Volkswagen Quotes

You're assuming they would listen to me," I said. Cole lifted his hands off the roof of the Volkswagen; cloudy fingerprints evaporated seconds ater he did. "We all listen to you, Sam." He jumped to the pavement. "You just don't always talk to us.

Do you feel better?” I asked Sam as he opened the door to the Volkswagen for me. “Yes,” he said. He was still a terrible liar. “Good,” I said. I was still a fantastic one.

I just don't like the word 'fun'--it's like Volkswagen, or bell-bottoms, or patchouli-oil or bean-sprouts...it rubs me up the wrong way.

Its beyond him now. its time for you to do you own thing." "My thing? my thing only worked if Grace was here to make it work. without Grace, i have an emotionally unbalanced wolf and a Volkswagen.

I brought the Beetle to life with a roar. Well. Not really a roar. A Volkswagen Bug doesn't roar. But it sort of growled...

Sneaky would be a lime-green Volkswagen. Nobody would suspect the assassins in the lime-green Volkswagen.

One more thing. I sold the mustang. Too conspicuous. Don't get too excited, but I bought you a little something with the extra cash. I heard you've had your eye on a Volkswagen. The owner is dropping it by tomorrow. I paid for a full tank of gas, so make sure she delivers.

El taco sudado es el Volkswagen de los tacos: práctico, bueno y económico

He was a gorgeous testament to the male gender, and I was an average looking gal that could bench press a Volkswagen. Nothing good could come of this.

When you realize that the Volkswagen sign-and-drive “event” is code for “we’re making the experience of buying a car slightly less miserable than usual,” you’ll start to appreciate just how low the automotive industry has sunk.

Is the journey the destination? Please, no. Let me out of your Volkswagen bus at the next corner.

There are two Venices I know about and one of them is a hotel in Vegas. The other is an L.A. beach where pretty girls walk their dogs while wearing as little as possible and mutant slabs of tanned, posthuman beef sip iced steroid lattes and pump iron until their pecs are the size of Volkswagens.

The author makes a tacit deal with the reader. You hand them a backpack. You ask them to place certain things in it — to remember, to keep in mind — as they make their way up the hill. If you hand them a yellow Volkswagen and they have to haul this to the top of the mountain — to the end of the story — and they find that this Volkswagen has nothing whatsoever to do with your story, you're going to have a very irritated reader on your hands.

It's beyond him now. It's time for you to do your own thing." "My thing? My thing only worked if Grace was here to make it work. without Grace, I have an emotionally unbalanced wolf and a Volkswagen.

Josie’s house was near the edge of town, next to the used car lot. When a person was done with a car, and they didn’t need to pawn it, they would park it in the used car lot, open the door, and run as fast they could for the fence, before the used car salesmen could catch them. No one ever came to buy one. The used car salesmen loped between the lines of cars, their hackles raised and their fur on end. They would stroke the hood of a Toyota Sienna, radiant with heat in the desert sun, or poke curiously at the bumper of a Volkswagen Golf, nearly dislodged by potholes and tied on with a few zip ties. The used car salesmen were fast and ravenous, and sometimes a person who meant only to leave their car would leave much more than that.

There were some very good books in the backseat of the little Volkswagen; good books were the best protection from evil that Pepe had actually held in his hands—you could not hold faith in Jesus in your hands, not in quite the same way you could hold good books.

Intel engineers did a rough calculation of what would happen had a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle improved at the same rate as microchips did under Moore’s law. These are the numbers: Today, that Beetle would be able to go about three hundred thousand miles per hour. It would get two million miles per gallon of gas, and it would cost four cents! Intel engineers also estimated that if automobile fuel efficiency improved at the same rate as Moore’s law, you could, roughly speaking, drive a car your whole life on one tank of gasoline. What

His treatment of mechanical problems wasn't divorced from the worldly situations in which they arise, and as a result [John Muir's service manual on Volkswagens] is extraordinarily clear and useful. It has a human quality, as well.

I’m a good, old-fashioned human, forcibly joined with an x-ray eye and a pneumatic penis because I was too stupid to stop fighting.” “Not the damn penis again...” said Thor, writhing on the couch. “What? I’m proud of it, Thor. I can lift a god damned Volkswagen.” “Christ, Mark, now I’m picturing it. And there’s a midget watching you for some reason.

I stopped looking at the cars after the first few miles. Once I started to see past the exteriors, I saw what lay inside some of them and felt the urge to sprint to the nearest freeway exit. Some people had tried to outrun The Plague by leaving town. They hadn't realized the illness could still find them in their cars, and now the 405 was one of the largest graveyards in the world. I thought for a moment about all of the other cities across the globe that probably had scenes just like this. My eyes stung, wondering if my mother, my dad, or any of my friends were in similar graveyards. I made the mistake of glancing into an overturned Volkswagen Beetle as I passed and saw a pair of legs clad in jeans and white Jack Purcell sneakers in the shadows of the car. They reminded me of Sarah's shoes. The man who laced those up that morning hadn't realized he wouldn't be taking them off again.

Innovators test limits, dealing with tools that have the potential of bringing great good to the world, or great destruction.

Technology is about broadening our ideas of what is possible.

Yo mama is so fat that she looks like she´s smuggling a Volkswagen.

