Volkswagen Axes All Non-Electric Racing Programs Worldwide (thedrive.com) 63
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: Volkswagen announced Friday that it will discontinue all of its motorsport activities outside of electric vehicles. The Volkswagen factory will no longer support racing efforts powered by internal combustion engines, which includes halting the development of a new Golf GTI TCR car. Because works racing programs largely exist to market a company's cars, it makes some sense that Volkswagen would want to shift the focus of its racing efforts to line up with its big electrification push. Per today's announcement, Volkswagen Motorsport will help develop new concepts based on the Modular Electric Drive Kit (or MEB for short) platform that underpins Volkswagen's ID. family of electric cars. Volkswagen Motorsport Director Sven Smeets explained in today's announcement: "Electric mobility offers enormous development potential, and in this regard motorsport can be a trailblazer: on the one hand, it serves as a dynamic laboratory for the development of future production cars and, on the other, as a convincing marketing platform to inspire people even more towards electric mobility. That is why we are going to focus more than ever on factory-backed electric drive commitments and continue to expand our activities with the development of the MEB. Innovative technology relevant to the car of the future is our focus."
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Well played.
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Websites are businesses, and are not required to cater to your individual requirements.
Go cry in your closet
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* I tried numerous times to create an account on Plenty of Fish (dating site). Every single time, no matter what information I inputted into the registration form, it would give fake error messages about how the "username is already taken"
They know it's you and they don't want assholes there.
That's also why you can't get into any other sites.
It's not them, it's you!
So our slot car races are still safe. (Score:2)
Family dads rejoice!
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Electrics (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Electrics (Score:4, Interesting)
You might as well be screaming bring back the horse and chariot, times change. Now comes the interesting part of electric motor racing, how quick can they swap battery packs. It will be interesting whilst tyre wear will affect the racing over time, the fuel load no longer will. Whether fully charged or running low, the batteries will way the same but interestingly enough, how hard the brakes are used will affect how much regeneration is possible and how does that impact the number of battery changes required to complete the race. Larger batteries, fewer changes, but slower on track. There is a whole world of new engineering problems to solve with electric racing vehicles.
Re:Electrics (Score:4, Interesting)
In Formula E they swap cars, but they don't really need to. The battery packs are only about 55kWh. They could fit one twice that size and do the whole race without stopping.
The goal was to keep costs down and test the car swap concept with a view to maybe using it for longer races.
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In Formula E they swap cars
Nope. They stopped doing that.
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I'm sure that VW can rig up a sound system that will broadcast your beloved V-12 roar as an option. It will be just like when you were a kid and fastened a playing card to the spokes of your bicycle.
Re: Electrics (Score:2)
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Bring back the horse and buggy!
They still have buggy races. I think they have ostrich buggy races! Who needs electric when you have an ostrich? : )
Re: Electrics (Score:1)
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Brand names of Volkswagen (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Brand names of Volkswagen (Score:3)
I was wondering the same thing. The Porsche 911 and Lamborghini Huracan are both raced extensively (the 911 especially). Doubtful that is being stopped. The article only mentions the VW brand.
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Maybe ''getting out of the racing business" means the sponsoring part ends and they no longer invest in factory cars and develop race cars anymore but people can still buy a 911 cup car, a rally car or a VW funcup.
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It sounds like they just mean they won't run any factory teams outside electric series. They don't really run much anyway, as in the wake of diesel gate they cut a lot of their motorsport expenditure anyway. For example they canned their short-lived involvement in the WRC in 2016.
Most racing series are run by race prep companies (m-sport, prodrive etc) who might have a working relationship with a brand, but in many cases don't get a lot of support apart from maybe body shells and other parts at cost.
Those s
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I doubt it, the headline is Volkswagen, not VAG. And they're talking about a Golf.
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There are a few businesses that will convert anything with the old 7xx/9xx transmission models - VW bugs and busses, Porsche 356, 912, 911s through the early 80s, etc. to electric drive train. One is using Tesla stuff and expensive, the other is an in-house design and runs about as much as a full engine rebuild on a 356 by a "known good" mechanic.
