As the Volkswagen brand takes aim at 800,000 annual U.S. sales by 2018, it plans to offer more vehicles and features targeted specifically at American buyers, top executives said in interviews. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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The strategy is a big change for the brand, which for decades sent cars designed for Europe to the United States and shrugged off complaints that they were ill suited to the local market and scored poorly on quality and dependability surveys.
The VW brand hasn’t sold more than 300,000 vehicles here since 2003. Last year VW sold 256,830 vehicles in the United States.
But the United States has taken on new importance to the VW Group, which hopes to pass Toyota Motor Corp. and General Motors Co. to become the world’s biggest automaker by 2018.
In addition to developing more vehicles with the United States in mind, VW executives say they are committed to lowering the price of key volume models and improving quality and customer relations. Leading the charge is a team of executives who have mostly worked for the competition.
“The whole degree of integration and engagement with the market has been stepped up several levels,” said Jonathan Browning, a former GM and Ford Motor Co. executive who has headed Volkswagen Group of America and the VW brand in the United States since last October.