It was exactly like attempting to lift a Volkswagen Beetle. It looked so cute, so ready to be lifted—and yet it was impossible to do.

some twenty more miles on an old two-lane country road. Traffic was light, just a couple of pickups and a Volkswagen,

It’s an old, buttery-yellow Volkswagen—the ones you’d see hippies back in the 70s driving around.

A Volkswagen that helps you get around provides more value than a Mercedes that is never driven.

My first vegetable garden was in a hard-packed dirt driveway in Boulder, Colorado. I was living in a basement apartment there, having jumped at the chance to come out West with a friend in his Volkswagen Bug, fleeing college and inner-city Philadelphia. I was twenty, hungry for experience, and fully intending to be a ski bum in my new life. But it didn’t turn out that way.

Often the men and women who find or discover the scientific principles that change our world are men and women who are moved—in the same way any writer or artist is moved—by a deep curiosity about the unknown.

What's wrong with these Volkswagen model names anyway? What the fuck is a Tiguan? They should go back to the trad German names, names like Masterracer, Schwarzersmashen, Judenkillen, and Boschenbabybayoneten.

You have demons?" "Yes." That answer didn't surprise me, although how these demons connected with the movie was anybody's guess. "Volkswagen demons," he said. "You have Volkswagen demons?" "Yes. There. I said it. Happy now?

...All without any more sound than flipping over a playing card. And sitting in this limo, compared to my fifteen-year-old Volkswagen Beetle I'd bought off a friend, was as quiet as sitting at the bottom of a lake wearing earplugs.

Obviously, a lot of people involved with Volkswagen's emissions were aware of the diesel car software cheat. One has to wonder how many of them tried to stop it and perhaps were demoted or lost their jobs over trying to prevent the secret Volkswagen car emissions fraud?

The Third Reich made it its mission to use the authority of the state to coordinate efforts within industry to devise standardized and simplified versions of key consumer commodities. These would then be produced at the lowest possible price, enabling the German population to achieve an immediate breakthrough to a higher standard of living. The epithet which was generally attached to these products was Volk: the Volksempfaenger (radio), Volkswohnung (apartments), Volkswagen, Volkskuehlschrank (refrigerator), Volkstraktor (tractor).34 This list contains only those products that enjoyed the official backing of one or more agencies in the Third Reich. Private producers, however, had long appreciated that the term ‘Volk’ had good marketing potential, and they, too, joined the bandwagon. Amongst the various products they touted were Volks-gramophone (people’s gramophone), Volksmotorraeder (people’s motorbikes) and Volksnaehmaschinen (people’s sewing machines). In fact, by 1933 the use of the term ‘Volk’ had become so inflationary that the newly established German advertising council was forced to ban the unlicensed use of the term.

There are children on the island who go barefoot all summer and wear feathers in their hair, the Volkswagen vans in which their parents arrived in the ’70s turning to rust in the forest. Every year there are approximately two hundred days of rain. There’s a village of sorts by the ferry terminal: a general store with one gas pump, a health-food store, a real-estate office, an elementary school with sixty students, a community hall with two massive carved mermaids holding hands to form an archway over the front door and a tiny library attached. The rest of the island is mostly rock and forest, narrow roads with dirt driveways disappearing into the trees.

The man who owned the bookstore was, of course, a Jew, a retired merchant seamen who had been torpedoed in the north Atlantic and floated there day after day until death did not want him. He had a young wife, a heart attack, a Volkswagen, and a home. He learned about life at 16, first from Dostoyevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.

Her father drove a Humber Super Snipe. Cars don’t have names like that any more, do they? I drive a Volkswagen Polo. But Humber Super Snipe—those were words that eased off the tongue as smoothly as “the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.” Humber Super Snipe. Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire. Jowett Javelin. Jensen Interceptor. Even Wolseley Farina and Hillman

Nothing dates faster than people’s fantasies about the future. This is what you get when perfectly decent, intelligent and talented men start thinking in terms of space, rather than place, and about single rather than multiple meanings. It’s what you get when you design for political aspirations and not real human needs. You get miles of jerry-built platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens.

Read. You should read Bukowski and Ferlinghetti, read Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and listen to Coltrane, Nina Simone, Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Son House, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Miles Davis, Lou Reed, Nick Drake, Bobbie Gentry, George Jones, Jimmy Reed, Odetta, Funkadelic, and Woody Guthrie. Drive across America. Ride trains. Fly to countries beyond your comfort zone. Try different things. Join hands across the water. Different foods. New tasks. Different menus and tastes. Talk with the guy who’s working in construction on your block, who’s working on the highway you’re traveling on. Speak with your neighbors. Get to know them. Practice civil disobedience. Try new resistance. Be part of the solution, not the problem. Don’t litter the earth, it’s the only one you have, learn to love her. Care for her. Learn another language. Trust your friends with kindness. You will need them one day. You will need earth one day. Do not fear death. There are worse things than death. Do not fear the reaper. Lie in the sunshine but from time to time let the neon light your way. ZZ Top, Jefferson Airplane, Spirit. Get a haircut. Dye your hair pink or blue. Do it for you. Wear eyeliner. Your eyes are the windows to your soul. Show them off. Wear a feather in your cap. Run around like the Mad Hatter. Perhaps he had the answer. Visit the desert. Go to the zoo. Go to a county fair. Ride the Ferris wheel. Ride a horse. Pet a pig. Ride a donkey. Protest against war. Put a peace symbol on your automobile. Drive a Volkswagen. Slow down for skateboarders. They might have the answers. Eat gingerbread men. Pray to the moon and the stars. God is out there somewhere. Don’t worry. You’ll find out where soon enough. Dance. Even if you don’t know how to dance. Read The Four Agreements. Read the Bible. Read the Bhagavad Gita. Join nothing. It won’t help. No games, no church, no religion, no yellow-brick road, no way to Oz. Wear beads. Watch a caterpillar in the sun.

