Volkswagen Australia promises to go from EV zero to hero

Volkswagen Australia has boldly declared it will soon offer the largest zero-emissions vehicle fleet in the country – even though it is yet to release a single electric or even hybrid model here – and hopes to fast-track the introduction of its first EV, the Volkswagen ID.4 and ID.5 mid-size SUVs, to next year.

Seven years on from the infamous #dieselgate emissions scandal that found Europe’s largest car-maker fitted its diesel cars with two-mode software to cheat global emissions testing, Volkswagen Group Australia says it will eventually offer the broadest portfolio of ‘zero-emissions mobility’ products nationally.

“It’s inevitable that we will be the biggest provider of zero-emissions mobility in the country – that’s just a fact. We will be and we’re making tangible progress on that all the time,” Volkswagen Australia’s corporate communications manager Paul Pottinger told carsales at the recent launch of the 2022 Volkswagen Tiguan Allspace.

However, the German car-maker has so far taken only baby steps in its local electric vehicle strategy after years of seeming idleness. As it stands, Volkswagen remains a relative minnow in the Australian EV landscape.

In fact, it doesn’t have a presence at all – despite its parent company’s accelerated rollout of the ID electric model family in China, Europe and the US – due to the lack of a national EV strategy by the federal government and demand for its EVs in Europe, which has deprioritised production capacity for Australia.

Meantime, mainstream auto brands including Nissan, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda and MG are selling as many EVs as they can land in Australia, and they will soon be joined by Ford and the local market leader, whose first EV – the Toyota bZ4X medium SUV – will likely be delayed until early 2023.

Volkswagen is working hard to change that, especially now that all Australian states and territories offer EV incentives, says Pottinger.

While Audi has its e-tron electric SUVs and is now technically part of Volkswagen Group Australia, the German giant’s first electrified models will come not from the VW or Skoda brands, but the newly-introduced Cupra brand via plug-in hybrid versions of the Leon hatch and Formentor SUV, the release of which have been delayed to August.

Volkswagen Australia’s first PHEV model will be the Touareg R flagship SUV in late 2022 and it is keen to release the Tiguan and Golf GTE plug-in hybrids thereafter.

In terms of pure EVs, the Cupra Born electric hatch will be first to arrive here, in early 2023, and it will probably followed by the Skoda Enyaq electric SUV, which is slated to arrive in late 2023 or early 2024.

But Pottinger said Volkswagen Group Australia was now lobbying its head office to bring forward the introduction of the VW brand’s first EVs to late 2023, beginning with the highly anticipated ID.4 mid-size SUV that is expected to start at about $60,000 in price.

Further afield, there’s also a chance for the small ID.3 hatch, the Kombi-channeling ID. Buzz people-mover and the range-topping ID.6 flagship SUV.

“ID.4 and ID.5 are approved for Australia and they’re the ones we particularly want,” said Pottinger.

“At the moment, what is set in stone is that they’re going into production in quarter four of 2023. Our intention is to bring that SOP (start of production) forward – to have them in market next year in Australia.

“We’ve made a great deal of progress. Look where we’ve come – a year ago we were saying ‘we’re a third-world dumping ground’, which we were. Now we’ve got ID approved and we have an SOP for ID. Now it’s a case of bringing it forward.

“The [Cupra] Born’s going to be brought to market first. [Volkswagen] ID.4 is such a different proposition to Born – it’s an SUV and it makes absolute sense for us to have that here.”

Pottinger’s comments were echoed recently by Volkswagen Group Australia’s head of passenger vehicles, Michal Szaniecki, who said Australia “is now much more prioritised” by its headquarters, putting his company in a better position to properly embrace green mobility.

However, when asked why the car-maker’s local transition to EVs had taken so long, Szaniecki admitted Volkswagen had underestimated the demand for EVs in Australia.

“It’s a very fair question,” Szaniecki told carsales recently.

“Within the global context and the limited resources of course, the countries which have already strong legislation and CO2 regulations will have the natural prioritisation for organisations like ours, which exactly happened.

“Now with a much bigger demand than we thought there is, of course Australia is now much more prioritised within our organisation, even almost ignoring the fact that legislation is not catching up with what is already happening in the market.”

A top EV seller in overseas markets, Szaniecki said Volkswagen didn’t want to introduce the brand’s first ID model (the ID.3 hatch) prematurely, instead opting to avoid the “infant stage”.

“It’s not such a bad thing [Australia has had to wait so long] because we are just better prepared,” he said.

“We are ready to launch it from A to Z without compromising on the quality of the customer experience or the product. So, it had to take some time, but now we are ready.

“We wanted to ensure we were coming with the right portfolio, the right products, in terms of quality. [The ID.4 and ID.5 are] much more adequate for Australia consumers than ID.3 [and] with the right pricing.”

Szaniecki said the early stages of EV sales in Europe were “sometimes painful” but “will not be in Australia”, despite the German car-maker being new to the local EV consumer landscape and getting customers to understand issues around value, charging, servicing, finance and resale.

“So first a lot of errors defaulting to the old [internal combustion vehicle] routines made it a bit of a tough and bumpy road in the beginning in Europe,” he explained.

“It’s a much better starting point for customers because now only the transaction has to happen because everything else is under control. In Europe, we were not under control of all the elements of the customer journey unfortunately.”

– with Alexandra Lawrence

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