VW to use MQB for three generations

Still reeling from its ever-deepening Dieselgate crisis, Volkswagen will look to keep its small- and mid-size cars and SUVs on the same chassis architecture for three generations.

The move, outlined yesterday by Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess, will deliver enormous savings in production, engineering and development, and could even take Volkswagen’s heart-and-soul models out to the end of internal-combustion power.

"In the past months we have worked on the cost side of MQB and made significant progress," Diess said to German newspaper Boersen-Zeitung on Saturday.

With the spending brakes being put on hard by Diess and Volkswagen Group CEO Matthias Mueller, the MQB architecture platform will be asked to sit beneath three generations, rather than the planned two.

"The MQB has high technical substance, so we can use it for the next two vehicle generations without further major investments," Diess said.

The MQB architecture, developed by retired Audi R&D boss Dr Ulrich Hackenberg, sits beneath the Golf, the Passat, the new Tiguan, the Touran, the just-launched five-metre Atlas and even the Golf Sportsvan, while a cut-price version of it set to debut beneath next year’s all-new Polo. And that’s just the Volkswagen brand.

It’s also beneath the Audi A3, the next Audi A1 and hordes of Seat and Skoda models.

The common architecture allows small- to medium-sized Volkswagen Group models to share enormous numbers of parts, electronic architectures and even production lines, slashing costs and build and ramp-up times.

The Volkswagen Group has admitted it has plans to bump up its current MQB-based production from about 2.5 million cars today to seven million by 2018.

But pushing MQB to three generations isn’t without risk. It made its debut beneath the Golf 7 in 2012 and a Golf 7.5 facelift is due laterr this year, while a Golf 8 isn’t expected until late 2018, at the earliest, but most likely early 2019.

Three generations of the Golf alone would take the MQB architecture out to 21 years, though the latest MQB offering, the Atlas SUV, will hit the streets a full five years after the Golf 7, which could take it out to a 26-year architecture.

Volkswagen insiders have admitted Diess is looking to cut €3.7 billion from the brand’s costs per year by 2021, which would be enough to double its operating margins from just two per cent to four per cent.