cars from their lineup. Stopped making new Audi A3 e-Trons, removed the hybrid Jetta from their lineup, and only made about 500 outdated (several year old design) eGolfs with a small battery for all of the Canadian market with a year and a half waiting list to get in one. All the while trumpeting how committed they were to electrification and how this was the future. So, I bought a GM EV instead.
And, yep, I just went to the local VW dealer's website and they have only one car with an electric motor in it, the 2019 eGolf with a 35kWh battery. That's it and I know exactly how it would go down if I were to call the dealer and ask to test drive one.
And last I looked the id.3 isn't coming to North America and the id.4 is a "maybe next year" kind of deal and the electric van they've been promising since about 2015 is now projected for 2023 when I recall in previous press releases talk about it coming out several years ago.
I'm sorry, they're greenwashing, they're desperate, and they're trying to milk as much out of the ICE while they can while playing a PR game. People trash GM's EV efforts as "compliance cars" but at least I can actually buy a Bolt.
This is false, the ID4 is already being sold in US. ID3 is in fact not going to US.
GM has improved now, but when I looked at Volts it was similar (dealers knowing nothing, actively hostile to me trying to buy a car from them).
I have a Model 3 now and think its features are really not available in the competition at any price point, but especially sub 40k.
Poe's Law: Corporate Intranet Edition
I’m cautiously optimistic that Volkswagen is signaling a similar change in their mission and leadership’s intent to change.
No, I think this is what happens as the date approaches April 1st.
"Ohm-y!" And who was charged with leading this change?
Energy production in EU-27 in 2020: 38% renewables (growing), 25% nuclear, 37% fossil fuels (decreasing). That's already 63% from zero-carbon sources.
Air pollution in cities is a real problem that nobody really talks about because there's no easy solutions.
I don't drive an EV, because it's not practical / affordable for me yet. I hope this changes soon.
Last time someone made a comment like yours, I actually tried googling and there’s a doe site that actually tells you the carbon emissions by state for an ev, hybrid or normal gas car given that states specific energy sources.
Even W Virginia, the worst state I could find, having about 90% coal, gives much lower emissions for an ev than a gas car. And that’s with the current mix. It’s only getting better from here. And that’s the worst state!
Here you go https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20170417164448/https://www.vanco...
tldr;
Got to be a joke, there's no way..
Maybe the P had a coronary heart-attack from all the grilled food at Big Brunch?
https://www.thedrive.com/news/39984/vw-says-its-officially-d...
Which is still…a choice.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/40001/now-the-germans-say-vws-...
April fools!