It’s rare that I find new technology that provides as much joy as I’ve found in Volkswagen’s reboot of their famous VW Bus, the 2025 ID Buzz. It’s also rare that I see that joy manifest from not just using that new tech, but also from random people who happen to be nearby. This car is weird, it’s different, it’s goofy. It drives goofy - the driver’s seat is way up by the wheelbase, which makes you feel like you’re in a snub-nosed moving van. It looks goofy - The profile is whimsical like the original VW bus, and the second row windows open in relatively tiny portholes. It sounds goofy - The horn is what one would expect on a happy VW bus, and it whirrs around with the hum of an electric car. It’s just goofy, and goofy in the best way possible.

I obviously love driving it, even despite some of its software quirks and the American-sized wheelbase which makes it drive more like a truck instead of a maneuverable compact utility vehicle. But what continues to surprise me is how people react to you driving this car around. If you park to get some takeout dinner or pop into a store, people come up to the car and ask you, “how do you like the car!?” “Is it fun?” When you drive around town, random people on the street corner of all ages will point at your goofy vehicle, smile and wave. When you pass other ID Buzz drivers, they excitedly flash your lights or honk their horn and wave while you pass.

It’s an odd club that I’ve accidentally joined, but it’s a very fun club.

This gives me great joy. I can say for the first time in my life… I love driving a car because of how much joy it brings others, and this colorful car embraces that thing that perhaps what we, globally, as a culture may have lost in the past few years: personality and character in our technology. All of our phones are single panes of glass in a brick that come in a dystopian color choice of grey, kind-of-grey, and shiny-grey. Cars generally are black, white, or beige. Paint schemes in our home aren’t far behind. And yet, the 2025 ID Buzz will not be sold in the US in 2026 (They’re choosing to skip a model year). This decision by Volkswagen isn’t because people didn’t have enough fun in the cars, but really amounts to price, perceived features, and uncertainty.

The price tag is a bit of a doozy considering the variety in today’s new car landscape. I looked at it through the lens of the EV market: it’s more affordable than the Tesla model X (which is closer in cabin space and size than other Tesla models), but that sticker price is comparably high when placed against other choices in the VW family, or even elsewhere in the market for a minivan-like car. This was a known downside when I walked into the dealership: goofy comes at a premium. Luckily, I also had the fortune of being able to exercise some state tax incentives, and happened upon a black Friday promotion to make the cost easier to digest.

This price tag also is hard to swallow when looking at the maximum range of the car: 230 miles. The range is much lower than comparable models near the same cost. Originally, I found the range argument to be less concerning. I’ve literally never looked at the size of the gas tank on a traditional car when purchasing because refueling stations are so frequent. Most of my daily driver needs are use cases that simply don’t require more than a 230 mile range (even if it’s hampered further by cold weather.) Now… with that said, I do find myself contemplating the car’s battery level much more like a mobile phone than a traditional car. One internally starts panicking when you go below 20%, and yet… I remember running cars well past the little “E” light in conventional autos. I think that anxiety sets in because charging takes around 20 minutes on a level three charger (fast DC at 200kW), or around 6 hours on the home EV charger at 240V (~11kW). It’s not the quick refuel that most of us grew up with. It’s just a touch more stressful - a change in habits to fuel a car that I think will simply take a little more time to get used to.

Lastly, the reason that Volkswagen has paused sales comes down to good old economics and uncertainty. The car is assembled exclusively in Hamburg Germany, which means that for US buyers, the current US government administration subjects its import to a nearly 25% tariff. Combine this with the “goofy” factor (appealing to a smaller pool of conventional buyers), range perception, and a high price tag to start, and the car becomes untenable at least in the short term. It’s also uncertain given the historic random shotgun approach to tariffs whether this cost could fluctuate tariffs to 100% or more.

While I can think of about a dozen things I’d change on the car (email me, Volkswagen product management. My feedback awaits), I’m enjoying new technology on the car such as the heat pump being able to pre-heat the car in a closed garage and the timed electric charging to avoid peak electrical grid load. Mostly, I’m just enjoying making people smile as I zip by in something that’s undeniably goofy.

