大众汽车转向美国扩张：拟进军皮卡与越野SUV，但中国销量大跌、全年营业利润率不超过1%

Volkswagen AG has spent decades trying to build a US business that matches its stature as the world’s second-largest carmaker. Now the market it repeatedly struggled to crack is one it can no longer let languish.

With its China business melting down and Volkswagen’s German plants shedding tens of thousands of jobs, Chief Executive Officer Oliver Blume has suddenly turned to the US for growth. He’s lining up a new incursion that will take the company into the heart of the marketplace: The light trucks and offroad sport utility vehicles that have long captured American wallets.

“The US is one big growth opportunity for Volkswagen Group, and therefore we are investing heavily,” Blume said Tuesday in an interview at the Paris Automotive Summit.

He rattled off projects like a software venture with Rivian Automotive Inc., the revival of heritage brand Scout and new SUVs for Audi. “For Volkswagen,” he confirmed, “we also have in mind to enter the very attractive rugged SUV and pickup segment.”

The plan will put VW up against some of the most entrenched US franchises. Volkswagen aims to field a midsize pickup that would take on General Motors Co.’s Chevrolet Colorado and Toyota Motor Corp.’s Tacoma, plus an offroad SUV to go against Ford Motor Co.’s Bronco and Stellantis NV’s Jeep Wrangler, according to people familiar with the plans.

It’s the kind of expansion that former Volkswagen executives urged Wolfsburg to undertake years ago, when booming profits in China made the need seem less pressing. Now that cushion has disappeared, while tariffs have shredded VW’s old formula of supplying the US with vehicles made in Mexico and Europe.

“Everyone in management knew the China bubble would burst someday,” said Johan De Nysschen, chief operating officer of the VW brand in North America from 2019 to 2022. “We all said to them: You’d better develop your presence in the US market so you have something less dependent on Europe.”

The task is even harder now, but Blume has little choice but to power ahead. In September, Volkswagen slashed its outlook and doubled its job-cut target to 100,000, about 15% of its global workforce. Volkswagen has forecast an operating margin of no more than 1% this year, and its unwieldy governance is slowing changes that may be needed to secure its future. That leaves Blume a narrowing window to get the US strategy right.

Former Audi sales chief Marco Schubert has been tasked with carrying out the US revamp. He took charge of North America on Oct. 1, with a mandate to produce a plan within 100 days, the people said. His biggest obstacle may be Wolfsburg itself: a ponderous headquarters bureaucracy that can turn even obvious decisions into drawn-out debates. During De Nysschen’s tenure, VW waited too long to decide on making a gas-electric version of its Atlas utility vehicle for the US and dropped the plan, he said. Hybrids have since surged in popularity with American drivers, and the brand now plans to debut hybrid versions of the Atlas and smaller Tiguan later this decade.

That misstep has added pressure on the brand as it searches for a more profitable US formula — one that takes Volkswagen straight onto Detroit’s turf.

The crucial questions of where and how to build the brawny models Blume is targeting remain unresolved, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential deliberations. All-terrain SUVs like the Bronco typically require dedicated architectures suited for towing capacity and durability. US production is an imperative to avoid the tariffs that have hammered Volkswagen’s sales there since Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025.

A partnership with Ford would be the fastest and most direct way to jumpstart the effort. The US automaker already builds the VW Amarok, a midsize pickup based on its Ranger model, in South Africa. But Ford executives are reluctant to extend the collaboration to the US and risk cannibalizing its light-truck franchise, the people said.

Should Ford reject an industrial tie-up, Blume’s executive team in Wolfsburg reckons Volkswagen can bring a Bronco rival to market within two to three years, drawing on suppliers and the offroad expertise at its Scout unit, according to some of the people.

Scout’s South Carolina factory, currently slated to start deliveries in 2028, could provide extra capacity, the people said. Audi, meanwhile, has no US plant and an entire American lineup exposed to tariffs. It is studying local production of larger SUVs that could tap spare capacity within the group, the people added.

“The US market is of great strategic importance to the Volkswagen Group,” the company said in an emailed response to questions, without detailing partnership plans. “Our growth strategy for the region is accordingly ambitious.” The automaker added that it has responded to the added cost of tariffs by strengthening its local operations.

A spokeswoman for Volkswagen of America separately confirmed the company is “actively exploring” a body-on-frame platform that could support products including a midsize pickup and rugged SUV.

Ford has regular talks with many companies, “especially existing partners like VW,” the US automaker said in an emailed statement. “We have nothing to share at this time.”

In the past, VW’s uneven US performance was obscured by its ability to mint profits in China. But the world’s biggest passenger-car market has contracted by about 20% this year, with no stabilization in sight. VW’s group deliveries in the mainland slumped 30% through the first nine months of 2026, while Western Europe rose 1.1%.

Competition in VW’s home region is also intensifying with the rapid influx of Chinese competitors. The European Union this past week moved to limit hybrid imports, after levying tariffs on Chinese-built EVs.

Blume told Bloomberg that “the Chinese market does not work anymore as we were used to in the past,” and that the company has taken a more localized approach to compete better on technology and cost. Europe, he said, needs to be steadied. “We see the US, especially, as one stable market for the future, with stable profit pools.”

Volkswagen has cycled through a few identities in the US since the original Beetle became a household name in the 1960s. The New Beetle of the late 1990s inspired a retro design craze but came nowhere near matching the sales of its air-cooled predecessor.

