02 Sep 04
Friday night in the pub, and the usual question arises: so what have you been driving this week? A Volkswagen Phaeton, I answer. Blank faces all round, until someone ventures: 'One of those larger Passats?' Well no, Andy, it isn't. I try to explain that Volkswagen conceived the car as a rival to the likes of the BMW 7-Series, Jaguar XJ and Mercedes S-Class, that it intended the Phaeton to be its flagship to-be-aspired-to saloon, a trailblazing entry into the luxury car sector and the start of a new era for the company as it moved ever further away from its 'people's car' Beetle-making roots, and cracked the lucrative North American market.
The Phaeton story also includes how Volkswagen drew an ambitious set of benchmarks it had to achieve, such as the W12 version being able to cruise at 186mph in a temperature of 50 degrees centigrade whilst chilling the cabin to 20 degrees (using the four-zone climate control system). Or how it had to have the stiffest body in class; apparently, you could attach a Golf GTi to a three-metre steel pole, bolt that to a Phaeton and the body would only bend by one degree. And easier to understand, how the engineers and designers aimed to make it quieter, better-constructed and more refined than its competitors - and that it shares more of its basic underpinnings and mechanicals with the Bentley Continental GT than with either the Passat or the Audis A6 or A8. How buying a Phaeton means flicking through glossy brochures of bespoke options, sumptuous interior trim finishes and every electrical or electronic gadget you ever dreamed of, and then some; how you don't get to deal with common or garden Golf-pushing salesmen, but dedicated, specially-trained personnel in a VIP-only area of selected showrooms, and, most of all, how it is built in a unique glass-walled showcase factory in Dresden which you can visit to see your car under construction. Andy wasn't convinced, though. And neither, it seems, are luxury car buyers.
When the Phaeton was unveiled at the 2002 Geneva Motor Show, the then Volkswagen boss Ferdinand Piech pronounced that sales of 20,000 a year were expected, a pretty modest number even by the diminishing sector's standards, but still an ambitious target for a company new to producing this kind of car in a very image-conscious niche. Some eighteen months on from launch, Volkswagen is more than coy when it comes to revealing just how many Phaetons have actually been sold. It would have taken Jeremy Paxman to persuade the spokesman at the launch of the V6 TDI to mention numbers: in a less than subtle attempt to duck the question, he waffled on about high levels of customer satisfaction, how Volkswagen wasn't going to undermine its image for quality by selling high volumes and cutting prices or offering discounts, and how they weren't measuring the car's success by the sheer numbers sold. Good job: a Chinese whispers-like process between the journalists present threw up the vital statistic that Volkswagen has sold roughly 6,000 Phaetons - worldwide - since launch, a significant failure to meet targets by anyone's standards. And to add insult to injury, American dealers are now offering incentives including a highly-advertised and heavily-subsidised lease programme in a last-ditch attempt to top sales of 1000 cars a year across the nation.
