Toshihiro Suzuki, executive vice president of Suzuki said Volkswagen conducting a review of their troubled marriage is “a step forward.” He quickly added  that Suzuki had not heard any details, says Dow Jones via The Nikkei [sub].

“Our cooperation is based on the premise of being equal partners,” said Suzuki. “We’ll wait to hear from Volkswagen to confirm that the review under way is being carried out with this idea in mind.”

This doesn’t sound like the remarks of a partner who is ready to kiss and make up & out. (Read More…)

Don Jackson, manager of Volkswagen’s spanking-new plant in Chattanooga, dispelled rumors that unionization of the VW works is imminent. “No one from the UAW has visited the plant, or asked to visit,” Jackson told Bernie Woodall of Reuters. Jackson said that neither he nor anyone else at the new VW plant has been in contact with UAW representatives, and dismissed talks about the UAW representing workers at the plant as “speculation.” (Read More…)

While natural and man-made disasters rattled the globe, Volkswagen, Europe’s largest and by the end of the year most likely the world’s second largest auto manufacturer, reports eye-popping numbers for the first half year of 2011.

Including China, Volkswagen made $13.5 billion in the first half of 2011. How did they pull off that economic miracle? (Read More…)

What TTAC readers have known for a while already, Germany’s Financial Times has realized: The UAW is trying to get its foot into the door of Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant. Apparently, the UAW is banking on the fact that the plant is new, that Volkswagen is used to working with the unions, and most of all, that wages in Chattanooga are lower than at Daimler, BMW, Toyota and Honda. Financial Times Deutschland reports that a worker makes $14.50 an hour in Chattanooga, $19.50 after three years. Now the German Metal Workers Union IG Metall wants to help the UAW – by establishing a works council in Chattanooga. (Read More…)

Porsche and Volkswagen are the typical German couple: Not married, with children. Formally, the two want to say “Ja” once the pending lawsuits are taken care of. In the meantime, the couple cohabitates happily. CEO Matthias Müller is made from Audi-DNA. He is a confidant of Martin Winterkorn, who is Piech’s man. Müller runs Porsche like a full-fledged Volkswagen division, down to doing his share to fulfilling Winterkorn’s grand “Strategie 2018,” the plan for world domination by Volkswagen. Under Müller, Porsche doesn’t chase Nordschleife lap times. Porsche chases volume. (Read More…)

Life imitates advertising: Years after the un-pimp your Volkswagen ads with Teutonic blondes and lots of lab coats, Volkswagen at last gets a head of Advanced Design with a name to match: Luc Donckerwolke! (Read More…)

As I noted in an earlier piece on the macro-level issues with EVs, it’s dangerously misleading to assume that electric cars can simply replace internal combustion-engine vehicles without a basic re-think of nearly every way in which we relate to our cars. That’s true in terms of consumer-end issues like refueling grid impacts and “range anxiety” but it’s also true in terms of manufacturer-end issues like development and differentiation. It’s even true for the auto media.

One of the giant re-thinks spawned by EV development is in how manufacturers make their vehicles reflect their brand values and stand out in the marketplace, as the electric motor in (say) a Ferrari EV wouldn’t be as fundamentally different as an electric motor in (say) a Kia. This, in turn, makes reviewing EVs extremely difficult, as they all display similar power attributes, weight challenges, single-speed transmissions and battery ranges. So when you are asked to drive a pre-production EV from a major manufacturer, the major question in the mind of the conscientious reporter is the same as the question that drove the vehicle’s development: how is this vehicle different than any other EV? In the case of the Golf blue-e-motion, the answer to that question reflects the challenges of developing a major-market electric vehicle.

(Read More…)

“Right now, there is no specific joint development project going on with Volkswagen,” Suzuki Executive Vice President Yasuhito Harayama told reporters who came to Suzuki’s headquarters in Hamamatsu, Japan, to meet four executive vice presidents of Suzuki. Come to think of it, there had been no progress over the past 18 months in the much feted partnership between Suzuki and Volkswagen, Harayama said.

The man who just cut deep in the fraying strands of the tie-up between Volkswagen and Suzuki would have all reason to say everything is fine.  Harayama is a former bureaucrat at Japan’s economy and trade ministry who was hired by Suzuki two years ago. He is in charge of relations with Volkswagen. It is not in his interest to admit defeat.

According to comments made by Harayama to Ran Kim of Reuters, one of the sharpest reporters on the Japanese auto beat, relations between Wolfsburg and Hamamatsu turned into a deep freeze when Volkswagen tried to “wield influence over Suzuki’s management.”

