Getting the Bugs Out: The Rise, Fall, and Comeback of Volkswagen in America (Adweek Book) by David Kiley

Author:David Kiley
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The German Patient

six

n 1991, Bill Young became the president of VW in the United States, running both VW and Audi, replacing Hans Hungerland who returned to Germany. There was no sign of any turnaround at Audi. At VW, though, he could at least look forward to the launch of the brand-new models of the Golf and Jetta. The new and improved A Class (the internal code name for the platform that was shared by the two models) was supposed to bring in new buyers who had passed over the previous version for its poor quality and skimpy amenities. However, he couldn't look forward yet. Because the plant at Westmoreland had been closed, Jettas and Golfs had been coming to the United States from Germany. The new cars, however, would be sourced for the United States from the Puebla, Mexico, plant, which had been making about 80,000 original Type 1 Beetles a year for the Mexican market. Volkswagen sales in 1991 had been just 91,700- the first year that the company had sold fewer than 100,000 cars since the 1950s. The Jettas and Golfs that had previously come from Pennsylvania had been inferior, and the ones coming from Germany were only marginally better. For instance, neither the air conditioners nor the electrical systems were reliable. The radios were of low quality. As usual, the color mixes seemed chosen by a blind person. Volkswagen was down to selling only to die-hard VW fans, the ones who would buy the cars if they came in boxes and had to be assembled in their driveways.

When Bill Young grabbed the reins as president, he saw a catastrophe brewing in Mexico. Until the launch of the new Golf III and Jetta III, the Puebla plant had been just an assembler of Beetles. The cars were all shipped to Mexico from Germany in kit form, and the plant had only to put the cars together according to plan; it was an assembly plant, not a full-blown manufacturer. Puebla did no substantial purchasing of its own. If Puebla did any sourcing or buying, it was just for local content issues, such as upholstery or maybe bumpers that could be bought more cheaply from a local supplier. The new Golfs and Jettas were an entirely different matter. Assembling them required Puebla to become a real manufacturing operation, like the Westmoreland plant had been. The only hitch was that no one at Wolfsburg bothered to train the supervisors or workers in the complexities of making cars from the tires up. No one knew how to order the breadth of required parts. There were no systems in place at Puebla to build cars according to dealer orders or on any forecasted basis. The plant's computers weren't set up for that, let alone the people. In mid-1992, Young went to Mexico and found, to his dismay, about 450 sea cargo containers full of parts, enough to build 100,000 cars. It was all just sitting in the yard at Puebla.

"It was a nightmare," recalls Young.

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