Introduction to the VW

Volkswagen has been the largest European car maker since the 70’s. Under the leadership of Ferdinand Piech, it expanded aggressively during the 90s. Apart from Audi and Seat, Skoda, Lamborghini, Bentley and Bugatti were also absorbed into the empire. Piech, who served Porsche and Audi before, succeeded to put Audi onto rails to target BMW, upgraded the build quality and image of the Spanish Seat and Czech Skoda. However, his effort to put the Volkswagen brand against Mercedes did not take off, as shown in the poor sales of Phaeton, its first luxurious car. The Bugatti supercar project is another unwise decision - it makes no business sense to Volkswagen and it takes the company too much resources to overcome the technical difficulties to realize its 252mph target speed. Piech got over-ambitious in his latter days.

Piech was succeeded by ex-BMW boss Bernd Pischetsrieder in 2002. The latter rationalize the strategy. He abandoned the plan to move Volkswagen brand upmarket and concentrated on catching the market trend such as compact MPV and SUV. He delayed the Bugatti project, killed the "Super Passat" and Volkswagen W12 supercar. This seems clever than his predecessor.

Volkswagen group used to be a keen believer to platform sharing strategy. Almost all cars from its four mainstream brands shared the four common platforms. This inevitably made the cars too similar. Under the leadership of Bernd Pischetsrieder, the group splits into two management groups - the Volkswagen group (consists of VW, Skoda, Bentley and Bugatti) and Audi group (consists of Audi, Seat and Lamborghini). These intents to differentiate the characters of their cars - the VW group cars are more conservative, while the Audi group cars are sportier. The first sign was shown in the 2005 Passat, which switched from Audi A4 platform to Golf platform.