Finding a situation that catches the key competitor or competitors with conflicting goals is at the heart of many company success stories. The slow Swiss reaction to the Timex watch provides an example. Timex sold its watches through drugstores, rather than through the traditional jewelry store outlets for watches, and emphasized very low cost, the need for no repair, and the fact that a watch was not a status item but a functional part of the wardrobe. The strong sales of the Timex watch eventually threatened the financial and growth goals of the Swiss, but it also raised an important dilemma for them were they to retaliate against it directly. The Swiss had a big stake in the jewelry store as a channel and a large investment in the Swiss image of the watch as a piece of fine precision jewelry. Aggressive retaliation against Timex would have helped legitimize the Timex concept, threatened the needed cooperation of jewelers in selling Swiss watches, and blurred the Swiss product image. Thus the Swiss retaliation to Timex never really came. There are many other examples of this principle at work. Volkswagen’s and American Motor’s early strategies of producing a stripped-down basic transportation vehicle with few style changes created a similar dilemma for the Big Three auto producers. They had a strategy built on trade-up and frequent model changes. Bic’s recent introduction of the disposable razor has put Gillette in a difficult position: if it reacts it may cut into the sales of another product in its broad line of razors, a dilemma Bic does not face.4 Finally, IBM has been reluctant to jump into minicomputers because the move will jeopardize its sales of larger mainframe computers.

Think of the future, she whispers. Jumbled images in primary colours. White and red swastika flags waving in the wind; gleaming rockets flying into the air; skyscrapers rise above the Danube, the Thames, the Volga and the Rhine, blond children play under a bright African sun, their uniforms ironed to perfection by their servant-slaves nearby, modern women work at factories assembling Volkswagens, in the mountains in a wood cabin Maria and Erich and their three children go on a skiing holiday, laughing, holding hands…

This particular Sunday, the Sunday I was hurled from a moving car, started out like any other Sunday. My mother woke me up, made me porridge for breakfast. I took my bath while she dressed my baby brother Andrew, who was nine months old. Then we went out to the driveway, but once we were finally all strapped in and ready to go, the car wouldn’t start. My mom had this ancient, broken-down, bright-tangerine Volkswagen Beetle that she picked up for next to nothing. The reason she got it for next to nothing was because it was always breaking down. To this day I hate secondhand cars. Almost everything that’s ever gone wrong in my life I can trace back to a secondhand car. Secondhand cars made me get detention for being late for school. Secondhand cars left us hitchhiking on the side of the freeway. A secondhand car was also the reason my mom got married. If it hadn’t been for the Volkswagen that didn’t work, we never would have looked for the mechanic who became the husband who became the stepfather who became the man who tortured us for years and put a bullet in the back of my mother’s head—I’ll take the new car with the warranty every time.

But paging through it for the first time while actually sitting on the trail was less reassuring than I’d hoped. There were things I’d overlooked, I saw now, such as a quote on page 6 by a fellow named Charles Long, with whom the authors of The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California heartily agreed, that said, “How can a book describe the psychological factors a person must prepare for … the despair, the alienation, the anxiety and especially the pain, both physical and mental, which slices to the very heart of the hiker’s volition, which are the real things that must be planned for? No words can transmit those factors …” I sat pie-eyed, with a lurching knowledge that indeed no words could transmit those factors. They didn’t have to. I now knew exactly what they were. I’d learned about them by having hiked a little more than three miles in the desert mountains beneath a pack that resembled a Volkswagen Beetle. I read on, noting intimations that it would be wise to improve one’s physical fitness before setting out, to train specifically for the hike, perhaps. And, of course, admonishments about backpack weight. Suggestions even to refrain from carrying the entire guidebook itself because it was too heavy to carry all at once and unnecessary anyway—one could photocopy or rip out needed sections and include the necessary bit in the next resupply box. I closed the book. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Of ripping the guidebook into sections? Because I was a big fat idiot and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, that’s why. And I was alone in the wilderness with a beast of a load to carry while finding that out. I wrapped my arms around my legs and pressed my face into the tops of my bare knees and closed my eyes, huddled into the ball of myself, the wind whipping my shoulder-length hair in a frenzy.

I dreamt that I took William Burrough’s penis and tied it up with piano wire. I hung him like a Chagall painting…In the next part J.G. Ballard swam through streets of female urine. The girls read his book Crash and then mowed him down with their Volkswagen, crushing his chest slowly against a brick wall. As he screamed in agony larger than representation can accommodate, they referred to his text and had orgasms. Later, they jumped up and down yelling, ‘You’re not a hero. You’re not a hero. You’re not. You’re not. You’re not.’ “ “How do you analyze that part of the dream, Anna?” …”I guess I’m nervous about my birthday.

The truth is that things do not work out, that there are no solutions, and you can go a year, a whole year, and be no better, no more healed, maybe even worse, be so skittish that if you’re walking down the street with Anna, and if someone opens a car door and gets out and slams the door you turn around, honest-to-god ready to kill them, turn around so fast that Anna, who knows what is happening, cannot even open her mouth in time and then you’re standing there, crying, and there’s some guy in a leather jacket and a fedora getting out of his Volkswagen Rabbit staring at you like, is this girl all right? and you want to be like, this girl is not all right, this girl will never be all right.