As recently as 2012, Volkswagen’s namesake brand sold nearly 440,000 vehicles in the US. That was during the height of its clean-diesel push, which gave it a unique proposition among shoppers seeking fuel efficiency.

Then came VW’s catastrophic emissions-cheating scandal, followed by a halting electrification program. An electric van modeled after the hippie-era Microbus failed to ignite sales, while the all-new electric Tiguan is set to edge out the ID.4.

Read More: Three Years Later, VW’s Future Still Clouded by Diesel Scandal

Last year, VW sold about half the vehicles Subaru Corp. did in the US, and trailed Kia Corp. by a bigger margin. It was even outsold by Mazda Motor Corp. In 2000, VW was far ahead of all three.

The German marque is now known mostly for staid family SUVs like the Atlas, Taos and Tiguan, whose modest sales underscore the difficulty of standing out in a well-defended and loyal niche of trucks and off-roaders. The Wrangler’s lineage, for example, stretches back to the US military Jeeps of World War II, with a vast ecosystem of clubs, abundant spare parts and aftermarket gear.

“When I think of rugged off-road, I don’t think of Volkswagen at all,” said Joe Hernandez, a 49-year-old hotel owner in Saratoga, California, who owns a Ford Bronco and a Rivian R1T.

Read More: Why Volkswagen’s Cost-Cutting Faces Unique Challenges

VW is already weighing a role for Scout Motors, the US off-road brand it established in 2022 after getting its hands on trademark rights via the acquisition of truckmaker Navistar. Hernandez, the Bronco owner, once had a 1972 International Scout and has ordered an EV version. “The Bronco works because it has the history and heritage,” he said. “Pursuing the Scout brand gives VW the same kind of thing.”

Volkswagen has repeatedly promised over the past two decades to better tailor its products for US consumers, said Ed Kim, president of research firm AutoPacific and a former Hyundai product planner. To date, it hasn’t gotten the nuances right, he said. “The market they’re trying to get into is very, very challenging and a very, very crowded space.”

Toyota’s Tacoma dominates the midsize truck market, with the Chevy Colorado, Ford’s Ranger and Nissan Motor Co.’s Frontier making up most of the rest. The rugged SUV market is led by Wrangler, Bronco and the Toyota 4Runner.

“The Jeep Wrangler is the only vehicle that I’ve ever driven where Wrangler people will wave to each other,” said Thomas Mokrzecki, a 59-year-old software developer from Lodi, New Jersey. His current Jeep, fitted with big tires, armor, bumpers and extra lights, has nearly 300,000 miles and looks like “some Roman warrior machine or just Mad Max,” he said. “I fell in love with it.”

Volkswagen executives acknowledge its namesake brand lacks the off-road heritage of Ford or Jeep. But they see such a vehicle as a logical first step toward a more Americanized lineup that veers away from the low-margin reliance on Mexico-built models.

Trump’s auto tariffs have turned Volkswagen’s once-efficient supply chain into a liability, penalizing the Jetta and Taos models it builds in Mexico as well as the higher-end Audis and Porsches it ships from Europe. Across the group, Volkswagen estimates Trump’s tariffs cost as much as €5 billion ($5.6 billion) a year.

The German automaker’s late start to its US pivot makes it even harder to pull off. Non-US brands like Toyota and Nissan have spent years shoring up their pickup and SUV lineups. Hyundai Motor Co. and Kia both plan to introduce a new pickup to the market by 2030, and Stellantis is bringing back the midsize Dakota by early 2028. BMW AG, which makes SUVs in South Carolina, plans a new SUV bigger than the three-row X7.

That puts pressure on Blume and Schubert to quickly lock down decisions on partnerships, product choices and factory planning, and put a plan in motion.

VW has so far “shown a lack of ability to make anything work in the US,” said John Murphy, founder of research and advisory firm Murphy Automotive Partners. “I don’t know why VW, having success nowhere else, would really think they could have success in something that is lock, stock and barrel the D3 plus Toyota on the Tacoma.”

Internally, Schubert is up against a structurally lethargic pace of decisionmaking. VW is less a single carmaker than a federation of fiercely independent brands. Audi, Porsche and its namesake unit each have their own engineering cultures, product priorities and power centers, all competing for investment. Executives in Wolfsburg try to impose common platforms and technology, with mixed success.

As a result, decisions that look straightforward can devolve into brawls across brands, management boards, labor representatives and headquarters staff. A US compliance monitor installed after the emissions scandal added another layer of bureaucracy and stoked more fear around making decisions, De Nysschen said.

“There is probably a need for some humility on the part of the German management, just to really sit and listen and internalize what it is that the US market needs, because it’s not what other markets need,” said Kim, of AutoPacific. “It’s vastly different from Germany. It’s vastly different from China.”

VW dealers, too, have had to contend with years of quality and software issues, low volumes and a lack of investment, said Fred Emich, chairman of Volkswagen’s national dealer advisory council.

There’s a feeling of inadequate support, and too many one-and-done buyers who purchase a Volkswagen but never return, he said. “At some point, you know, we’re running out of customers.”

This has created tensions with Wolfsburg, Emich said. To break through with SUVs, VW will have to commit fully to the segment. “If they don’t invest in making it a rugged off-road vehicle,” he said, “it will fail in America.”