The cars that Volkswagen retails in the US market have never been that good. They are, however, rabidly adored by the armchair car enthusiast community and have therefore been able to get away with truly substandard products under the misnomer of quality 'German Engineering.'
VW parts are expensive for a mass-market car, largely bespoke only to VAG products, and mostly worked on by VW or Euro-specialty shops. VAG diagnostic equipment is expensive and difficult to procure and the electrical quirks of VWs are mindnumbing to say the least. Simple equipment like power door lock actuators and power windows regulators run off an unnecessarily complicated system of control modules which are themselves also expensive (for a mass-market car).
One might chalk this up simply to assembly quality, as USDM Beetles/Jettas are assembled in Mexico while current-gen Passats come from their new factory in Tennessee. However, European assembled models also had many short- and long-term quality problems and the trim on these cars after a few years is appalling at best - loose headliners, dash trim that gets easily scoured by fingernails, loose items, etc, door cards that separate with normal usage, etc. Again, finding replacement parts is expensive for a mass-market car.
The six-speed automatics in the New Beetle ~'03MY are notorious garbage. Early DSGs have ridiculous and expensive service requirements...and still shift sloppy, moreso than a comparable Ford PowerShift (Focus, Fiesta). The older 3.0l V6s puked more oil than they burned. 2.0Ts are also Russian Roulette in terms long-term dependability. Electronic A/C pressure valves that cause cars to take ~15 minutes to begin to cool down. And don't even mention the EOS with that Rube Goldberg top. On and on and on...
Frankly, everyone should be surprised VW managed to get a piece of electronic equipment to function correctly and consistently!
And the proof is in the sales. VAG - that's VW, Audi, Bentley, Porsche - has been consistently neck-and-neck in the US market with Subaru...SUBARU. That's the same Subaru that essentially offers a lineup consisting of a sports car no one buys and two sizes of the same car with outdated interiors in the traditionally unpopular wagon bodystyle and whose hallmark is a drivetrain 1/3 of the country has no use for with a smaller dealer network to boot.
VW in the US heavily fleets Jettas and Passats and gives them away retail with a dunderheaded long-term-residual-sapping lease and finance program (ask Mitsubishi how THAT worked out for them...), no one buys the Golf, the Tiguan is a dud that is a compact CUV priced like a premium midsize CUV, and their big five-year-plan prior to this scandal consisted of FINALLY offering a 3-row crossover in 2017 and reintroducing the Phaeton, another Ferdinand Piech vanity project that was a marketplace joke.
The TDIs were the only thing they got right in this country. And they did it on massive fraud.
And that's the key, folks. Its was intended fraud from the get-go. You can debate the necessity for the regulations until the sun comes up, but you have to pay to play - follow the rules or don't retail your cars here. Everyone else seems to do it the correct way - Ford, Mercedes, BMW, GM, Chrysler - why couldn't VW just do it right or not do it at all?
Fact is, no one will REALLY miss VW if it ever leaves US shores (which they almost did in the eighties, and the nineties) because they haven't offered anything for us to miss for so long and burned all their goodwill with inferior products and blunt mismanagement.
VW parts are expensive for a mass-market car, largely bespoke only to VAG products, and mostly worked on by VW or Euro-specialty shops. VAG diagnostic equipment is expensive and difficult to procure and the electrical quirks of VWs are mindnumbing to say the least. Simple equipment like power door lock actuators and power windows regulators run off an unnecessarily complicated system of control modules which are themselves also expensive (for a mass-market car).
One might chalk this up simply to assembly quality, as USDM Beetles/Jettas are assembled in Mexico while current-gen Passats come from their new factory in Tennessee. However, European assembled models also had many short- and long-term quality problems and the trim on these cars after a few years is appalling at best - loose headliners, dash trim that gets easily scoured by fingernails, loose items, etc, door cards that separate with normal usage, etc. Again, finding replacement parts is expensive for a mass-market car.
The six-speed automatics in the New Beetle ~'03MY are notorious garbage. Early DSGs have ridiculous and expensive service requirements...and still shift sloppy, moreso than a comparable Ford PowerShift (Focus, Fiesta). The older 3.0l V6s puked more oil than they burned. 2.0Ts are also Russian Roulette in terms long-term dependability. Electronic A/C pressure valves that cause cars to take ~15 minutes to begin to cool down. And don't even mention the EOS with that Rube Goldberg top. On and on and on...
Frankly, everyone should be surprised VW managed to get a piece of electronic equipment to function correctly and consistently!
And the proof is in the sales. VAG - that's VW, Audi, Bentley, Porsche - has been consistently neck-and-neck in the US market with Subaru...SUBARU. That's the same Subaru that essentially offers a lineup consisting of a sports car no one buys and two sizes of the same car with outdated interiors in the traditionally unpopular wagon bodystyle and whose hallmark is a drivetrain 1/3 of the country has no use for with a smaller dealer network to boot.
VW in the US heavily fleets Jettas and Passats and gives them away retail with a dunderheaded long-term-residual-sapping lease and finance program (ask Mitsubishi how THAT worked out for them...), no one buys the Golf, the Tiguan is a dud that is a compact CUV priced like a premium midsize CUV, and their big five-year-plan prior to this scandal consisted of FINALLY offering a 3-row crossover in 2017 and reintroducing the Phaeton, another Ferdinand Piech vanity project that was a marketplace joke.
The TDIs were the only thing they got right in this country. And they did it on massive fraud.
And that's the key, folks. Its was intended fraud from the get-go. You can debate the necessity for the regulations until the sun comes up, but you have to pay to play - follow the rules or don't retail your cars here. Everyone else seems to do it the correct way - Ford, Mercedes, BMW, GM, Chrysler - why couldn't VW just do it right or not do it at all?
Fact is, no one will REALLY miss VW if it ever leaves US shores (which they almost did in the eighties, and the nineties) because they haven't offered anything for us to miss for so long and burned all their goodwill with inferior products and blunt mismanagement.