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Cars and Drivers

No Signs Of Intelligent Life At VW

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Like GM and Toyota (TM) before it, VW aims to be the largest car company in the world within a few years with a huge lead over its competition.

In the meantime, VW said that in the fourth quarter of 2009 net income dropped 73% from the year-earlier period to 257 million euros ($350.4 million). Revenue fell 1.2% to 28.03 billion euros. That means its plan for global domination is off to a rough start.

VW said it delivered 6.3 million vehicles in 2009, about flat with the prior year. According to MarketWatch, “Under its 2018 strategy, Volkswagen aims to increase the number of vehicles sold to around 8 million in the medium term and to more than 10 million by 2018.”

VW management seems to have forgotten the business school maxim “under-promise and over-deliver”. If the Toyota recall debacle taught the auto industry anything, it should be that a lead can be fleeting.

VW has one other hurdle to selling 10 million cars and moving into first place in global market share–it sells almost no vehicles in the United States.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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