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Volkswagen has hit a pretty big bump in the US. The company has been a legacy auto leader for the electric vehicle transition in the past several years. Following “Dieselgate,” Volkswagen Group decided to invest several billion dollars into EVs and aimed to be one of the first legacy auto companies to electrify its full lineup. The company rolled out the ID lineup for the Volkswagen brand as initial steps in this regard.
In the US, like with other companies, Volkswagen doesn’t sell as many EVs as in Europe. There’s just not the strong government policies requiring that automakers electrify quickly. The company also didn’t bring its first ID model, the ID.3, to the US — because it was deemed too small for the US market. Instead, the focus was on selling and building growing demand for the ID.4, which worked for a while.
In the second quarter, Volkswagen Group was the 7th highest selling auto group in the country for EVs. Not amazing, but not horrible. The Volkswagen brand was 12th among auto brands. Especially when you think of the scale of Volkswagen globally, this seems really bad. However, the German brand actually has a very small footprint in the US. Volkswagen Group was 5th among legacy auto groups for the share of its sales coming from EVs (7%). Looking at auto brands, Volkswagen was 11th (5.7%). So, yeah, not much better.
Though, looking only at more affordable mass-market brands (excluding luxury auto brands, which have been leading the way on EV sales), only Kia (8.7%) and Hyundai (7.8%) had a higher share of their sales coming from electrics in Q2. Ford was close behind Volkswagen’s 5.7% with 4.7%.
However, things took a turn for the worse last quarter. Volkswagen ID.4 sales decreased by 58%! They went from 10,707 to 4,518. At a time when EV sales are going up for Ford (+12%), Nissan (+41), Chevrolet (+26%), and Cadillac (139%), one would think and hope that Volkswagen EV sales were going up, and certainly not decreasing by 58%.
Unfortunately, in the previous quarter, the ID.4 had just over 6,000 sales. So, sales slid down from there to 4,518, and that followed two quarters of more than 10,600 sales (each). Volkswagen needs to find a way to climb back up and routinely sell at least 10,000 EVs a quarter, and then a lot more.
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