I wish I could have shown you that engineheart- the system of pieces and parts that moved us forward, that moves us forward still. One day, a few weeks after my son’s death, I took the bolt off the casing and opened it up. Just to see how it worked. Opening that heart was like the opening the first page of a book- there were characters (me, the Memory of My Father), there was rhythm and chronology, I saw, in the images, old roads I’d forgotten- and scenes from stories where the VW was just a newborn. I do know that it held a true translation: miles to words, words to notes, notes to time. It was the HEART that converted the pedestrian song of Northampton to something meaningful, and it did so via some sort of fusion: the turtle that howls a bluegrass tune at the edge of Bow Lake becomes a warning in the VW heart…and that’s just the beginning- the first heart layer. It will take years and years of study, and the energy of every single living thing, to understand the tiny minds and roads in the subsequent layers, the mechanics at work to make every single heartmoment turn together… The point is, this WAS always the way it was supposed to be. Even I could see that the Volkswagen heart was wired for travel-genetically coded. His pages were already written-as are mine and yours. Yes, yours too! I am looking into your eyes right now and I am reading your life, and I am excited/sorry for what the road holds for you. It’s going to be amazing/really difficult. You’ll love/loathe every minute of it!

A young man dreamed of being an actor, but in the early 1980s, he wasn’t getting the big parts he wanted. Broke and discouraged, he drove his beat-up old car to the top of a hill overlooking the city of Los Angeles and did something unusual. He wrote himself a check for ten million dollars for “Acting services rendered.” This young man had grown up so poor his family lived in a Volkswagen van at one time. He put that check in his wallet and kept it there. When things got tough, he’d pull it out and look at it to remind himself of his dream. A dozen years later, that same young man, the comedian Jim Carrey, was making fifteen million to twenty-five million a movie. Studies tell us that we move toward what we consistently see. You should keep something in front of you, even if it’s symbolic, to remind you of what you are believing for.

So the bad Ninjamobile swept along on the great Ventura, among Olympic visitors from everywhere who teemed all over the freeway system in midday densities till far into the night, shined-up, screaming black motorcades that could have carried any of several office seekers, cruisers heading for treed and more gently roaring boulevards, huge double and triple trailer rigs that loved to find Volkswagens laboring up grades and go sashaying around them gracefully and at gnat's-ass tolerances, plus flirters, deserters, wimps and pimps, speeding like bullets, grinning like chimps, above the heads of TV watchers, lovers under the overpasses, movies at malls letting out, bright gas-station oases in pure fluorescent spill, canopied beneath the palm trees, soon wrapped, down the corridors of the surface streets, in nocturnal smog, the adobe air, the smell of distant fireworks, the spilled, the broken world.

Finally, when everything I was going to carry was in the place that I needed to carry it, a hush came over me. I was ready to begin. I put on my watch, looped my sunglasses around my neck by their pink neoprene holder, donned my hat, and looked at my pack. It was at once enormous and compact, mildly adorable and intimidatingly self-contained. It had an animate quality; in its company, I didn’t feel entirely alone. Standing, it came up to my waist. I gripped it and bent to lift it. It wouldn’t budge. I squatted and grasped its frame more robustly and tried to lift it again. Again it did not move. Not even an inch. I tried to lift it with both hands, with my legs braced beneath me, while attempting to wrap it in a bear hug, with all of my breath and my might and my will, with everything in me. And still it would not come. It was exactly like attempting to lift a Volkswagen Beetle. It looked so cute, so ready to be lifted—and yet it was impossible to do.

En eso, estalló la balacera a sus espaldas. Una gritería ensordecedora se levantó alrededor; la gente corría entre los autos, los carros se trepaban a las veredas. Antonio oyó voces histéricas: «¡Ríndanse, carajo!». «¡Están rodeados, pendejos!» Al ver que Juan Tomás, exhausto, se paraba, se paró también a su lado y comenzó a disparar. Lo hacía a ciegas, porque caliés y guardias se escudaban detrás de los Volkswagen, atravesados como parapetos en la pista, interrumpiendo el tráfico. Vio caer a Juan Tomás de rodillas, y lo vio llevarse la pistola a la boca, pero no alcanzó a dispararse porque varios impactos lo tumbaron. A él le habían caído muchas balas ya, pero no estaba muerto. «No estoy muerto, coño, no estoy.» Había disparado todos los tiros de su cargador y, en el suelo, trataba de deslizar la mano al bolsillo para tragarse la estricnina. La maldita mano pendeja no le obedeció. No hacía falta, Antonio. Veía las estrellas brillantes de la noche que empezaba, veía la risueña cara de Tavito y se sentía joven otra vez.

Which meant, if somehow GameStop did start to go up, the people who had shorted the company would begin to feel pressure to buy; the more the stock went up, the heavier that pressure became. As the shorts began to cover, buying shares to return them to their lenders, the stock would rise even higher. In financial parlance, this was something called a 'short squeeze.' It didn't happen often, but when it did, it could be spectacular. Most famously, in 2008, a surprise takeover attempt of the German automaker Volkswagen by rival Porsche drove Volkswagen's stock price up by a factor of 5 — briefly making it the most valuable company in the world — in two quick days of trading, as short selling funds struggled to cover their positions. Similarly, a battle between two hedge fund titans — Bill Ackman, of Pershing Square Capital Management, and Carl Icahn — led to a squeeze involving supplement maker — and alleged pyramid marketer — Herbalife, which cost Ackman a reported $1 billion. And perhaps the first widely reported short squeeze dated back a century, to 1923, when grocery magnate Clarence Saunders successfully decimated short sellers who had targeted his nascent chain of Piggly Wiggly grocery stores.

