Volkswagen just shook up a concept the automotive industry had carried for decades without questioning it.
For the German automaker, quality has always been synonymous with solid construction, mechanical reliability, and technical safety. But that definition is changing — and the change is coming from within, straight from the top.
Andreas Krepp, chief quality officer of the Volkswagen Group, brought up a phrase he heard a lot in the United States that sums up the company’s new mindset pretty well: if it’s not easy, it’s broken.
In the executive’s own words, quality is a variable. It evolves, and anyone who wants to fulfill that promise of quality needs to evolve with it. This vision places user experience on the same level of importance as time-tested technical aspects.
It sounds simple, but the impact is huge. A car can work exactly as designed and still leave the driver feeling lost every time they try to use the navigation system or adjust the air conditioning through the touchscreen. That is now a quality problem — at least in Volkswagen’s view.
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User experience (UX) and user interface (UI) are officially entering the quality equation of a vehicle, right alongside traditional pillars like safety and performance. And this shift changes a lot for the people who build cars — and for the people who buy them. 🚗
What changed in Volkswagen’s definition of quality
For years, automotive engineers measured quality with precision tools: assembly tolerances, material strength, mechanical failure rates, crash performance. All of that is still essential, but Volkswagen realized a massive gap was being ignored — the one between what a car does technically and what a driver feels while using the car day to day. Krepp made it clear that this gap is no longer a comfort detail but a real internal evaluation criterion for the brand. A driver who can’t turn on the seat heater without taking their eyes off the road for 10 seconds is living a poor quality experience — even if the seat heats up perfectly.
An important detail that Krepp himself explained, in an interview on the automotiveIT podcast, is that he sees quality as a hierarchy. At the base of this pyramid sits safety, which remains the non-negotiable foundation of any vehicle. Higher up, UX, UI, and additional comfort features gain space. In other words, nobody is suggesting that safety should be sacrificed to prioritize pretty screens. The idea is to build on that solid foundation an experience that also respects the time and intelligence of the person behind the wheel.
This shift in perspective didn’t come out of nowhere. It reflects a transformation that’s been happening for a while in the consumer technology market. Companies like Apple and Google spent years teaching the public that usability isn’t a bonus — it is the product. When a smartphone is hard to use, it’s considered bad, regardless of its technical specs. Volkswagen is importing that logic into the automotive world, and it represents a significant break from the engineering culture that has always dominated the industry. The end user has become the ultimate judge of the experience, and technical complexity is no longer a valid excuse for confusing interfaces or interaction flows that require an instruction manual to perform simple tasks.
The move has a clear trigger: the accelerated digitization of modern vehicles. Large displays, embedded operating systems, voice assistants, over-the-air updates — all of this brought into the car a level of software complexity that the industry is still learning to manage responsibly. It’s worth noting that Volkswagen has already faced setbacks in this space, and the lessons from those experiences are helping shape the current response, which now relies on the creation of internal UX and UI metrics that carry the same weight as traditional mechanical engineering indicators within the quality assurance processes.
UX and UI as technical criteria, not aesthetic ones
One of the most common misconceptions when it comes to user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) is treating these concepts as if they were just visual choices or personal preferences. Within Volkswagen’s new framework, they are treated as measurable technical requirements. This means an interaction flow that requires too many steps to complete a simple task can fail a quality criterion the same way a sensor malfunction or a paint defect would. The company is developing specific benchmarks to evaluate how long it takes a driver to perform certain actions inside the vehicle, how many screen taps are needed for frequently used functions, and what the expected learning curve looks like for new users of the system.
The distinction between UI and UX matters here. The user interface is what you see and touch — the icons, the menus, the physical or virtual buttons, the typography, the screen layout. The user experience is broader: it’s how you feel throughout your entire interaction with the vehicle, from the moment you get in the car until you reach your destination. A beautiful UI can hide a terrible UX if the way information is organized doesn’t make intuitive sense to someone who’s driving. Volkswagen is working to ensure both aspects are developed together, with interaction design teams integrated into the process from the earliest project phases — and not just called in at the end to put a visual finish on what the engineers already built.
This repositioning also has direct implications for how Volkswagen’s suppliers will be evaluated. Companies that develop software and infotainment systems for the automaker will need to demonstrate that their products meet not only functional specifications but also usability criteria defined by the brand. This creates a chain of accountability that goes well beyond what the automotive industry was used to demanding. It’s a positive pressure that could raise the bar across the entire supply chain involved in creating connected vehicles — and it puts the driver at the center of the equation in a way that used to exist only in marketing talk.
What this means for anyone buying a car today
For consumers, this shift in Volkswagen’s approach might seem abstract at first glance, but the practical effects are pretty tangible. Imagine buying a new car and, in the first few weeks, feeling like you need to memorize menu paths to do simple things like turning off the auto start-stop system or setting the speed limit on the adaptive cruise control. That kind of friction, which used to be treated as a normal learning curve, is now seen as a product failure by Volkswagen. The expectation is that future vehicles from the brand will offer interactions that are self-explanatory — where the logic of the interface naturally guides the user without them needing to check the manual or watch tutorials online to use everyday features.
This also connects the quality discussion to something every driver has felt but may have never put a name to: the difference between a car that feels like it was made for you and a car that feels like it was made to impress on a spec sheet. Cars with huge screens, fast processors, and cutting-edge connectivity can, in practice, deliver a frustrating user experience if the software layer organizing all of that wasn’t thoughtfully designed. Volkswagen is publicly acknowledging that this is a real problem and that solving it is part of the quality promise the brand wants to deliver — not as a differentiator, but as a baseline obligation.
Models like the interior of the ID. Polo GTI already signal the direction the automaker intends to follow, with design choices that aim to balance technology and clarity of use. The impact of this vision is likely to go beyond electric models or the brand’s more upscale lineups, gaining traction as a philosophy that guides design decisions more broadly across the group. 🎯
The automotive industry on a path the digital world already walked
Anyone who’s been following the tech market for a while recognizes this pattern. There was a time when enterprise software was developed with a total focus on functionality, and usability was treated as a secondary detail. It took years — and a lot of user experience research — for the software industry to understand that a product people can’t use well is a product that fails at its core purpose, no matter how many features it offers. Volkswagen is now going through an automotive version of that same learning curve, with the advantage of being able to observe the mistakes and successes of those who went through it first.
The American reference Krepp mentioned — if it’s not easy, it’s broken — is a powerful summary of that thinking. It comes from a product culture that placed simplicity of use as a central value, and that transformed entire companies around that premise. It’s not about making cars less sophisticated or cutting features to simplify interfaces. The real challenge is far more complex: it’s about creating systems that hide technical complexity behind fluid, intuitive interactions that seem simple precisely because they were very well thought out. That requires investment in UX research, testing with real users, constant design iteration — a mindset the automotive industry is still working to weave into its culture.
Volkswagen took a major step by naming this publicly and by tying the discussion of user interface and user experience directly to the concept of quality — which is, historically, one of the most sacred pillars of the brand’s identity. When an automaker with that kind of weight in the global market decides that UX and UI are quality criteria, it sends a clear signal to the entire industry. And for drivers, it’s a promise that the next car rolling off the group’s assembly lines might finally be as easy to use as it is enjoyable to drive. 🚀
