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VW solid-state battery retains 95% capacity over 1,000 charge cycles in lab testing
(www.techspot.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Sadly, VW has never strayed far from their roots.
They've always been just a little scummy on the business practices side of things. More than a little scummy during WW2...
They do sometimes have good engineering. Which means fuck all in the face of management who want to cut corners and cheat to make more money.
the 1.4 introduced somewherein the 2000s was their last "good" engine. newer models just suffer from downsizing, constant engine problems after around 80K km.
buy a used honda or a toyota. might even be fuel efficient if you buy a prius for cheap and replace the battery.
or, you know... buy a small car. the 1st gen aygo easily does 40-50mpg and cost 10K BRAND NEW. but then toyota made it a crossover which uses more fuel and is almost 20K.
If you're speaking on the 1.4l turbo, that was introduced in 2012. Have one in my car and it's a great little engine. Lots of extra room in the engine bay left over though.
i think it was an earlier NA one. my brother's 2006 Polo has it.
extra room is good, a couple more turbos can't hurt.
It's aluminum block though. Only so much that little guy can take. I honestly have never looked into many performance upgrades for it outside a new air intake because that giant fuck-off box that's under my hood needs to go.
of course. it's better to optimize airflow and only slightly increase boost.
or if you wanna go extreme, swap a bigger, more durable engine in there.
all at the cost of fuel mileage.
VR6? ;)
Their diesel engines are great. At almost 100k miles on my diesel jetta and no issues whatsoever.
160K km is indeed quite an amount, my 1SZ-FE Yaris has done just over 100K now, and similarly has had zero incidents after 20 Years and me being it's 4th owner. doesn't use oil, doesn't burn coolant, no unusual rattles, everytime we change the oil it's still very translucent.
they don't make them like they used to, not even the toyotas.
Do any companies have morality
I think the bigger a corporation is, the more shitty things it had to do in order to reach that status.
There are some good companies with a moral code, but they'll never become competitive with the big dogs in our current capitalist system.
From what I've seen, some family owned ones do, as they're run for the long term (rather than by CEOs with an average tenure of less than 2 years and who thus are fine with damaging long term prospects for short term profit boosting as its the latter that dictate the size of tbeir bonuses) so don't want to damage the name of the company and sometimes are even run in a way that reflects the owner's morals and principles.
Market listed companies or even private ones with lots of "investors" as owners (such as the bigger startups) almost never have any morality or, in the case of the latter, reflect the typical morality of the kind of people who are good at getting investors, which tends to be the in the area from the "flexible with the truth" salesman all the way to outright fraudster.
Investment nowadays is pretty short term, amoral and fickle, and this ends up indirectly leading to overwhelmingly certain kinds of personalities ending up leading companies and certain management styles being used, both high on the more sociopath end of the spectrum.