To purchase a Volkswagen, customers were required to make a weekly deposit of at least 5 Reichsmarks into a DAF account on which they received no interest. Once the account balance had reached 750 Reichsmarks, the customer was entitled to delivery of a VW. The DAF meanwhile achieved an interest saving of 130 Reichsmarks per car. In addition, purchasers of the VW were required to take out a two-year insurance contract priced at 200 Reichsmarks. The VW savings contract was non-transferable, except in case of death, and withdrawal from the contract normally meant the forfeit of the entire sum deposited. Remarkably, 270,000 people signed up to these contracts by the end of 1939 and by the end of the war the number of VW-savers had risen to 340,000. In total, the DAF netted 275 million Reichsmarks in deposits. But not a single Volkswagen was ever delivered to a civilian customer in the Third Reich. After 1939, the entire output was reserved for official uses of various kinds. Most of Porsche’s half-finished factory was turned over to military production. The 275 million Reichsmarks deposited by the VW savers were lost in the post-war inflation. After a long legal battle, VW’s first customers received partial compensation only in the 1960s.

Emotions get our attention As the television advertisement opens, we see two men talking in a car. They are having a mildly heated discussion about one of them overusing the word “like” in conversation. As the argument continues, we notice out the passenger window another car barreling toward the men. It smashes into them. There are screams, sounds of shattering glass, quick-cut shots showing the men bouncing in the car, twisted metal. The final shot shows the men standing, in disbelief, outside their wrecked Volkswagen Passat. In a twist on a well-known expletive, these words flash on the screen: “Safe Happens.” The spot ends with a picture of another Passat, this one intact and complete with its five-star side-crash safety rating. It is a memorable, even disturbing, 30-second spot. That’s because it’s charged with emotion. Emotionally charged events are better remembered—for longer, and with more accuracy—than neutral events. While this idea may seem intuitively obvious, it’s frustrating to demonstrate scientifically because the research community is still debating exactly what an emotion is. What we can say for sure is that when your brain detects an emotionally charged event, your amygdala (a part of your brain that helps create and maintain emotions) releases the chemical dopamine into your system. Dopamine greatly aids memory and information processing. You can think of it like a Post-it note that reads “Remember this!” Getting one’s brain to put a chemical Post-it note on a given piece of information means that information is going to be more robustly processed. It is what every teacher, parent, and ad executive wants.

What are they doing?” he whispered. The pinball machine’s scoreboard was full, the bank’s windows fogged. They were so involved- so cofaithed- that they didn’t know we were there. The VW’s face joined, “Are they hurting each other?” I took a breath. “There’s risk involved, because of what they can’t see. Plus the risk of trust. But no-they’re not hurting each other.” The bank whispered something in the pinball machine’s ear and the pinball machine giggled. “What are they saying to each other?” the VW said. “They’re expressing their faith, VW-sharing it.” Just then I heard a rustle, soft at first, then louder…Distracted by other things-the VW, the faith in the trees- I had forgotten to keep the mountain straight in my mind. I had let it go, and now it was changing, reversing itself, growing young: the leaves were turning from brown back to green… THIS was western Massachusetts-unpredictable; a changing moving bitch; a switcher of faces…how could I have many any progress here when mountains were mountains one moment and something else the next; when people were here one day and then GONE?

In 2015, Herbert Diess was recruited away from BMW to lead the Volkswagen car group with a new agenda. One of his first questions was, What is Volkswagen’s electric car strategy? His question went beyond diesel versus gasoline to a challenge that would be closing in on all European automakers.

new era” for Volkswagen.12 The company announced that it would launch at least seventy-five all-electric vehicles by 2028. “The future belongs to electric drive,” said Diess. “Without EVs, we can’t win the battle against climate change.” He also pledged that the company would become “carbon neutral across the whole supply chain.

Porsche made more money last year from selling almost 190,000 cars than its parent company, Volkswagen, made from selling more than 4.5 million.

Rob Jetten, met witte sneakers én jeans, heeft een strafblad. Dictators 1937-1940.

while screaming, “I’m not a thief! I’m her son!” The last thing I wanted to do that Sunday morning was climb into some crowded minibus, but the second I heard my mom say sun’qhela I knew my fate was sealed. She gathered up Andrew and we climbed out of the Volkswagen and went out to try to catch a ride.

IG Farben appears to have been the first company to fully integrate concentration camp labor into modern industrial production, and it eventually became known in Germany as a model enterprise for this new technique. Farben executives even provided advice and training on the large-scale use of forced labor for executives from Volkswagen, Messerschmitt, Heinkel, and other major companies.

Members of the boards of directors at IG Farben, Siemens, Krupp, Volkswagen, and other major companies that desired large numbers of forced laborers personally took on the task of high-level liaison with the SS on labor matters.

He'd seen Volkswagens that were smaller than the ring on her finger.