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Depends on how you look at it. Capturing ever more NOx and particulates reduces fuel economy which means more CO2. IMO the focus on street level pollutants has gone too far - one gust of wind and they're gone, CO2 is a far more pressing concern now.
Re:Yeah, but they lied about their diesel emission (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ask the australians how that "long term" is going and all the smog from forest fires covering their east coast.
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You don't capture NOx, you react it with DEF in a SCR. You do capture particulates, in a DEF. And then the DEF burns the soot off into CO2... and smaller particulates, actually making the soot more hazardous.
EGR and SCR should be the only diesel emissions controls, DPFs are terrible.
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The NOx doesn't leave the exhaust system - its captured. Sure it comes out as something else but thats besides the point.
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The NOx doesn't leave the exhaust system - its captured.
The soot is literally captured. The NOx is literally not captured.
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Oh ok, well thanks for that insight. I guess you think carbon capture isn't actually capture either if the CO2 is converted into a solid then hauled away elsewhere?
Innovation (Score:1)
Noun
1. An opportunity to sell something 'because the old stuff is now outdated'. Or just because the new stuff is.. well, ehm.. new.
2. The act of making such sales.
Not that I have a problem with car manufacturers moving towards an all-electric future. Quite the contrary. Just remember why they're in it (Tesla excluded in this case).
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From an AGW perspective... (Score:2)
...this is completely meaningless. Compared to routine traffic, all the auto racing in the world is a rounding error as far as AGW is concerned.
So, someone at VW has decided that they can get some good publicity by doing this, and it won't cost VW anything, so why not?
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What if their racing program research leads them to the truly viable electric car which they are able to market at the 50 million a year level? Think 50 million electric cars a year over the next century might have an impact on the AGW situation?
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It won’t.
Why won’t it?
Because all the hybrid and electric formulas currently in play are essentially either extremely heavily restricted in energy storage, energy harvesting and energy deployment, or they are spec formulas where you are supposed to buy those parts from one or two manufacturers.
There is no open hybrid or electric formulas where heavy development would benefit - not even F1 counts, as its hybrid usage is extremely restricted.
There’s no scope for fielding a wonderful extra ca
Re:From an AGW perspective... (Score:5, Informative)
Not at all. Sure, the CO2 from the race cars is irrelevant, but racing isn't about race cars. Racing serves two purposes - marketing and R&D. The technology you see in street cars today is largely the technology developed for race cars a decade or two ago.
So long as a company is partaking in ICE racing, they're making a substantial ongoing investment in the future technology of their fleet of ICE vehicles. By withdrawing from the sport, Volkswagon is publicly abandoning their efforts to further advance the technology, presumably in favor of focusing on developing technology for electric vehicles. It probably won't directly affect their sales mix for a while, but from this moment onwards the technology in their ICE vehicles will begin to stagnate, and in a few decades they'll be also-rans in the ICE vehicle market.
Essentially, by making this move Volkswagon has made a public announcement that they see no long-term future for ICE vehicles, and are beginning to abandon the market.
Re: From an AGW perspective... (Score:2)
They've said as much publicly, but talk is cheap. This is demonstrating that they're actually serious about it.
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Hmmmm... (Score:1)
Seeing as how there are no viable electric cars in the world yet (viable == match the performance of internal combustion engine cars in every respect including range, refuelability (time to refuel), and price, is this move simply premature or are they using their racing programs to create the "viable" electric car?
On the one hand, I desperately want the viable electric car, as they are blindingly cheap to fuel due to electricity's prices and the car's high efficiencies, but on the other hand, electrics will
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Why would Putin fund a bunch of Envirowacko's when Russia is a major exporter of Oil and Gas and much of their economy if built on it?
Please explain?
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Obviously because Putin thinks doing evil is much more important than looking after Russia's interests.
