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VW Up Buggy may be headed to showrooms

Volkswagen showed six conceptual takes on its Up at the 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show, one of those being the Up Buggy. Although few will probably remember it, VW has not forgotten it, applying for a patent for the Meyers Manx revival roadster way back in March 2012 and being approved in June of this year, according to a report in Autocar. That will give the automaker a 14-year lock on the design while it decides whether to move forward with a reboot of its past.
A patent doesn't mean the Up Buggy will ever move beyond the sheet-of-paper stage, but Autocar says VW is studying the market to see if a production version is feasible. We can't see North America ever getting it, but even so, we wouldn't complain if they made it - especially if they put an exposed engine in back that was set off by 18-inch-long twin tailpipes jutting straight up into the air. However, for a company that aims to be the world's number-one automaker by 2018, a niche vehicle for its mass-market brand would be a surprising use of resources.

VW CEO lost his job over buggy software that delayed new models

It says a lot about the state of the auto industry and where it's going that software problems have cost the CEO of a carmaker his job. Volkswagen ousted Herbert Diess as chief executive officer after severe software-development delays set back the scheduled launch of new Porsches, Audis and Bentleys. This was untenable considering buggy software postponed the debut of VW’s initial rollout of ID models, and customers are still having to drop off their cars at the dealer for updates the company has struggled to make over the air. Sure, Diess also didnÂ’t do enough to make allies and became increasingly isolated due to his hard-nosed leadership style. In his push to transform the company into an electric-vehicle leader, he repeatedly clashed with labor leaders by warning VW was losing out to Tesla and needed to cut thousands of jobs. But failures at the carmakerÂ’s software unit Cariad ultimately eroded DiessÂ’s support from the powerful Porsche and Piech family that calls the shots. Back in December, VW overhauled its management board, stripping Diess of some responsibilities while tasking him to turn around Cariad. While thereÂ’s been a lot of re-arranging since then, Diess didnÂ’t manage to make the issues go away. Discord at Cariad has pushed back the rollout of important new models including the electric Porsche Macan, a high-volume sport utility vehicle for the division thatÂ’s planning an initial public offering in the fourth quarter. AudiÂ’s new line of Artemis EVs has been delayed by around two years to 2027. And VWÂ’s ultra-luxury brand Bentley may not be able to go all-electric by the end of this decade as planned because of the software issues, Automobilwoche reported earlier this month. “Taking over the ship at Cariad seems to have been DiessÂ’s downfall,” said Matthias Schmidt, an independent auto analyst based in Berlin. VWÂ’s solutions to challenges tend to reflect its status as an industrial behemoth: itÂ’s able to throw lots of money and people at its problems. But modernizing the company for the digital age is going to take bringing in talent and building skillsets outside its traditional zones of expertise. Drivers increasingly demand intuitive user interfaces and services that could create new revenue streams, if done correctly. “Software is the key to the future,” TeslaÂ’s Elon Musk tweeted when one of his followers asked about VW switching CEOs. Diess certainly didnÂ’t lack ambition.

In wake of Volkswagen scandal, cheating may actually get easier

The three crises that rollicked the auto industry in recent months – a rising death toll related to the General Motors ignition-switch defect, the Jeep Cherokee hack and now the Volkswagen cheating scandal – all have one thing in common. Outsiders discovered the problems. In the new matter of Volkswagen rigging millions of cars to outsmart emissions tests, researchers at West Virginia University and the International Council on Clean Transportation first spotted irregularities. In the hacking of a Jeep Cherokee, it was independent cyber-security researchers Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller who found and reported cellular vulnerabilities that allowed them to control a car from halfway across the country. And lest we forget in the case of General Motors, it was a Mississippi mechanic and Florida engineer who first made connections between non-deploying airbags and faulty GM ignition switches that had been altered over time. They worked on behalf of Brooke Melton, a 29-year-old Georgia woman killed in a Chevy Cobalt. "That argument is built on a whole string of trusts, and now it is clear that we should absolutely not be trusting." - Kyle Wiens Amid the Volkswagen scandal, the role these independent third parties played in unearthing life-threatening problems is important to highlight, not only because it shines a light on the ethical indifference corporations paid to life-and-death problems of their creation. The role of the independents is noteworthy because, just as their contributions never been more relevant in protecting the driving public, they could soon be barred from the automotive landscape. Since May, a little-known but critically important process has been playing out before an office within the Library of Congress, which will soon decide whether independent researchers and mechanics can continue to access vehicle software or whether that software, which runs dozens of vehicle components, is protected by copyright law. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act criminalizes measures taken to circumvent security devices that protect copyrighted works. When the DMCA was signed into law in 1998, it was intended to protect the likes of movies from being pirated and companies from ripping off software. At the time, few had a clue that some 17 years later cars would essentially be mobile software platforms run by millions of lines of code that potentially fall under the law's jurisdiction.