Word: touareg
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...about 50% of the common stock of Porsche Automobil Holding SE, which in turns owns more than half of VW stock. And the two companies have been working ever more closely together, including sharing a slew of joint operations. The Porsche Cayenne SUV and its VW equivalent, the Touareg, for example, share the same chassis and are built in the same plant. (See the most important cars of all time...
...company known for the inexpensive Beetle is now launching its most expensive cars ever. Its first SUV, the Touareg, tops $42,000 with an eight-cylinder engine, putting it in league with hot models from BMW, Cadillac and Infiniti. And a loaded Phaeton, a sedan that cost more than $900 million to develop, will have a sticker price north of $85,000 when it hits U.S. dealerships in December. VW plans to launch dozens of new models over the next two years, including a new Microbus, smaller SUVs and crossover vehicles, and is considering a sexy convertible, the Concept...
Pischetsrieder insists the strategy will pay off once the new cars take hold with consumers. Investors seem to think so. VW's share price rallied 34% from the start of the year to early November, outperforming the Dow Jones auto index by 14 percentage points. The Touareg is off to a strong sales start, both here and in Europe. The Phaeton is not. Available in Europe for more than a year, it has been no threat to the Mercedes S Class and the BMW 7 Series, selling less than 8,000 units (in 2002 BMW sold 14,670 7 Series...
None of that will fix a basic Touareg glitch: that strange name. After dealers heard it in 2002, some begged VW for a change of name, fearing that U.S. customers wouldn't have a clue about how to pronounce it. VW has tacitly admitted that they were right. Some of the first TV ads for the Touareg parody the pronunciation (which, for the record, is tour-egg). VW says Americans had difficulty pronouncing Passat when it launched. (Never mind fahrvergnugen.) But that doesn't dispel the sense that VW's marketing department is in triage mode. VW named the Touareg...
...build luxury car sales if your basic fleet is perceived to be poor quality. To pump up VW's reliability ratings, Pischetsrieder recently dispatched Stefan Ketter - a widely recognized expert in quality control - to the U.S. After service technicians found a potentially faulty wiring harness in the Touareg, VW sent technicians to the homes of Touareg owners to reassure them of the vehicle's quality. The company now has a dozen engineers in the U.S. solely to monitor the Touareg, and has appointed a board member to oversee quality issues. None of that will fix a basic Touareg glitch...