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Because now that the German economy depends on Putin's natural gas, he might see something like E-racing sponsorship as a socially disarming gesture.
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Russia has been a long-standing US adversary. They will take any and all opportunities to diminish us. The envirowacko faction suits their purposes and are effective in impeding needed infrastructure development, so they use them.
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>viable == match the performance of internal combustion engine cars in every respect including range, refuelability (time to refuel), and price
Umm - no. viable = competitive on balance with ICE vehicles in a large enough niche to saturate production capacity.
An electric car that was at least equal to ICEs in every measure, would be unquestionably vastly superior to ICEs overall thanks to its advantages (torque, emissions, fuel costs, maintenance,...)
If you regularly travel 1400 miles in a day (and I *r
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"If you regularly travel 1400 miles in a day (and I *really* doubt that - that's a full 16 waking hours a day averaging 88mph), then clearly electric vehicles are not yet viable for you. On average though Americans drive only 50 miles per day - many of them would be well served by an electric vehicle. They can rent an ICE if they want to go on a fast-paced road trip, or perhaps just a generator."
Best I've been able to do driving alone is 1200 miles, and it took 20 hours. Left Virginia at 4 AM, slept in Te
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"People with families are practically forced into SUV's to have enough spaces to carry themselves and the kids, "
And yet, outside the USA people tend to do just fine with normal cars.
A lot of the biases in the USA are driven by marketing which pushes larger vehicles at consumers because larger vehicles enjoy tariff barrier protection that "ordinary" cars don't. Look up the Chicken wars to see when it started and how US automakers exploited the change in profitability from this and then not having to submit
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Are other countries plagued with safety nazis mandating "child safety seats" that dramatically limit the carrying capacity of the smaller cars?
Europeans do not have a country 3000 miles "wide" and 1800 miles "tall". When we get in a vehicle we may be going across the town or several states. What's comfortable for Europeans may not be for extended highway driving in the USA.
Europeans that decide that SUVs are somehow reliable I'll show my current SUV, a Ford Edge ST with 34,217.5 miles on it (I'm sitting
A predictable PR move after the dieselgate (Score:4, Interesting)
Those who followed motorsport news can recall that VW/Audi people repeatedly refused to enter Formula 1 racing, even after introduction of hybrid electric power units in 2014 because they said that "Formula 1 was not road-relevant". For a decade now, they kept telling everyone that diesel cars were road-relevant, and this is why Audi continued racing diesel race cars in 24 Hours of Le Mans, and then WHAM.. The dieselgate. It turns out that their diesels weren't specially green or road-relevant. This broke the hearts of a tiny but a very vocal north american community of euro-diesel fans. Audi dropped out of Le Mans racing immediately. And now they're making a 180 degree turn in the direction of all-electic vehicles. This is a predictable PR move because VAG now has the image of a manufacturer of cheating particle spouting diesels. That's not exactly a nice image to have in 21st century.
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It turns out that new diesels actually clean up the air, they emit less particles than they suck in: (German article)
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/te... [faz.net]
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And you can trust this because many people are checking if they do what they say. Any little detail which is off is uncovered nowadays, there is a lot on our news.
It was not really news that the car manufacturers only followed the rules to the letter and optimizing results for the test conditions. This was standard in Europe and Asia, though the US authorities took it more serious. This is looked into nowadays, and they don't get away with it any more. Wel
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> they said that "Formula 1 was not road-relevant".
And in this, they are 100% correct. It stopped being road relevant about 1982-3 season when most of the stuff we take for granted in our vehicles as standard features were removed because the cars were going "too fast"
This has been discussed for many years on many fora. Once upon a time things like active suspension, 4WS, ABS, better fuel combustion efficiency, turbocharging, ground effects(*), better chassis dynamics, etc etc did flow from high end ra
Winning the magazine cover war, but... (Score:3)
Volkswagen is doing really well in the magazine cover war for electric vehicles; perhaps it is time for them to get a significant number of EVs with usable performance on the road. Hint: more then 30 km electric range.