Tiguan production at Volkswagen’s main plant in Wolfsburg: Group managers now have to wait much longer for a company car.
(Photo: www.imago-images.de)
Dusseldorf The ongoing shortage of parts and the associated production stops lead to extraordinary decisions at Volkswagen. The VW Group informed its employees on Friday that the period of ownership of company cars will be extended to 24 months. Normally six months are usual, a few weeks ago Volkswagen had already doubled the holding period to one year for the first time.
“Customer orders must have priority in this exceptional situation,” said Germany sales manager Achim Schaible, explaining this decision on the Volkswagen intranet. VW has its own company car fleet of around 30,000 vehicles. As a rule, the managers of the car manufacturer are entitled to their own company car, in the upper management levels up to the board of directors there are even two.
Several tens of thousands of company cars are an important sales channel not only for Volkswagen, but for every car manufacturer. If the regular sales figures stagnate, additional volume can be pushed into the market by shortening the holding periods for company cars.
Now the exact opposite is happening: Volkswagen can no longer keep up with customer requests from regular buyers, so those entitled to company cars hardly get any new cars in their own company.
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“There has never been a two-year retention period for a company car,” said a VW manager. The situation is particularly precarious for plug-in hybrids (PHEV), i.e. partially electric vehicles. Those entitled to Volkswagen company cars no longer have any entitlement to this at all, and all existing internal orders will also be deleted with immediate effect.
Electric vehicles only for regular customers
This means that only classic combustion models are available as company cars at Volkswagen. Pure electric vehicles (BEV) have been offered exclusively to regular customers from outside the company for a long time.
>>> Read here: What Tesla is doing better when it comes to parts supply
“We currently have well over half a million orders on the books worldwide,” said sales manager Schaible about the tightened company car rules that the group board of directors had decided. In the case of individual models, customers have now been waiting more than nine months for their new car. Those entitled to company cars at Volkswagen would now have to take a step back. “We can hardly let customers walk through empty showrooms of car dealerships,” says Schaible.
Volkswagen has been suffering from the ongoing supply problems with semiconductors for more than a year. As a result, several 100,000 vehicles could not be produced last year. The supply of chips will only improve slowly in 2022, and stabilization is not expected until after the summer break at the earliest.
Because of the war in Ukraine, at the end of February some VW factories were suddenly missing cable harnesses, which are mostly manufactured by suppliers in the western parts of the Ukraine. Because of the Russian invasion, this production came to a standstill and led to a temporary standstill in German Volkswagen plants.
The aggravated corona situation in China has been added as a new problem. The new ongoing lockdowns in the People’s Republic could mean that supplier parts are suddenly missing in Europe. However, the exact consequences cannot be estimated at this time.
More: Task force against lack of parts: This is how the car manufacturers get the consequences of the war under control.