In 2016, Albanian police purchased electric cars. However, at the time, there were no recharging spots at Albanian fuel stations or around Albanian cities, so the cars had to head back to the police stations to be recharged every day or twice a day. The estimated range of the purchased Volkswagen e-Golf varied between 130 and 190 kilometres (80-118 miles).

Investors appear to be focused on a firm’s vision, its narrative about where it could be in a decade. That’s how Tesla’s value now exceeds that of Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, and Honda combined. That’s despite the fact that in 2020 Tesla will produce approximately 400,000 vehicles, while the other four companies will build a combined 26,000,000.

You don’t need to be a hippie to own a Volkswagen campervan. VW camper soon became just as well known for its funky yet functional design, as well as a fashion statement.

It took Apple 42 years to reach $1 trillion in value, and 20 weeks to accelerate from $1 trillion to $2 trillion (March to August 2020). In those same weeks, Tesla became not only the most valuable car company in the world, but more valuable than Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, and Honda . . . combined.

I love wrestling. But there’s no future in it. It’s just not a realistic dream. I want to find something that I love as much, but that’s a safer choice, you know what I mean?” “Well, you can’t do that anymore. But have you considered business studies?” she responded, deadpan. Spending four years doing something so utterly boring felt like a prison sentence. I left, barely able to see through my tears as I bawled my eyes out in my red Volkswagen Polo. I drove across a suspended bridge and imagined myself veering to the left and plummeting into the water far below. Just one flick of the steering wheel and it’ll be over. Hold on, ya bastard. It’ll get better. I was now white-knuckling the steering wheel. Any move I make from here is better than this. Fuck this, I thought. You don’t want to do business. You don’t want to do sports management. You want to perform. Do that. Find a way. Find a fucking way, Rebecca. I crossed the bridge.

It took Apple 42 years to reach $1 trillion in value, and 20 weeks to accelerate from $1 trillion to $2 trillion (March to August 2020). In those same weeks, Tesla became not only the most valuable car company in the world, but more valuable than Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, and Honda … combined.

Why the hell is Senile Suzy in your driveway?” I squeak, my tone bordering on hysterical. Right before me is my big, yellow Volkswagen van in all its glory, gleaming beneath the sunlight. He quirks a brow. “You never said why you chose that name,” he deflects. “She’s a goddamn imbecile and moody as fuck. Why is she here?” “Because this is where she belongs. This is where you belong.” I curl my bottom lip between my teeth, tears welling in my eyes. “How did you find her?” I ask, the words raspy and uneven. He shrugs casually. “After you fell asleep at the hospital, a nurse let me use her phone, and I called to make sure it was still parked at Vilen’s Bend. It was, so I had my friend, Troy, retrieve it for me and bring it here.” I laugh, because if I don’t, I’ll cry. The fact that he remembered where I parked it is enough to have my ovaries exploding. “You didn’t have to do that,” I choke out. “Didn’t I say it would be waiting for you? Don’t ever doubt what I would do for you, Sawyer.” He doesn’t let me answer, nor that I’d have one for him anyway.

The Volkswagen had been ordered up by Hitler, financed by money confiscated from workers, and built initially in a factory staffed by forced laborers.

Conceived by a totalitarian government bent on military conquest, the people’s car lived up to its name only when there was peace, when Germany was a democracy and Western ally, and the company had access to markets worldwide.

VW was like North Korea without labor camps,” Ellinghorst said, paraphrasing a description of the company once made by Der Spiegel magazine: “You have to obey everyone.

As Volkswagen shares plummeted, Porsche’s obligations to Maple Bank began piling up on an almost hourly basis. At 8:14 a.m. on October 21, for example, Maple Bank confirmed in an e-mail to executives in Porsche’s finance department that it had received €300 million ($420 million) in security.15 At a few minutes after noon, a bank employee sent another e-mail to the Porsche executives advising them of their obligation to transfer another 243 million ($340 million). Porsche obliged forty minutes later. Then, at 2:10 p.m., Maple Bank asked for another €417 million ($584 million). And on it went.

In Europe, with its astronomical fuel prices, Volkswagen could market diesel on fuel economy. In the United States, where gasoline was cheaper than diesel and much less expensive than in Europe, Volkswagen needed another pitch. Positioning Volkswagen as a car for environmentally conscious drivers seemed like a clever strategy from many angles. It provided a way to attack archrival Toyota, whose hybrid Prius had become a hit and shown that people would buy a car that lent its owners a green halo. Volkswagen was not in a position to offer competing hybrids, because it had been slow to develop any. But Volkswagen was already a leader in diesel.

Piëch took office on January 1, 1993. He was well aware that he was regarded with apprehension, if not hostility, by many people in the company. “Only when a company is in severe difficulty does it let in someone like me,” he wrote later.31 “In normal, calm times I never would have gotten a chance.

Especially when driving uphill, the lighter the car, the faster it would go. To save a few pounds, some Porsche racers had aluminum fuel tanks that would easily split open in a crash, engulfing the car in flames. By Piëch’s account, four Porsche racers died during his time as head of the racing program, but none because of his designs.

Because nothing can kill a Volkswagen, man,” Jim said with a grin.

All in all, though, shareholders appreciated Piëch’s role in averting disaster in 1992 and gave him a standing ovation. It is unlikely that any of them concerned themselves with Piëch’s dictatorial style of management, or the fact that he had taken office complaining about the authoritarians in Wolfsburg, and left as the most authoritarian of them all. The important thing was the result.

