Skip to main content

Paris Spotlight: Volkswagen Phaeton Exclusive

It’s hard to believe that it’s been about 10 years since the first Volkswagen Phaeton was introduced. Built using the same corporate steel chassis D platform that underpins the Bentley Continental, the car even did a short stint in the USA before ending its stateside run in 2006. It’s since undergone a facelift and remained on sale in Europe, and it still turned up on the Volkswagen stand in Paris.


Volkswagen Phaeton Exclusive


Chatting about the car with a Volkswagen staffer from another market outside of Germany, he pointed out the demand for the car in limo friendly markets like China. While a new version is expected in a few years and Volkswagen of America boss Michael Horn has hinted that we could even see it in the USA by 2018, it is the current-generation car that still soldiers on looking surprisingly fresh for a car introduced a decade ago.


Volkswagen Phaeton Exclusive


Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the Volkswagen show stand Phaeton was an “Exclusive” model. That means it was decked in tailored bright leather and had seemingly every bit of kit you could order for such a car from the glass factory in Dresden that builds the Phaeton exclusively.


Volkswagen Phaeton Exclusive


In the end, the Phaeton may be a bit of a non-story to Americans who haven’t gotten it for some eight years. Even still, we’re guessing OEM+ fans are likely still eyeing it up for its cool components. Come on. You know those 20-inch polished split 5-spokers would look pretty amazing on a Golf 7 or a Passat.


The post Paris Spotlight: Volkswagen Phaeton Exclusive appeared first on VWVortex.






from VWVortex http://ift.tt/1uQfoPo

via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Project SportWagen: Going Stage 2 with APR

    When we last left you, the humble little SportWagen was fresh from the development process with our friends at AWE Tuning, sporting a new downpipe, exhaust and intake, allowing things to breathe a bit easier.  The car sounded great, but there was no getting around the fact that our wagon was still quite, well, slow.   While we realize that nothing we do to the Golf SportWagen at this point will make it a race car, we still felt compelled to do something .  To put it bluntly, we had a fever, and the only cure was more power. Flash forward a few hours, and we found ourselves at Waterfest, staring down APR’s palatial spread and the numerous tuned vehicles surrounding it.  Earlier in the year, APR had hinted to us that their 1.8 TSI files would be quite impressive, and based on what they were able to do with the 2.0 TSI found in the new GTI and our time in their Golf R, we knew it’d be worth the wait.  So with this in mind, we lined our G...

Volkswagen Group Records Best Ever First-Half-of-Year Sales

With 5.5 million vehicles in customer hands after the first six months of 2018, the Volkswagen Group is seeing the best performance of its history. Group deliveries increased significantly in all core regions,” said Fred Kappler, head of sales for the Group. “Our core brands recorded strong growth in the first half year.” For the year-to-date, all of Volkswagen’s brands had sales bumps. MAN, SEAT, and Skoda led the sales charge with performances 24%, 17% and 11% better than the previous year. The big sellers, too, had strong sales periods, with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Audi, and Volkswagen sales rising 3.5%, 4.5% and 6.3% respectively. That last figure is particularly good new for the board, since Volkswagen alone sold more than 3 million vehicles in the first half of 2018. As Kappler stated, the numbers are equally good when you break sales down by region. Brazil and Russia were the most improved markets (22% and 20%, respectively), while strong sales in Europe and China (u...

Project Golf SportWagen- Intro

I’ve never really been one for SUVs and crossovers.  The current offerings aren’t the body-on-frame, go-anywhere specialty tools I remember from my youth, and what they lack in capability, they also lack in on-road performance. The current crop isn’t terribly good at handling or being efficient, which in my opinion are major components of our ideal driving experience.  So when it comes to space or utility, I usually look for something of the wagon variety- and it seems that I’m not alone. We hit quite a few shows around the east coast each summer, and we see modified Jetta SportWagens at nearly every event. Even amongst common consumers, these cars are highly sought-after. They don’t depreciate much, making even early Mk 5 2.5 versions expensive in comparison to other Jettas or Golfs of the same vintage. This year, Volkswagen launched their latest SportWagen, which is now billed as a Golf.  In many ways, this latest SportWagen is the best yet and it has certai...