Word: volkswagen
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Race Car Driver Newman, at the wheel of a Volkswagen Rabbit, also chauffeured Skow around the actor's Westport, Conn., neighborhood at what Skow nervously refers to as "a rather brisk pace." A few days before, Newman had repaired to the back of a limousine to travel around California campaigning for a nuclear freeze. In between some backseat driving, he talked to Los Angeles Correspondent Denise Worrell. During the week that she spent with Newman, Worrell also watched him spellbind waiters at a San Francisco restaurant as he concocted his own salad dressing, rescue a stricken bee that...
...about $10,000 fully equipped, the GTI sells for three times as much as the original $2,995 Rabbit. The base price of interim Rabbits climbed steeply-more than $400 annually on average-which is the biggest reason Volkswagen's U.S. sales have slumped from 570,000 (nearly all Beetles) in 1970 to about 175,000 (including 100,000 Rabbits) this year...
...Volkswagen has also been slow to react to changes in the U.S. car market. After keeping the Beetle in production for 30 years, it confidently expected to be able to sell Rabbits until 1990. But competitors were quick to copy the Rabbit's front-wheel design and efficient use of interior space. Today's car buyers can choose from a number of similar-looking makes, including the Mazda GLC, which sells for $5,295,'and Chrysler's $5,840 Plymouth Horizon and Dodge Omni. Those base prices are well below the $6,290 for the standard...
Instead of stressing economy, Volkswagen has decided to make a virtue of the car's higher price. In a new advertising campaign, it stresses the Rabbit's made-in-Germany heritage of quality engineering and reliability. Admits James Fuller, vice president of Volkswagen of America: "We are aiming at the customer of higher expectations." Whether that strategy will work remains to be seen. For the first nine months of this year, Rabbit sales plummeted 43.4% below 1981's figure, and Volkswagen's share of the U.S. auto market stood at a meager 1.9%, well below...
Many auto industry observers believe that Volkswagen needs a replacement for the Rabbit, a move Industry Analyst Maryann Keller of Paine Webber Mitchell Hutchins terms "essential." Despite rumors that a new model is on the way, company officials deny such plans. Insists Carl Hahn, chairman of Volkswagenwerk AG, the parent company: "We don't want to offer the consumer a new shape every day." Yet as long as Japanese and U.S. automakers can nibble into Volkswagen's market by behaving like sheep, it will take more than a wolf in sheep's clothing to revive the company...