Volkswagen-Suzuki alliance not a-bed-of-roses!

Volkswagen Suzuki Alliance

The Teutons and the Japs are finding life a little tough together mainly due to the speed at which each party to the Volkswagen-Suzuki alliance makes a decision. While Volkswagen wants to be quick, Suzuki prefers to stop a little and don the thinking hat for a longer while. But, the bad news is this won’t be changing anything and we might still end up getting the A-Star badged as Volkswagen something and selling alongside the “real” A-Star in India.

German build quality and all that, bah! Any which ways, VW plans to ride on Suzuki, Maruti’s India expertise to be precise to develop cars specifically for the Indian market. This, as India and China are said to be the markets from where the future growth is set to come for all automakers. What would be very interesting to see in the coming days is how VW will manage to retain it’s brand identity by selling it’s cars in India developed from scratch by Maruti.

Or will a separate low cost VW sub-brand be established to sell lo-co products in India? For now, the latter seems more plausible and by the looks of it, Volkswagen seems to be very determined to make sure that half the world buys it’s cars only which is not really a good thing. Toyota/Ford, you’ve got to do something.

Coming to Maruti, conflict-of-interest could just be the biggest word that will emerge out of the entire alliance as doing business together in the same market can be pretty ghastly, the live example being the topsy turvy Tata-Fiat alliance which has all but wiped out Fiat India. Meanwhile, here are a few sound bytes from Martin Winterkorn, the CEO of Volkswagen.

Working with a Japanese partner is not easy. In the West sometimes, we make decisions more quickly. In the Japanese culture, sometimes things are a little different. We are making progress(on the VW-Suzuki alliance synergies). We are in a phase with our colleagues from Suzuki where we are building mutual trust. We have targeted the small car segment in India, in particular. We can also envisage cooperating in efficient powertrains and alternative drive technologies . Concrete projects are currently being discussed constructively with colleagues at Suzuki. We are looking at developing common parts and joint platforms to produce small cars that we can sell in India.

Via TheEconomicTimes

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