When Piëch returned to Wolfsburg in September 2015 for a meeting of the shareholder’s committee, arriving in a red Bentley driven by Ursula, his mere appearance sparked speculation that he was plotting a comeback.7 So formidable was Piëch’s reputation as a corporate power player that no one would believe that he was really gone until he lay in his grave, and perhaps then only if he had a stake through his heart.

The idea that CARB would take a closer look at the older models raised even more alarm inside Volkswagen. “We must be sure to prevent the authority from testing the Gen 1!” one employee wrote in an e-mail, referring to the first generation of clean diesels.2 “If the Gen 1 goes on to the roller at CARB, then we’ll have nothing to laugh about!!!!!

At least since 1998, when truck engine makers paid one billion dollars to settle an emissions scandal, vehicle manufacturers had been on notice that getting caught trying to fool the government could be expensive. In the meantime, the technology to check auto emissions on the road had also advanced, increasing the chances of discovery. Everyone in the industry knew that—except, apparently, Volkswagen. “I was shocked,” Carder said. “After all the stuff that happened in the nineties, how could anyone do this?

The essence of the “made in Germany” brand is that, whatever people might think of the Germans, they’re damn good engineers. In Volkswagen’s case, it now looked as though some of the vaunted engineering was just bluff.

He smiled. Scientists do love Volkswagens!

where they’d drink Mountain Dew, play Nerf basketball, and talk for hours, riffing on the film’s numerous bull’s-eyes: masculinity, consumerism, their aggravating elders. “We were sitting around, thinking of all the things we wanted to stick a fork [into],” says Norton, who was especially irked by the recent revival of the Volkswagen Beetle, an icon of the flower-power era that was being targeted to younger drivers. “They just wanted to repackage an authentic baby boomer youth experience to us—they don’t even want us to have our own,” he says, laughing. “They just want us to buy sentiment for the sixties, with a little fucking molded flower that you sit in the dashboard. And they wonder why we’re cynical.

desperate housewives. Ferguson, Missouri, torched by its residents following the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager, epitomises the failure of many American suburbs. Mayors like boasting about their downtown trams or metrosexual loft dwellers not their suburbs. But the planet as a whole is fast becoming suburban. In the emerging world almost every metropolis is growing in size faster than in population. Having bought their Gucci handbags and Volkswagens, the new Asian middle class is buying living space, resulting in colossal sprawl. Many of the new suburbs are high-rise, though still car-oriented; others are straight clones of American suburbs (take a look at Orange County, outside Beijing). What should governments do about it?

Fake engine noise has become one of the auto industry's dirty little secrets, with automakers from BMW to Volkswagen turning to a sound-boosting bag of tricks. Without them, today's more fuel-efficient engines would sound far quieter and, automakers worry, seemingly less powerful, potentially pushing buyers away.

Next time a car ad appears on your television, pause for a moment and really listen to what’s being said. When you realize that the Volkswagen sign-and-drive “event” is code for “we’re making the experience of buying a car slightly less miserable than usual,” you’ll start to appreciate just how low the automotive industry has sunk. In

A rat,” she said, breathless. “Behind that box. It’s four feet long.” Lucy wasn’t trying to get at anything in the closet. “I think you scared my dog,” he said. “The rat scared her, I bet.” Noah entered the closet cautiously, kicked the box, and when nothing rustled, he pulled it out a bit. Ah. Behind the box was a dead mouse. Probably four inches long at best. It was very dead, dried out, kaput. He lifted it by the tail and held it toward her. “Is this the rat?” “No. My rat is much bigger. That must be its baby.” “Maybe you just got scared and it looked much bigger.” “No,” she said. “There’s a rat the size of a Volkswagen in there.” “Was it a dead rat, Ellie?” “Possibly. It wasn’t moving.” He went into the downstairs bathroom and dropped the thing in the trash. “Why did you do that?” she yelled, getting to her feet. “What if he gets out of there and attacks me?” “He’s petrified. It’s over,” Noah said. Then he smiled at her. “I’ll protect you.” “Right,” she said. “So far you don’t even have the real rat! What good are you?

growing up so poor that for a time his family lived in their Volkswagen van on a relative’s lawn, Jim Carrey believed in his future. Every night in the late 1980’s, Carrey would drive atop a large hill that looked down over Los Angeles and visualize directors valuing his work. At the time, he was a broke and struggling young comic. One night in 1990, while looking down on Los Angeles and dreaming of his future, Carrey wrote himself a check for $10 million and put in the notation line “for acting services rendered.” He dated the check for Thanksgiving 1995 and stuck it in his wallet. He gave himself five years. And just before Thanksgiving of 1995, he got paid $10 million for Dumb and Dumber.

When we think of foreign direct investment, most of us think about Intel building a new microchip factory in Costa Rica or Volkswagen laying down a new assembly line in China-this is known as 'green-field' investment. But a lot of foreign direct investment is made by foreigners buying into an existing local company- or 'brownfield' investment. Brownfield investment has accounted for over half of total world FDI since the 1990s, although the share is lower for developing countries, for the obvious reason that they have relatively fewer firms that foreigners want to take over. At its height in 2001, it accounted for as much as 80% of total world FDI.

College was constantly creating these predicaments: in the morning, you’re an interested, earnest student trying to understand John Rawls’s veil of ignorance, in the evening you’re a dumb-ass five beers deep and peeing on the hood of Carl Sagan’s Volkswagen Rabbit.

