Volkswagen Wants to Compete with Tesla. Here's What's Stopping It
Taking on Tesla is a monumental and extraordinarily task, and if there's one company that may be able to pull it off, it is German automaker Volkswagen. But it's going to take more than a couple of years.
Volkswagen learned their lesson the hard way last year, as it rolled out its flagship EV called the ID.3. The ID.3 was futuristic, had all the German characteristics of beautiful design, spaciousness, and comfort. But its software didn't function properly.
For all of the focus that Volkswagen placed on hardware, they admittedly under-emphasized the role of software in making an EV that can be better than Tesla. VW's ID.3 reportedly had hundreds of software bugs, and early customers must now bring-in their cars for service to have newer, less sophisticated software installed. The learning curve for updating software remotely is higher than Volkswagen anticipated, and now any notion of overtaking Tesla has been pushed out for years.
German automakers are resilient, however, and they have quickly identified problems in workflow, management, and depth of human capital needed to make the ID.3 competitive. The next couple of years will present major challenges for Volkswagen's entry into the EV market, but investors shouldn't rule them out.
Contributor
Sergey Savastiouk, Ph.D. has a degree in Applied Mathematics from Moscow University and has extensive experience as an entrepreneur, investor, manager, and mathematician. His professional expertise is in applied mathematics, mathematical modeling, system and pattern analysis, and software and hardware system integration. He has served as the CEO of several hi-tech start-up companies and nonprofit organizations, which has given him proven capabilities in business strategy for high-tech start-up companies, market assessment, company formation, team building, product development, marketing, and sales. He has published numerous articles in journals and magazines on related fields. As a retail investor, he spent 15 years developing his proprietary trading and quantitative algorithms (now Tickeron’s A.I.), which brought him significant returns in trading the stock market. His current work and goal in founding Tickeron is to bring professional, sophisticated stock market analysis capabilities to retail investors via an easy-to-use interface.
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