Yep, like they said, sorry, but if you are literally “People’sCar”, the market will not respond well to an attempt to go dramaticaly upmarket.
He has also been dead for 9 months so I don’t think he cares any more.
Besides the company is currently kind of busy still with cleaning up and restoring goodwill after Emissionsgate.
“In 1934, with many of the above projects still in development or early stages of production, Adolf Hitler became involved, ordering the production of a basic vehicle capable of transporting two adults and three children at 100 km/h (62 mph). He wanted all German citizens to have access to cars.[8] The “People’s Car” would be available to citizens of the Third Reich through a savings plan at 990 Reichsmarks (equivalent to €3,747 in 2009)—about the price of a small motorcycle (the average income being around 32 RM a week).[10][11]
Despite heavy lobbying in favor of one of the existing projects,[which?] it soon became apparent that private industry could not turn out a car for only 990 RM. Thus, Hitler chose to sponsor an all-new, state-owned factory using Ferdinand Porsche’s design (with some of Hitler’s design constraints, including an air-cooled engine so nothing could freeze). The intention was that ordinary Germans would buy the car by means of a savings scheme (“Fünf Mark die Woche musst du sparen, willst du im eigenen Wagen fahren” – “Five marks a week you must put aside if in your own car you want to ride”), which around 336,000 people eventually paid into.[12] However, the entire project was financially unsound, and only the Nazi party made it possible to provide funding.[13][Note 1]”
from the Wikipedia article on “Volkswagen”.
BTW I misspelled it above. Sorry!
I hadn’t heard, but I’m not surprised. He started those projects because he knew the end was near.
I saw a programme hosted by James May (of Top Gear fame) in which he talked about the Beetle design. As I remember, after the war, the Allies offered the design to various British or American auto manufacturers but none wanted it. Imagine, for example, if Ford had taken the design and produced the car under its name.
Wouldn’t the Volkswagen Touareg be considered a luxury vehicle? They aren’t/ weren’t cheap!
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My sister has a Volkswagen Atlas, which might be considered a semi-luxurious SUV.
Nope. It’s basically the cheap version of the Porsche Cayenne or the short version of the Audi Q7.
As this Forbes article notes, the issue was that the Touareg was too high-priced / too “luxury” for the U.S. market (and particularly so, now, with the third-generation version, which they don’t sell in the U.S.)
The Touareg never sold particularly well in the U.S. – only a few thousand a year. This all serves to illustrate the earlier point: in the U.S., the Volkswagen brand name doesn’t fit well with a luxury vehicle.
The Atlas, as Sunspace notes, is VW’s newer, lower-price (relative to the Touareg) SUV – a little googling indicates that, when it was discontinued in the U.S., the Touareg started at around $50K; the Atlas starts at around $31K.
Just to clarify: I was saying that the Touareg was too “luxury” for a Volkswagen in the U.S. market. Plenty of luxury auto badges sell tons of luxury SUVs here, of course.
VW seems to have the mid-range car market, while Audi has the upscale/sporty market. The Volkswagen CC is about as high-end as VW badged vehicles get, and it’s just a upjumped Passat when you get down to it.
Followed by the Arteon, which was mentioned in post #8. Arteon is called “CC” in China.
Please note that is at the middle of the Volkswagen brands in Europe. Bentley, Lamborghini and Porsche are relatively exotic.
If you look at the brands that are sold in large volumes (and which share identical platforms and engines), only Audi is more luxurious, while Skoda and Seat are the cheaper brands. Nowadays the price difference is not that big anymore, so people are likely to chose VW because it has the best brand image.
Really, a VW polo, Seat Ibiza, Skoda Fabia and Audi A1 are pretty much identical.
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Because at the high end of the market, labels matter, and people don’t want to buy high-end vehicles with the same badge as entry-level vehicles. It’s the same reason Ferrari was able to sell cars at a massive premium over objectively better Porsches for years: Porsche made as many cars every year as Ferrari had made in its entire existence (Ferrari volume is now up a bit so this is no longer true, but Porsche still sells 5 cars for every Ferrari sold.