“It was made very clear when we tied up with Volkswagen that we did not want to become consolidated, and that we would remain independent,” Harayama said.

Before anything will happen between Suzuki and Volkswagen, the deal needs to be renegotiated. (Read More…)

Mexico was one of the last markets to build the old VW Bug. The really old one. Mexico remains the center of Beetle-mania. Volkswagen officially began production of the new Beetle in Puebla, Mexico. (Read More…)

As we just noticed, the Volkswagen Group gained 5.7 percent in Europe in the first six months of 2011. But that’s only a small part of the story. Globally, the Volkswagen Group delivered more vehicles in the first six months of 2011 than ever. A total of 4.09 million units changed hands, up 14.1 percent from the 3.58 million delivered in the same period of 2010. This according to a communique sent out by Volkswagen today. For you, dear TTAC reader, this is old news however.  A few days ago, we told you that we “expect group sales to come in at somewhere around 14 percent and change for the half year.” (In more than 30 years working for the company, some of the clairvoyance possessed by VW’s upper management  had rubbed off …) (Read More…)

No good deed goes unpunished. While the leadership of GM refuses to comment on Opel, Volkswagen’s Winterkorn filled the void and dispensed some helpful advice.  He said that only the Chinese would be interested in Opel, and even that remains a very theoretical possibility. GM did not like that advice and fired back.

GM top echelons refused to break cover. Instead, there is a big pronouncement on GM’s website.

“General Motors has a longstanding policy of not commenting on rumors and speculation.  Unfortunately, some of our competitors do not show similar restraint. (Read More…)

The Volkswagen Passenger Cars BRAND ( not the Group) reports global sales  of 2.53 million for the first six months of 2011.- Compared to the same period of 2010, this is an increase of 11.8 percent. The brand also reported an increase for the month of June, with 438,500 vehicles sold. For a gain of 9.8 percent compared to June 2010. With Audi having grown 17.7 percent in the half year, the Volkswagen Group will most probably report a nice double digit gain for the first half year. (Read More…)

Earlier today Bertel noted that the UAW’s goal of organizing “at least one” transplant automaker could be motivated by a desire to earn “brownie points” from the Detroit automakers. But the question that has remained unanswered ever since the union announced its transplant campaign is “which automaker will let the UAW into its plant?” Now that question may have its answer, as Automotive News [sub] reports:

Volkswagen AG and the UAW have intensified discussions about organizing workers at a new plant in Tennessee, German newspaper Handelsblatt reported in a preview of an article that will run Tuesday.

The newspaper, citing Volkswagen officials, said the union and automaker have held meetings and a workshop over the matter in the past few weeks.

VW insists that talks are still preliminary, and that no organizing campaign has yet begun. But, say the UAW, VW’s long tradition of worker unions “more willing to talk to unions about representation.” Ultimately VW says the decision to organize “belongs to our workers alone,” which implies a lot more openness to organization than Honda, for example, has indicated. But Southern workers seem to be largely ambivalent towards the UAW, so just because VW could let organizers into the plant doesn’t mean workers will necessarily vote for union representation. Meanwhile, there’s no word on how a possible UAW organizing campaign could affect a possible new VW/Audi assembly and engine plant that is being considered for the US according to AN [sub]. With Audi execs insisting on the need for more US production capacity, a UAW win in a Volkswagen vote could have serious implications for the firm’s future expansion.

Things are not going well between Volkswagen and Suzuki. In 2009, Volkswagen invested $2.5 billion for a 19.9 percent share in Suzuki. Suzuki sent $1.13 billion back and bought 2.5 percent of Volkswagen. Suzuki netted $1.37 billion, domo arigatou gozaimasu, but then nothing happened. End of last year, Ferdinand Piech became impatient. Volkswagen stockholders asked discomforting questions at the annual meeting. Now, it turned into a war of the words. Volkswagen uses old media. The octogenarian Osamu Suzuki drops a massive blog bomb on Wolfsburg. (Read More…)

When I used to go to Cannes for the Cannes Lions International Festival, it was more to hang out with friends at the bar of the Carlton or the Martinez, and to boo at the choices of the jury, after the more interesting topless attractions at the beach had gotten dressed. Volkswagen had a serious reason to go. They went home with a whole safari park of the coveted “Lions.” Volkswagen received a total of 34 Gold, Silver and Bronze Lions. (Read More…)