VW Boss Says Auto Shows “Are Dead”

The head of Volkswagen has said that the traditional auto show is dead. And he left little to interpretation when he said it.

“Motor shows are dead,” VW Group Chairman Herbert Diess said at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. “They are a product of the 1960s and they are not as relevant anymore. They’re not delivering what we want and they’re not delivering what car buyers want.”

The traditional auto show has been hurting of late. The North American International Auto Show in Detroit, once the premiere global auto show, is now scrambling to find its way after losing BMW, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz. The show is even moving from a longstanding January date to June. Other brands like Jaguar, Land Rover, and Mitsubishi have skipped the show for years.

Even the Geneva show in March, the biggest European show, has seen the pressure.

“People need to see more interaction with the product. They expect it. Those days of relying on tradition are gone,” Dr Diess insisted.

So what’s the solution? “It’s events like the Goodwood Festival of Speed that are showing us the modern way to show cars to people,” Diess said.

Shows where potential customers can not just see a static display in a well-kept booth, but also experience the car in motion. Like the race up the hill climb at Goodwood. Performance cars get to perform, for better or for worse.

Independent launches also let the automaker show off their product in ways that a traditional show won’t allow. Like Jaguar’s barrel roll reveal for the E-Pace.

Look for the big shows to possibly shrink, but certainly to try to adapt to what automakers are looking for. And what they think consumers desire.

[source: Motoring.au]

The post VW Boss Says Auto Shows “Are Dead” appeared first on VWVortex.

from VWVortex https://ift.tt/2mLHCgj
via IFTTT

Comments

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...

Vorderman Volkswagen

Search This Blog