VW "Rootin' Anne"
 

This review is not nearly harsh enuff...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/automobiles/autoreviews/25routan.html

Brooke was the best part of the campaign. The first couple of times I saw the spots, I didn't even know they were pushing a minivan.

Shameful. Just stinking shameful. Diluting a brand is one thing, but this pretty much just washes it away. They might as well be Kia or Hyundai.

Jerks have been selling sporty looking JUNK cars for years under the banner of 'German engineering', and making them in Mexico.

That car is a travesty. As the son of a VW dealer of 50+ years, that car depresses me. It's like seeing a family member go bad.

I know, i love that! Mexican beetles are hardly on the same level of build quality or fit and finish as my 25 year old Porsche.

I had a 99 turbo beetle, and I assure you it was lower quality than the 82 911 SC I owned at the same time. Everything in the VW was cheap plastic. It looked good at first, but then it just started coming apart. With less than 50,000, the doors on the VW started to not line up properly. I had treated this car well, and it appeared that the frame was actually weakening. I was SO done.

I smell Wienie King in this...

Absolutely not. WW had nothing to do with this.

The Routan was largely the idea of cost-cutting former VW chairman Wolfgang Bernhard, who, not coincidentally was Chrysler's chief operating officer from 2000 to 2004 before jumping ship to Volkswagen.

During his tenure at VW, Bernhard and his former boss, DaimlerChrysler CEO Dieter Zetsche, came up with the Routan program as a way to generate easy sales and keep Chrysler's minivan factory cranking out product.

Why? VWoA has some, in my opinion, wildly ambitious goals to increase US sales from below 250,000 now to 800,000 in 10 years. And the Routan seemed a quick and cheap method to expand the VW product line in the US.

The horribly misguided marketing effort has not helped.

I am in general a huge fan of minivans and their utility when compared to comparably piggish, less useful SUV's. The new gen Caravan/T&C are honest, if basic tools. I like them.

But, the Routan does a disservice to both VW and Chrysler.

I'm sure it must have seemed like a much better idea a few years ago...







Tim