VW is reviving a storied American brand to sell electric SUVs

You arent wrong. But people like to have some hope that the auto market is not the dumpster fire that it is.

As a longtime fan of both VW and Scout I wish I could say that you’re wrong, but VW is already doing the same with their main brand. Their current vehicles, like the Atlas are almost unusable due to poor quality and terrible engineering.

VW was making some of the highest quality vehicles in the world 20 years ago, and now they’re destroying the brand name to pump it for short term profit by tricking consumers into buying cheap to make garbage, because they trust the VW brand.

I can’t edit anymore but this clinches it for me:

> push the Volkswagen Group’s transformation into a software-oriented mobility provider while leveraging our economies of scale and maximizing synergies

What’s interesting is that they are self funding this, which I suppose makes sense given their size. That tells me their board likely changed recently to be more profit focused

Edit: Yup, same year this was announced there was a new board change and CFO change

https://annualreport2022.volkswagenag.com/group-management-r...

https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/en/press-releases/volksw...

VWs strong point is manufacturing. They have car factories all over the world and actually know how to run them efficiently. While software is their weak spot with no change in sight and might break their back.

My armchair CEO opinion of GM is that they need even fewer brands. Buick and GMC need to be folded into Chevrolet.

They are now... 20 years ago they were building the highest quality cars you could buy. The build quality of the cars during Ferdinand Piëch's tenure of running the company such as the MKIV Golf/Jetta, early Touareg, etc. make high end cars like BMW and Mercedes products of the same era seem like cheap garbage. Those Piëch era cars will last another 100 years if people maintain them.... lots of TDI MKIV Golf and Jettas are running around with 500k+ reliable miles and holding up well. On the VW forums you see them lasting over 400k miles despite serious performance tuning, often doubling the horsepower.

Neither has anyone in the US - they're relatively niche pre-cursors to the SUV, sold a respectable yet tiny amount (500,000), and haven't shipped a product since 1980.

Neither have I. From the title, I thought they were going to revive Studebaker or something.

I think it's mostly that HN is a tech site and the HN audience is only into cars insofar as they intersect with gadgets (thus the fascination with Tesla and Lucid). Step into a group of car geeks and you're sure to find folks who know about International Harvester.

Case in point, on my way to Woolworths in Sydney a few years back I saw a pickup of all things. Utes are all the rage over there, pickups not so much, so it really stood out even though it was parked innocently on the street. Upon closer inspection it was an IH pickup, but it didn't look like any I'd seen in America. On my way out I ran into the guy that owned it and we had a long chat. The truck itself was an Australian market vehicle, largely similar to the American ones mechanically but with a different front clip. He was a huge fan and desperately wanted to import an American one.

HN is a uniquely weird bubble of urban tech people that wouldn’t know what a Scout is.

The Scout is well known and revered among people that are into off roading, or live in rural farming areas. It was built by International Harvester- a major and well respected tractor and heavy industrial equipment brand (now known as Case IH), and marketed to farmers and rural people. The Scouts build quality and offroad capabilities are legendary… it also came with some distinctly tractor like features such as a PTO (power take off), which could directly power farm equipment like pump, winches, plows, mowers, and augers from the vehicles engine.

I grew up in a rural area in the USA in the 90s and we had a scout, and so did many of our friends and neighbors.

I don't offhand know if the Scout was sold outside of the USA or not.

When I graduated high school in 1999, it was a reasonably prosperous upper-middle-class campus, so a lot of kids had cars.

It was a couple years too early for the Koreans to have a serious market presence, and a couple years too late for Geo and really cheap Japanese cars.

As I recall the default new cars there were either Chevrolet Cavaliers or the old Mitsubishi Mirages (the ones also sold as Dodge Colts) for the kids whose parents were subsidizing stuff.

Of course there were also plenty of random hand-me-down 80s and 90s stuff that was clearly "all I could get for $2000." But there were quite a few 'car kids' who had obviously either taken their parents' projects or started their own, so you'd see one or two IH Scouts in the parking lot on any given day. They were bigger and bulkier than anything else around at the time.

So these kids are now mid-40s, and saying "we did the minivan phase, I want something cooler." Will they remember the kid with his restored Scout in the parking lot?

Please tell us more!

The Piech era VW "supercars" were pretty awesome: W12 and twin-turbo V10 Touaregs with adjustable ride height and lockers, W12 Phateon, R32 Golf, etc. Maybe not super practical, but really neither was the Syncro with its quirky water cooled boxer engine.