VW is reviving a storied American brand to sell electric SUVs

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/17/cars/vw-scout-american-electric-suvs/index.html

by iancmceachern • 2 years ago

21 30 2 years ago

cnn.com

bell-cot3• 2 years ago

I owned a VW once.

Not gonna make that mistake again.

2143• 2 years ago

Please tell us more!

bell-cot3• 2 years ago

In 2002 it was an extremely nice new car, rated "Average" reliability by Consumer Reports, which the VW dealer wanted to sell cheap - because it was near the end of the model year. Diesel, but good performance and awesome mileage. You could get >50MPG on the highway.

Eight years later, after zero accidents and zero breakdowns, it was needing thousands of dollars in "routine" maintenance done. CR's reliability rating had sunk into the abyss. The mechanics at 6 different dealerships and repair shops assured me that I did not have a lemon, and my problems were "perfectly normal" for VW's like mine. However lovely to drive (and, yes, it was), it was engineered with no thoughts for maintainability, nor the ongoing cost of that. The exhaust manifold coked up regularly, requiring replacements. It could take a skilled VW mechanic half an hour to change a burned-out headlight bulb. (I'd given up myself after a couple hours fiddling - concluding that you needed either just the right custom tool, or a well-trained pet octopus.) Another shop's mechanic told me that later VW models required removal of the whole front bumper assembly to change a headlight bulb.

Never again.

afruitpie• 2 years ago

Seems like an odd revive since International Scouts are relatively unknown outside enthusiast groups.

1letterunixname• 2 years ago

Not really.

The last cool VW was a Vanagon Westfalia Synchro Joker.

UniverseHacker8• 2 years ago

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.

CRConrad2• 2 years ago

What's so "quirky" about that? Took a decade or two, but even Porsche moved to the Wasserboxer concept... ;-)

AndrewKemendo2• 2 years ago

Is this a debt fueled pump and dump?

Oh yeah it is

1. Take a well known brand that isn’t totally leveraged

2. Use the brand to launch a shitty version of something great that it used to do (Scout)

3. Cut corners to ensure low capex/opex

4. Jam it full of ads and other revenue generating spyware trash

5. Dump the lot on consumer 401ks

They even pre-ran the IPO tease before production even starts

This is the whole world now. Nothing innovative or actually beneficial

Just pump the name, get the cash and run for the hills.

Volkwagen is attempting to launder its reputation in the US through what seems like a “Tough” US brand that could compete for the EV Bronco/Rivian market. So grossly transparent

Bedbathedandbeyonded

porkbeer2• 2 years ago

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

UniverseHacker8• 2 years ago

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.

AndrewKemendo2• 2 years ago

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...

1970-01-01• 2 years ago

But VW is banking on something Rivian doesn’t have, a backstory. An avid fanbase in America fondly remembers Scout.

"<1" of them, actually.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

porkbeer2• 2 years ago

I love the old International Harvesters, known for their durability. VV seems the exact wrong company to embody that image or usecase. They are constantly the most fragile disposible cars on the road.

UniverseHacker8• 2 years ago

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.

decafninja• 2 years ago

I don’t know - I can’t help but think the number of people who remember the Scout brand is even smaller than the people that think reviving Pontiac as a “performance brand” is the key to solving all of GM’s problems.

_mlbt• 2 years ago

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

PeterStuer• 2 years ago

Must be a pure US thing. I had never heard of 'Scout' as a car brand.

timetopay• 2 years ago

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.

hilux2• 2 years ago

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

CRConrad2• 2 years ago

I thought Detroit Electric. (Possibly = the old "granny" car in Cars -- unless she's a Stanley Steamer or something?)

But then again, Detroit Electric is perhaps nowadays owned by that same Lebanese / Egyptian / "Canadian" scammer who either bought or is buying the remnants of SAAB?

Sigh.

inferiorhuman• 2 years ago

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.

UniverseHacker8• 2 years ago

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.

UniverseHacker8• 2 years ago

From looking up old ads, I can see it actually was sold all over the world. I think this old Scout ad sums up who it was marketed to well.

A handy new workhorse for your farm: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/153403931038864688/

hakfoo• 2 years ago

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?

hilux2• 2 years ago

I'm sure many already know this, but EVs are much more commodified than ICE cars are, and the trend will continue. An EV is a battery on wheels.

Batteries will be increasingly commoditized. So the remaining differentiators are software (usability) and brand.

You can make software a winning differentiator - Apple has done it - but why would VW succeed at this? Their best-known software to date was to cheat the emissions test.

That leaves brand. My guess is that Scout will be VW's biggest moneyloser since DieselGate. But at least they'll employ many Americans for a few years, which is a positive.

kiney• 2 years ago

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.

VW is reviving a storied American brand to sell electric SUVs

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