The Volkswagen Group’s Cariad software division has known almost nothing but controversy in its nearly three-year life.
Formed to shoulder the burden of creating a digital future for the group’s still fairly analogue fleet in the teeth of competition from the likes of Tesla, it became the public face of the failure to ship working software with the first Volksagen ID 3 electric cars.
The troublesome software was called 1.1, and fixing that has not been easy. ID Software Update 2.0 was designed to fix issues for the affected MEB-platform electric cars but put pressure on the cars’ weak 12V batteries. After VW replaced them with beefed-up versions, Cariad late last year pushed out update 3.0 that is said to finally allow the full suite of over-the-air updates promised from the off.
Meanwhile, as all that was happening, work on the posher 1.2 software aimed at Audi and Porsche cars on the upcoming PPE (Premium Performance Electric) platform got delayed. That knocked back the launch of the Porsche Macan EV by a year.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Porsche took issue with the fact that Cariad was developing a third software platform designed to replace the first two, initially scheduled for 2025 and forming part of the new Unified platform that would eventually replace both the MEB and PPE – underpinning all future electric VW Group cars.
Porsche complained in its share prospectus published ahead of its part flotation last year that the development of this 2.0 stack “could potentially allocate greater development capacity and resources to the detriment of further development of the E3 1.2 platform”.
Then in July, VW Group CEO Herbert Diess resigned, with some business outlets in the group’s native Germany reporting that it was his failure to sort the software issues that forced the supervising board’s hand.
Since then, new VW Group CEO and Cariad chairman Oliver Blume – previously Porsche CEO – has pushed for a change in the way Cariad operates, resulting in a more streamlined approach. Dirk Hilgenberg, Cariad’s CEO since 2020, acknowledged that even with 5566 employees as of the end of 2022, it was trying to do too much. “We need to do the software platforms, the driver stack as well as the digital [infotainment] experience and we had three releases being developed in parallel,” he told journalists at the CES tech show held in Las Vegas early January. “But we are now not promoting that differentiation any more. Now we try to find the synergies [between 1.1, 1.2 and 2.0].”
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