O meu pai dizia sempre que os carros da Volkswagen resistiam a tudo porque não-sei-quê da Segunda Guerra Mundial, e eu, aqui dentro, queria que o meu pai fosse um carro da Volkswagen. Para que nunca desse problemas. Para que nunca me acabasse. "Não atires pedras a estranhos porque pode ser o teu pai

It was then Gray wished she could snap her own fingers or nod her head like Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie and teleport herself into the front seat of the Volkswagen Bug.

In 2014, we worked together for the last time. We did a Volkswagen commercial—for German television. It was a simple concept to introduce its new electric car. In recognition of the international appeal of Star Trek, a young German boy recognizes me. As the theme plays in the background, he runs into his room, which is filled from floor to ceiling with Star Trek memorabilia. Then, as the Star Trek theme plays, a garage door slowly lifts open to reveal—the new Volkswagen—with me driving. As the two of us drive along, we suddenly stop next to a futuristic concept car—with Leonard driving. He looks at us, looks at the car, and says the one word that so defined Spock: “Fascinating.” It’s hard to believe that was the last time I saw him, but it was.

Lab Report Sheet The Principle: The Volkswagen Jetta Principle The Theory: You impact the field and draw from it according to your beliefs and expectations. The Question: Do I really see only what I expect to see? The Hypothesis: If I decide to look for sunset-beige cars and butterflies (or purple feathers), I will find them. Time Required: 48 hours Today’s Date:__________ Time:__________ The Approach: According to this crazy Pam Grout girl, the world out there reflects what I want to see. She says that it’s nothing but my own illusions that keep me from experiencing peace, joy, and love. So even though I suspect she’s cracked, today I’m going to look for sunset-beige cars. Tomorrow, I’ll go butterfly hunting. a. Number of sunset-beige cars observed: __________ b. Number of butterflies observed: __________ Research Notes:________________________________ _____________________________________________

Imagine trying to jerry-rig a Volkswagen Beetle to travel at speeds of 150 miles per hour. In 1933, Adolf Hitler commissioned Dr. Ferdinand Porsche to develop a cheap car that could get 40 miles per gallon of gas and provide a reliable form of transportation for the average German family. The result was the VW Beetle. This history, Hitler’s plan, places constraints on the ways we can modify the Beetle today; the engineering can be tweaked only so far before major problems arise and the car reaches its limit. In many ways, we humans are the fish equivalent of a hot-rod Beetle. Take the body plan of a fish, dress it up to be a mammal, then tweak and twist that mammal until it walks on two legs, talks, thinks, and has superfine control of its fingers—and you have a recipe for problems. We can dress up a fish only so much without paying a price. In a perfectly designed world—one with no history—we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer.

Automakers typically offer deals in the summer to clear out inventory before cars from the new model year arrive in the fall. But July's discounts were unusually high. Incentives rose 8 percent - $216 per vehicle - over last July, according to Jesse Toprak, chief analyst for Cars.com. Incentives averaged $2,774 per vehicle, the most since August 2010. Toprak said Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen and Hyundai were the most generous. Chrysler saw the biggest gain in July, with sales up 20 percent to 140,102, led by the Ram pickup and the new Jeep Cherokee small SUV. Jeep sales rose 41 percent overall.

How to read this book: Even after I was told my father was dead, I believed (I still believe) that I could fix everything- that if I logged enough miles in my VW and kept telling stories through the countless dead ends and breakdowns, I could undo the terrible tree events…not that I should have expected to with this particular power, which is incomplete (as I was forced to sell a few stories and procedures for time-of-money), full of holes. Sure, the book turns on, lights up; its fans whirr and the bookengine crunches. But some of the pages are completely blank; others hang by a thread. the book’s transmission is shot, too, so don’t’ be surprised if the book slips from one version to the next as you’re reading .Finally, the thermostat’s misked, so you should expect sudden changes in temperature, the pages might get cold, or it may begin to snow between paragraphs, or you may turn the page and get hit with a faceful of rain or blinding beams of sunlight. So go ahead. Do it-open the book. See? You see me, right? And I see you. See? I am reading your face, your eyes, your lips. I know the sufferdust on your brow. I can see you reading, and I can tell, too, when you are here, when you are absent, what you’ve read and how it affects you. There is no more hiding. I see your chords- your fratures, your cold gifts, where and when you’ve hurt people…your stories are written right there on your face!

The heart of the engine is the one part that I can’t help you find, unfortunately. There is just no way for me to document its location; it’s different in every car. I could barely find the heart of my VW-it was too confusing, and there were too many routes. Every time I thought I’d reach the center point I realized I was lost, not where I thought I was, following the wrong sunrise yet again. I wonder: Does the heart move around or something? The geographic arrangement of the engine compartment doesn’t make things any easier- some of the mechanical parts are underground, nestled in the hills, and others are hidden behind the hustle and lathe of small mechanical cities. But don’t cloudy-day! We’ll find the heart eventually- I don’t care if we need to tear the engine down to every bolt and moment to do so.

LOVE is measured in GAUGE TWENTY- specifically, love pressure in the surrounding area. If it drops below four percent, though, you may have trouble-the VW might get sad, slow down, or even stop altogether. If this occurs, you have to immediately find/write a story that somehow convinces him that there is more love, caring or compassion in the area than he thinks there is. I can’t tell you how many times this has been a problem for us- how many trips were interrupted because I had to head into the nearest populated town to see if we could find examples of kindness.