Every couple of years, somebody releases a study claiming to show that the average palate can’t differentiate between a good red wine and a cheap red wine, a good red wine and a good white wine, or a good red wine and a tumbler-full of Thunderbird mixed with antifreeze and raw gasoline. Survey says: it’s all the same juice, right?

Previously, amidst the vineyards of the Napa Valley, EIC Pro Tempore / sommelier Jack Baruth decanted a few forced-induction Germanic vintages and ran us through the tasting notes. He left one machine off – the turbocharged version of VW’s Beetle. So what do we think: GTI wine in a rotund bocksbetuel? (Read More…)

1974 Audi photo

The United States was supposed to be an important part of the Volkswagen Group becoming the world’s biggest automaker by 2018, with sales of 800,000 units in the U.S. by then, but it’s finding the U.S. market a tough nut to crack. “We understand Europe, we understand China and we understand Brazil,” VW Chairman Ferdinand Piech told Bloomberg this month. “But we only understand the United States to a certain degree so far.”

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A group of workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee plant is circulating a petition aimed at stopping the UAW’s attempt to organize the plant.

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Volkswagen intends to sell a subcompact SUV in the United States by 2016 and there is a strong possibility that the vehicle will be assembled at VW’s Chattanooga, Tennessee facility. Marc Trahan, executive vice president of VW of America, told reporters at an Automotive Press Association event in Detroit.

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Ford Oakville, Ontario, Canada  Assembly Plant

The Toronto Star is reporting that Ford Motor Co. will soon announce a ~$700US million investment in it’s Oakville, Ontario plant, where it assembles the Ford Edge and Lincoln MKX midsize crossovers. According to Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper, $135 million of that will come from the Ontario and Canadian governments, which recently divested some of their bailout related shares in General Motors. The investment by Ford follows commitments made to the Canadian Auto Workers, now under the banner of Unifor, to add 600 jobs to the Oakville facility. (Read More…)

The current GTI has thoroughly earned its reputation as a brilliant, satisfying driver’s car. Under the skin, however, it’s a decade old and in the time since the MkV GTI blew the bloody door off the segment and today the competition has been anything but asleep. The Mazdaspeed3, Focus ST, and Subaru WRX offer vastly more power, while the Fiat 500 Abarth, Fiesta ST, and Mini Cooper S attack from the segment below with a driving experience that is just as involving for less money — or, in the case of the MINI, the same money and more street cred with the lay-dies.

It’s not too soon for Volkswagen to revise the car, and the Mk7 GTI is more than a simple revision. It’s a thorough re-engineering of the Golf from the ground up. This time, weight is down, power is up, and refinement is the watchword. With a formula like that, it’s virtually assured that the civilian-grade Golfs will find themselves back on top of the market, particularly in Europe where people like to pretend that the Honda Civic doesn’t exist. This will be great news to the more than five people who plan to purchase a brand-new Golf late this year or early next. The rest of us just want to hear about the GTI.
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The C-Suites of two major auto makers are unlikely to change in the near future, despite rumors suggesting that both Ferdinand Piech and Alan Mulally are set to depart both VW and Ford respectively.

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Two years ago “Dubbers” around the country from AnimeCon to FanimeCon were shocked by my decision to make the Jetta GLI the winner of the VW Intramural League. My failure to recognize the obvious Euro-superiority of hatchbacks at all times caused the phrase “threw up in my mouth a little” to be used to the point that certain backbone Internet routers achieved sentience just by being forced to repeatedly consider the concept of holding in one’s vomit to express disgust.

If you, like Ender’s “toon”, have mastered the process of elimination, you have just realized that this time we had to let the hatchback win. Was it because it wasn’t a straight GLI-on-GTI scrap, or was it because the Mark VII platform represents a major step forward? To find out, you’ll have to click that “Read More” link below, which will immediately cause TTAC’s advertisers to deposit yet another Brazilian-Rosewood-and-Beeswing-Sipo-festooned Paul Reed Smith guitar into my private vault. So go ahead and do it!
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Two years ago, this bottom-of-the-podium position in the Intramurals was occupied by the Golf R. I slated the car for being both too slow to run with the Japanese rally-reps and too porky to match the FWD turbo Volkswagens on a back road.

The Scirocco R addresses both of these concerns: it’s FWD, light, and as we’ll discuss below, brutally quick. Compared to the Golf R… well, it barely compares. It’s Stilton to the Golf’s Velveeta. And yet it’s in third place, just like its Haldex-twisting cousin. What gives?

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Negotiations between Volkswagen and the United Auto Workers over the UAW’s possible representation of workers at VW’s Chattanooga, Tennessee assembly plant began last Friday, according to the German newspaper, the Handelsblatt and Automotive News. The newspaper also reported that UAW president Bob King and VW board member for human resources, Horst Neumann discussed the establishment of a German style “works council” to represent factory workers at the plant. VW and the UAW both declined comment. (Read More…)

Two years ago, I caused VWVortex members to spit bits of Pocky all over their mothers’ basement walls when I declared the Jetta GLI the winner in a four-way comparison test of Volkswagens equipped with the enthusiast-oriented 2.0T engine. The idea of comparing Volkswagens to each other seemed a bit odd at the time, but take it from a guy who’s owned a 1990 Fox, a 1998 Passat, a 2000 Golf GLS 1.8T, two Phaetons, and an ’82 Quantum Coupe: if you’re a true believer, you don’t even bother to look at what the other guys have for sale. In the land of Volkswagen nutjobs, “cross-shopping” means “pretending you’re considering the lease of an Audi A4”.

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The Volkswagen Group announced that global July sales for VW branded vehicles were down half a percent from last year, to 466,100. Reuters reported that July joins March 2013 as the second monthly decline this year.

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VW, whose growth in the U.S. market has not gone quite according to their optimistic plans, may take a page from booming Subaru’s playbook and introduce an all-wheel-drive station wagon to compete with the Subaru Outback, Fuji Heavy Industries’ best seller in North America.

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It’s one of those too-good-to-be-true things that turns out to be true anyway: Volkswagen is sponsoring a fifty-freaking-dollar trackday at Summit Point’s Shenandoah Road Course. You need to be a VW owner and you need to bring that VW to the track. There are probably a few other little caveats and fine-print things in the registration as well, but generally this is what it sounds like: a stellar opportunity to get on-track with one of the best organizations in the United States.

Your humble E-I-C was scheduled to be an instructor at this thing, but I just got out of the hospital with some pretty fire-resistant pneumonia and I won’t be up to speed in time to come hang out. Have a good time without me, okay?

This weekend was the end-of-summer graduation at Auburn, and like all such events, it brought an avalanche of rental cars to our Loveliest Village on the Plains™. Amidst the ubiquitous Chryslerbishis and engineering-excellence-cum-fleet-staple Camrys, I spotted a couple of newish Jettas and Passats wandering about town, crooked rental bar stickers applied with obvious indifference. I saw one particular rental Jetta sitting in the parking lot not far from the bookstore when I went to pick up some cut-price tomes. Coated in dust and wearing those ugly DUI-style New York plates, it was a forlorn sight. I couldn’t help but think of it as a reminder that the road to hell can be paved with tax breaks as often as it’s paved with good intentions; at least that’s the case if you happen to be governor of Tennessee.

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