World status doesn’t mater as this is North America only. Volkswagen doesn’t have a chance and tbh, I doubt they care that much.

They certainly didn’t care enough to make electrify America good.

They were forced to make EA as part of Dieselgate. If most vehicles is the U.S. are on NACS, they will be forced to switch by market forces alone.

Go check out some car forums for folks that depend on EA (like Lucid). I've never had an issue with EA, but the general consensus seems to be that EA reliability is abysmal, with stations frequently being down (though reviews seem to be on an uptrend starting in 2023, so perhaps it was a pandemic related issue).

As another commenter stated, though, Volkswagen was forced to create EA as part of their Dieselgate settlement, and their behavior in the past hasn't exactly instilled confidence that they see it as something worth investing in.

EA is bad at best. Very unreliable network, especially the ones not near urban centers. Yeah you get reliable charging if you’re near big cities but once you’re out in the middle of nowhere, it can be terrifying. I’ve personally arrived at an EA charger to only find it not working and the next closest one was a 50 mile detour. Thankfully I plan liberally, but I’d be in a very bad spot if not. Someone I know, also had a locking problem where the charger wouldn’t detach. And I’ve seen news items relating to literal bricking of cars by using the chargers.

Having to "plan liberally" is something that makes EVs much less usable on long trips. When road tripping, its fastest to arrive at a charger with a very low state of charge (way less than a 50mi buffer). When I road trip my Model X, I trust that the supercharger will work, and I target arrival at a 3-5% state of charge. This allows me to charge at the fastest part of the charging curve, and to depart when the charge rate starts to drop off.

I have road tripped well over 10k miles in my Telsa over the last 5 years, and I've never seen an entire supercharger site offline (like happens with EA). I'm sure it must happen after natural disasters when grid power is cut, but its not the normal state of operations like it is with EA.

EA is pretty bad. The fact that no one can decide what side the connector should be on also leads to chaos (cars splayed out everywhere around the chargers).

> Volkswagen owns Electrify America the only competitor at scale to Tesla's supercharging network.

The only car manufacturer with a competitive charging network or only competitor period? ChargePoint seems better than Tesla my area. Most of the Tesla stations in this area require a hotel stay to charge.

Those are not fast charging stations, they’re L2 destination chargers.

They can’t compete with Tesla’s manufacturing and operational prowess. Their stations are money pits.