Investors of late have been responding positively to news of companies increasing electric vehicle production, swelling the value of shares of Tesla as well as of some EV startups. The fake release could land Volkswagen in trouble with US securities regulators because its stock price rose nearly 5 percent on Tuesday, the day the bogus statement was officially issued. The company's fake news release, leaked on Monday and then repeated in a mass e-mail to reporters on Tuesday, resulted in articles about the name change in multiple media outlets. READ MORE: VW to be known as 'Voltswagen' as part of electric shift in US Volkswagen's intentionally fake news release, highly unusual for a major public company, coincides with its efforts to repair its image as it tries to recover from a 2015 scandal in which it cheated on government emissions tests and allowed diesel-powered vehicles to illegally pollute the air. The company's false statement was distributed again on Tuesday, saying the brand-name change reflected a shift to more battery-electric vehicles. Mark Gillies, a company spokesman, confirmed on Tuesday that the statement had been a pre-April Fool's Day joke after having insisted on Monday that the release was legitimate and the name change accurate. Volkswagen of America has issued false statements this week saying it would change its brand name to "Voltswagen," to stress its commitment to electric vehicles, only to reverse course and admit that the supposed name change was a joke. In this file photo taken on Februan employee of German car maker Volkswagen (VW) fixes a VW logo on a Volkswagen ID.3 electric car at an assembly line of the Volkswagen car factory in Zwickau, eastern Germany. "While it sounds like science fiction, it might very well be our daily life in 50 years," he wrote."Volkswagen of America will not be changing its name to Voltswagen, the renaming was designed to be an announcement in the spirit of April Fool’s Day, highlighting the launch of the all-electric car," the company's US spokesperson says. The challenges might be worth surmounting: An "age of magnetism" could revolutionize the energy industry and help battle climate change, according to a 2018 LinkedIn post by George Sassine, a vice president at New York's State Energy Research and Development Authority. For instance, what happens if a car traveling at high speeds floats off its magnetic track, or is knocked off course by a non-magnetic vehicle? There's also the very difficult issue of infrastructure: Building a nationwide network of electromagnetic highways would likely take years and a massive public investment in any country, notes the AutomoBlog. Researchers have been exploring the potential for maglev cars for more than a decade, with Volkswagen designing a hover car concept in 2012.īut potential safety issues still need to be worked out. The technology has been proposed for hyperloop projects from Elon Musk's The Boring Company and Richard Branson's Virgin Hyperloop One. Theoretically, maglev technology allows for high-speed travel without using as much energy as traditional engine power due to a lack of friction. Last year, China debuted a maglev bullet train in Qingdao, Shandong province, last year that can reach a top speed of 373 miles per hour. China, Japan and South Korea all use maglev trains today.
Some commercial trains have used magnetic levitation, or "maglev" - which involves electrifying a magnetic field to push or pull vehicles at high speeds - since the 1980s.
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