Volkswagen has ambitious plans to directly challenge Toyota — and a cornerstone of the plan for global expansion is to boost sales for its cars and vans in the U.S. by building products with more American flavor.
The plan calls for the company to grow from 6.2 million sales worldwide in 2008 to 10 million cars by 2018, with American sales climbing to 800,000 cars a year.
To accomplish this, VW hopes to expand the appeal of new cars and used vans outside its current base of European car enthusiasts, attracting more of the shoppers who reflexively buy Toyota Camrys and Honda Accords today.
This means making cars that are bigger, but less expensive than today’s models, and expanding the model line into additional segments, such as seven-passenger crossover SUVs, where the company does not participate today, said Stephan Jacoby, president of Volkswagen Group of America.
“We believe that the brand has a fantastic foundation to grow into segments where we are not present right now and where we are not competitive right now,” he said.
Continued…
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32678823/ns/business-autos/#storyContinued
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.