Elon Musk has managed to build an electric car/battery/space? house of cards out of taxpayer subsidies and become a stock market darling. VW built the worlds largest car and truck maker the old fashioned way, and today proposed to transition themselves into a financial house of cards powered by dying electric cars to rival Musk’s Tesla. The sober Euro markets responded by shaving a couple percent of VWAG’s stock price.

If you’re waiting for an announcement of just how much VW is going to award us long (not) suffering diesel owners, that’s been put off for another week. And with VW promising to introduce 30 new battery powered “cars” by 2025 totaling a quarter of their production, future diesel development is clearly on the back burner if not in the dumpster. Ready for a new 40+ MPG TDI? Heck, we’ll be lucky if they give us an emissions fix so we can keep our old ones. My local VW dealer has a back lot full of twenty odd brand new TDIs that can’t be sold at least until the settlement is made official, and those may be the last affordable diesel cars allowed in America… Maybe I should pick the one I want and stand by it on the day the settlement is announced, checkbook in hand?

I’ve been faithful to VW all through this crisis, only to have them blindly surrender to the electric car fanatics with nary a struggle. For VWAG this is corporate suicide… The world’s biggest and most profitable car and truck maker can’t pay the bills competing with Tesla et al for the electric car’s less than one percent and falling share of the market. Neglect VWAG’s core market for mass produced affordable diesels and that 600,000 worker payroll will be tough to make. Pull some of the world’s best engineers off working on profitable Porsche, Audi, Lamborgini, MAN, and Scania and the world’s biggest and most profitable auto and truck maker becomes a house of financial cards that will come crashing down in a multinational bankruptcy.

VW, I’m not filing for divorce yet, but you’re sleeping in the driveway. And I got a date with this Ford guy at Le Mans this weekend, sounds like fun…