Volkswagen Shortening Life Cycles

[Canadian Turbo]

Volkswagen Group of America's Vice President of Quality and Service has revealed the company will shift to five-year life cycles in the United States.

Speaking to Edmunds, Marc Trahan said dealers have been pushing for the move and it will help "keep the models fresh and attractive." The company declined to go into specifics but the shortened life cycles will reportedly begin when the next-generation Jetta and Passat are introduced in 2017 and 2018, respectively.

The company declined to mention anything about facelifts but Volkswagen Group of America CEO Michael Horn previously stated his desire to launch facelifted variants three years after an all-new model is introduced.

[witchcraftz]

Re: Volkswagen Shortening Life Cycles

Hmmm, it works for apple and it will make buyers of new cars happy, but it will make the used car market value plunge. Your 9 year old car will now be 3 redesigns behind and every redesign makes it loose that much value.

[Ponto]

Re: Volkswagen Shortening Life Cycles

All in the move to a throw out world.

sigh.

[Thor]

Re: Volkswagen Shortening Life Cycles

^ Agreed all for money

[Canadian Turbo]

Re: Volkswagen Shortening Life Cycles

Well I understand the complaints but of course you are never forced to buy a new car, but I do think that the NA market has longer life cycles than Europe and closing that up a bit would be a good thing.

[flipstah]

Re: Volkswagen Shortening Life Cycles

The refresh has to be more than aesthetics. What's stopping me from buying new parts to do cheap facelifts?

[witchcraftz]

Re: Volkswagen Shortening Life Cycles

You might, but 99.9% of people would be "change the bumper?!!! I can't do that!" and run away. Or "I'm not going to spend my valuable time doing that when I could be having fun instead."

Not everyone has the time/skill/patience do something like a facelift.

[Canadian Turbo]

Re: Volkswagen Shortening Life Cycles

Confirmed

Volkswagen has disclosed its intentions to adopt a five-year model life cycle to better meet customer demand.

Talking to Auto Express, Volkswagen of America's vice president for marketing and strategy, Joerg Sommer, said the plan is to shorten the life cycle from seven to five years as a method to "better align with customers' buying habits.” After the first three years, a facelift will be rolled out which will live on the market for just two more years until the arrival of a new generation.

The report does not indicate whether the same rule will be applied on other brands within the Volkswagen Group but chances are Audi, Skoda, Seat and the rest of the family will adopt the same life cycle taking into account they all share a significant amount of parts to keep the costs down.

Sommer went on to say that Volkswagen will be investing no less than $7 billion in new models and facilities in United States in the next four years. One of the new products will be a production version of the CrossBlue concept, a seven-seat SUV already confirmed for a 2016 launch and according to Sommer it will be a US-only affair. However, a European version is likely planned as a more budget-oriented Skoda SUV slated to come out the same year.

[Spooling_turbos]

Re: Volkswagen Shortening Life Cycles

Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but this wouldn't be a lot different than the current Golf lineup. Last time Golf had a more than a 5 year life cycle between generations was the mk4. The mk5 sold for 5 years, the mk6 sold for 3. The Jetta lineup is similar. The actual manufacture production of those units has been longer, but the actual cars you could buy per generation don't seem to last longer than 4 years. In the recent years seems as the turn around for the next generation is around 3 years.

[Canadian Turbo]

Re: Volkswagen Shortening Life Cycles

They are pretty short at the moment but I think they are firming them up to be more predictable and hopefully align them better with Europe.