5 highlights
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The chief executive officer of Volkswagen AG kicked off a March 15 news conference modeled after Tesla Inc.’s “Battery Day”—Diess called his “Power Day”—by declaring that there’s only one way to quickly reduce emissions from transportation: Go electric. Skeptics could be forgiven for raising their eyebrows at that message, coming as it was from the same carmaker that spent years gaslighting the world about “clean diesel.”
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But VW is finally seeing the payoff from its five-year effort to create a standardized platform to underpin dozens of electric models.
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VW last year became the No. 1 electric-vehicle maker in Europe, where sales of battery-powered cars surged thanks to stricter carbon dioxide limits.
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Tesla has done to the auto industry what Netflix Inc. did to cable TV, speeding the shift away from internal combustion in much the same way easy access to Breaking Bad and hundreds of other shows spurred consumers to take the scissors to their Comcast contracts. But just as Netflix now sees a growing challenge from parts of the old guard—think Walt Disney Co. and HBO—incumbent automakers are starting to emulate the upstart.
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Even though Disney+ was years behind Netflix, Disney’s service has been a runaway success with new fare such as The Mandalorian offered alongside its deep catalog of classics like Pinocchio, Toy Story, and Mulan. Similarly, Diess has won over investors by making the case that VW can exploit something Tesla doesn’t have much of yet: scale.