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What made VW big, was building affordable, reliable, good quality cars that could be maintained easily even with limited means.
At some point in the early 2000s, a bunch of suits became greedy and decided to use the reputation built up over decades by their former products to cater to the international upscale market and sell overpriced cars of mediocre quality instead.
Somewhere in there is also too strong lobbying against emission standards, the whole emissions cheating and a too late entry into the EV market, because of lack of regulatory pressure. The company was so powerful, that it became fat and lazy, and now struggles to keep up with necessary reforms.
The late entry into the EV market is due to bad management and not lack of regulatory pressure. It is an international brand and company, so it has to adapt to most government regulation with some product or fail. It is not the fault of the regulators that they are fat, lazy and incompetent.
Even if that had not happened, there would still be the decline of quality coupled with a simultaneous increase of prices.
The ~~corruption~~ lobbying unfortunately is pretty much a staple of every large corporation these days.
They haven't become lazy, they are taking quite an effort to squeeze the maximum amount of money out of the minimal possible effort. They aren't optimising for good products, they are optimising for maximum profits. With corporate suits not thinking ahead any further than the next quarter's numbers and the resulting stock value, they don't care that reputation is a finite resource that will run out quickly if you're selling it rather than products that are good enough to actually replenish the reputation.
Who would have thought that pricey but mediocre cars with worse material quality than some years ago stuffed with touch screens and touch surfaces which are a nightmare to operate would harm their sales.
In the 60s, even a hippie could afford a Microbus.
What's the base cost of even their lowest priced model?
I currently have a 2007 VW and another one from 2018. The quality and little special features and details have greatly declined. Before this I had a 2001 model which I drove over 300,000 miles. The 2018 one just doesn't feel as sturdy. I've been a VW fan for a long time, but this last car is disappointing compared to what they used to make.
Best car I ever had was a 1990 VW Passat with the 1.8 l 4 cylinder gasoline engine, it ran over 450000 km and almost 20 years on the first engine, was easy to service and repair and no amount of abuse you threw at it would kill it. They don't make them like that anymore.