We can keep lying like Elon Musk, or...

Yesterday I saw an advert for a fully electric Opel Frontera (Vauxhall for the ones outside of the EU). The people in the car were in awe of the charging speed: “Wow, this charges so fast”, they said.

My instinct kicked in and told me that couldn’t be true, I mean, it’s a French car underneath and French things don’t do well with electricity. So I checked. Turns out the Frontera maxes out at 100 kW, which is painfully slow these days.

This fact ruined my night. I just couldn’t figure out why Opel would choose to tell potential customers this in their advert, only to have them be disappointed in the car after they buy it. It feels like the car brand is out to get money and leaving Opel-drivers waiting at chargers, while flipping them off from their office windows.

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The problem is that Opel isn’t the first, nor the last to do this. Every car brand is doing this. Not only for their EV’s, but also for their regular ICE cars and everything in between (remember some small scandal with VW-diesels?).

Before you go there: yes I understand that WLTP-ranges and maximum charge speeds and all other kinds of standards that are being used, are a guideline to give customers some kind of way to compare. But you have to know that some of the car brands are going out of their way to get the highest, most unrealistic marks. They’re driving their cars mostly downhill with predictable tailwinds to get a WLTP-range no one will ever match in real life.

And the issue I take with this communication is the simple fact that car manufacturers don’t have to do this. They can be clear about what a potential buyer can expect. Honesty is a virtue, or something like that.

Take Porsche for example. Up until recently the brand gave you multiple real life range estimates based on your way of driving. They might’ve been a bit optimistic, but it goes beyond the unrealistic WLTP-cycles, and I don’t know why they took this range calculator down.

And you’d think the move to communicating charging speeds in minutes instead of kW’s is great, but it isn’t. You’ll not match that amount of charge in the specified minutes during any of your charging stops. There are simply too many variables that have to line up perfectly, which they probably won’t. Well that is unless you make sure you charge in a controlled environment, like at a testing facility a car manufacturer owns.

I can only compare this deceitful type of behavior to what Elon Musk keeps doing over and over: over promising and under delivering. At first we accepted it from the man, because Tesla was a young company trying to make things happen. But over time he chose to keep over promising while he had to have known there was no way for Tesla to deliver on that promise.

It kind of feels like the whole car industry looked at Musk and the way he kept getting away with his lies during that first period, and thought: “if he can do it, so can we”. The irony is that we’ve turned on Musk and his behavior. We see him as untrustworthy now. So maybe it’s time for the car industry to look at that change too and figure out there’s somethings that need to be fixed in their communication.

It once was cool to do what Musk did, it isn’t anymore.

Or at least don’t let people in car adverts be amazed by things that are blatantly false.

In other news

Sources are telling F1-media that Max Verstappen is currently traveling to Spa, Belgium and Toto Wolff is also. Might be a new meeting to discuss a transfer?

Chinese car brands Zeekr and Neta have been lying about the amount of cars they sold in the last couple of years, Reuters found out. At least in China both brands have been insuring thousands of cars before they’re actually sold. This means they’re counted towards the total amount sold vehicles, because this is the way they measure it. Neta tells Reuters it’s standard practice in the Chinese market, while Zeekr said it only insured cars in showrooms as a safety measure.

Getting one or two actual key fobs with your brand new car is getting rarer and rarer. Mini is only giving you one from now on, and that is probably too much anyway, the brand thinks. You’re opening and closing your car with your phone or by touching the door handle with your hand anyway. So tough luck if you like to check if your car locked itself correctly while you’re walking away.

Aw shit…

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