Email has become a critical part of life, and for some, it has been for decades now. As more and more of life is accessed through some kind of web portal, it becomes all that more important that the security to those portals is maintained - and sadly, it isn’t always. Frequently, for reasons of supportability and scale, all of these individually implemented web portals fall back to one thing to identify you - your email. Some websites have even thrown away any kind of user database with passwords and now just send you a link to your email when you attempt to login.

Consider the wealth of information that you have stored in services accessible by the internet.

Storing a credit card on a website has become normal, and personal information is easily searched and indexed through public records. There’s also healthcare information, banking information, and everything up through investments, cryptocurrency, and other information that once stolen is very hard to make secret again. As adoption of online services continues to scale up, online identity theft becomes the greatest threat to individuals and their peace of mind.

I started this off saying, protect your email, because so many consumer services today use it as the only way to reset your credentials. Whether you need to reset a simple password, or completely change around your profile and billing information - Email is viewed as a trusted system because it’s easy to implement, and most people now have at least one address.

Take the time, now, to go look at your email – yes, both the one that you use for important things, and even your “garbage account” (yes… some of us have multiples for just that). There are three things I wish everyone would go check out: Multi-factor authentication (MFA), active sessions, and review your privacy settings.

Multi Factor Authentication (MFA)

MFA is table stakes for everything these days, but not all services are at the same level of security as others. Go with the best method available, just make sure it’s some kind of multi factor method. I’m open to discussion, but I think that the further you can go down this list, the better off you are for securing your accounts.

1. Security questions (not really MFA :) )

2. SMS text messages sent to your phone

3. App-based push notifications. (“Is this you? Click here to say yes!”)

4. One-Time Password (OTP) or another “authenticator app” where you get rotating codes with time or sequence based numbers.

5. Device-synced Passkeys - Think of Apple passkeys or Google’s passkeys

6. Hardware authenticator passkeys - Yup, like a YubiKey.

It’s worth noting that not all of these are super-convenient for every user out there, and that I wouldn’t always order this list this way based on the situation you’re looking to secure. Just, for now, please work with the one that’s the best security for you (ideally at passkeys or higher)

Also, for full disclosure, at the time of this writing, I do indeed work for Yubico (maker of the YubiKey) – but I do truly believe that they have their place in everyone’s identity ecosystem.

There’s a world more to write here, but for now, please, just go check on your MFA – and while you’re there, check out your sessions.

Check your sessions

Every good email tool out there should be able to show you your active sessions. In Gmail, it’s down at the lower right hand corner showing you how many “locations” you have mail open. From time to time, it’s easy to forget that you’ve signed into a browser, or that you’ve changed over phone ecosystems and didn’t sign out of mail on that device. These aren’t huge security holes, but they’re worthwhile to audit every blue moon and remove all the sign-ins you don’t recognize or need anymore.

Check your privacy settings

Nearby to the settings indicating where you’re signed in is usually a privacy section. In Google-land, this is in the my account administration area, in other providers it can be buried in settings, or account administration. Privacy controls are constantly evolving. I’d recommend that you check them as often as you check your credit score online for inconsistencies – once a year, or when you see anything that’s odd.

This all feels like perhaps a lot to check on, but as I said earlier, email is today’s most trusted fallback for online identity. It’s important to keep up with changes as new features evolve. Not all features will be welcome!

Check back here as I continue to write up opinions and views on the technology world, especially as it relates to business.

Thank you for reading!

Update and edit (2025-09-01):
August 15th was an incredibly opportune time to publish this, assuming that you read it and took action! - This Newsweek article published on Sept. 1 outlines how a hacker group that’s been labeled “ShinyHunters” breached Salesforce databases and is using the data to phish customer data from Google. While this may not affect the everyday gmail user, many contractors still operate out of personal accounts. Please go check your MFA and set it up by any means possible today. (Preferably passkeys!!!)