Volkswagen. Asleep at the Wheel.
It’s never too late, but this whole fuel efficient, lower emission car thing should have been the provenance of Volkswagen. It was made to order for them. But NOOO, they had to spend time designing the Touareg.
They owned both the “product” and the “consumer psyche” in this rich automotive marketing space. Moreover, as anyone who has ever written a brief for a German multinational knows, German companies gets major credit for engineering. It would have been a “can’t miss.” Yet they let the Toyota and Honda beat them.
In the early fall Volkswagen is launching a marketing campaign around fuel-efficient, low carbon-dioxide emitting vehicles. Will it be too late? No. Muscle memory will help. But they clearly didn’t have enough vision, to get ahead of this one. Where’s the leadership?