Mercedes is kind of sui generis in that it has been able to retain an upmarket image despite building small cars, commercial vehicles, and the like. It’s not an accident that they didn’t put three-pointed stars on Smart vehicles, and nor is it an accident that Audi doesn’t make a city car even though they could easily stick an Audi badge on an Up!
In Japan they use the same brand name for high end cars. For example Acuras in the US are Hondas in Japan.
Mercedes are rental cars and taxis, though, so they definitely have mid-range models available.
The three Japanese luxury brands are somewhat different in global scope rather than Acura being closely representative of the other two. Acura is virtually entirely a US/Canada brand, only a few % of sales are anywhere else. Infiniti is sold in more places than Acura but still something like 3/4’s North America. Lexus is still over 1/2 North America but it’s a non-asterisk as a brand in more markets than the other two, and is sold in Japan unlike the other two (though in fairly small numbers).
There are lots of variations in car brand marketing that are at least not total failures. As others mentioned Mercedes has long managed to be a luxury and non-luxury brand in some places (Mercedes taxi’s in a lot of the world, etc) but a luxury-only brand in other places. But it still didn’t market the Smart Car as a Mercedes in the US (probably in part not knowing if it would succeed, which it didn’t, a different risk than brand dilution from a successful product). It’s a messy process because it’s dealing with consumer perception in different countries and that’s not necessarily logical within or among them.
Toyota did something similar in the US with its Scion marque, a gambit on branding for what were expected to be “edgier” vehicles vs. Toyota’s mixed-blessing “Point-A-to-Point-B transportation appliance” image. It did not get enough traction and the more succesful remaining models were melded back into the Toyota brand.
True. But again, that just shows that Mercedes’ perception is unique because building taxis hasn’t hurt their brand image.
Acuras in the US are Hondas almost everywhere. The TLX was the European-market Accord. The RSX was the Japan-market fourth-generation Integra. Nissan has done this at times as well; the Infiniti G20 was the European-market Nissan Primera.
I wonder if there’s a different perception of Mercedes in Europe versus the US. IIRC they specifically don’t sell those more mid-range models in the US because they think it will hurt their image as a high end luxury brand here.
Interestingly for a long time VW did the opposite – they didn’t want to sell their nicer models in the US because they didn’t want to hurt their image as affordable, basic transportation they’d cultivated here. When they introduced the Rabbit (Golf) in the US they offered an extremely basic version because the wanted to be able to advertise a starting price about the same as a Beetle. Except VW sales in the US started tanking in the 1980s as the Japanese brands took over the “basic transportation appliance” market, so in the early 1990s they reinvented themselves as a more midrange brand in the US (remember the “Fahrvergnügen” ad campaign?).
This was true but is now outdated. Honda introduced Acura to the Japanese market in 2005. Lexus was introduced around the same time. Acura in Japan has struggled mightily, but as far as I know they’re keeping it going. Acura has struggled in the US for that matter, it’s just never had the required cachet. Lexus still exists in Japan.
I don’t know the history of Infiniti in Japan but I searched and saw an article that the Infiniti Skyline was going to be come the Nissan Skyline again, so they must have introduced Inifinti in Japan at some point. I do know that Red Bull Racing was Infiniti branded for several years, until they split with Renault, in order to promote the Infiniti nameplate in the EU and elsewhere.
It does seem like all of these luxury brands introduced in Japan are struggling to some extent. I believe national pride in the Toyota and Nissan nameplates probably hurt their efforts but that’s just a WAG. It’d be like rebranding the Corvette, nobody cares that it’s “just” a Chevy. Acura could have done better since Honda doesn’t have quite the same history in Japan as they do here, but I guess Acura’s models aren’t that much different from the Hondas they’re based on anyway.