Volkswagen AG, Europe’s largest carmaker, aims to sell more than 100,000 units of a new version of its best-selling Jetta sedan in the US a year, the interim chief of the VW brand in the country said.
“The new Jetta will be a very nice volume product for us,” Mark Barnes, who was appointed last month to run Volkswagen of America, said in a telephone interview on Friday.
“The goal is to bring the masses to Volkswagen who currently believe they cannot afford a Volkswagen,” he said.
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
The new Jetta, VW’s first model altered specifically for the US market, is 8.89cm longer than the European version. The model accounted for half the brand’s 214,000 US deliveries last year, excluding the Audi luxury brand, and 44 percent of the total in the first six months of this year.
Volkswagen cut the price for the extended Jetta, which goes on sale in October, to about US$16,000 from the current base of US$17,735. The reduction brings the model closer to the starting prices of Toyota Motor Corp’s Corolla and Honda Motor Co’s Civic, now at US$15,450 and US$15,455 respectively, according to company Web sites.
VW aims to sell 1 million cars and sport-utility vehicles in the US by 2018, with its Audi luxury division accounting for 20 percent of that figure.
The Wolfsburg-based manufacturer is aiming to dethrone Bayerische Motoren Werke AG as the largest luxury-car maker.
A new assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, will probably begin production in the third quarter of next year, Barnes said in the interview.
VW is using the factory to produce a sedan that is bigger than other VW cars for US customers.
“We’ll have the new product in late third quarter or early fourth quarter,” Barnes said.
Asked whether there is room for a second model, Barnes said: “Certainly there’s enough room down there to expand, but our focus is clearly on the new mid-sized sedan.”
The Jetta is produced in a VW plant in Puebla, Mexico, which has capacity to make 450,000 cars after an expansion that has been ongoing since July last year.
VW said June 24 that it was holding contract talks with US chief Stefan Jacoby. At the same time, it named Michael Lohscheller, who had been in charge of finance in the US since 2007, to run Volkswagen Group of America on an interim basis, while Barnes would do the same for the Volkswagen brand until Jacoby’s contractual situation is clarified.
The negotiations focused on Jacoby’s contractual obligations to the German carmaker before he takes over as CEO at Volvo Cars, people familiar with the matter said on June 25.
Excluding Audi, VW aims to more than double US deliveries to 450,000 by 2012 to 2013, Jacoby said in January.
Meanwhile, Ford Motor Co and its Chinese partner, Jiangling Motors Corp (江陵汽車), began building a US$300 million assembly plant in Nanchang, Ford said yesterday in an e-mailed release.
The plant will begin production at the end of 2012 with capacity to build a combined 300,000 vehicles a year for Ford, the second-biggest US carmaker, and Jiangling Motors, a commercial vehicle maker, the release said, giving no further details.
The factory will be Jiangling’s largest.
Ford, which owns 30 percent of the Chinese carmaker, already operates two joint plants with Jiangling, with annual capacities of 50,000 and 160,000 vehicles.
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