The CEO of Volkswagen’s U.S. group, Jonathan Browning, is leaving the company for personal reasons and returning to his home in the United Kingdom. The Wednesday night press release does not say if Browning will take another position with Volkswagen. In fact, Browning gets just one sentence in the release and no thanks for a job well done.

Perhaps that is because the job has not been well done, but Volkswagen is more to blame for that than is Browning. Year-to-date sales are down more than 5%, and November sales were down more than 16% year over year, according to Kelley Blue Book. Sequentially, however, VW’s November sales were up 9.2% over October.

Browning is taking the fall for a company strategy that has been a failure in the United States. New car sales are up 8.3% in the country so far this year, and the reason for Volkswagen’s failure to keep pace is that the company has too few models, and the models the company does have need to be refreshed to compete with new designs from Toyota Motor Corp. (NYSE: TM) and Honda Motor Co. Ltd. (NYSE: HMC). The company is expected to introduce refreshed designs in the next 12 to 18 months.

Volkswagen’s Audi division is doing well in the United States, with sales up more than 13% year to date, but Audi only sells about a third as many cars as VW.

Browning became VW’s U.S. chief in September 2010, at about the same time that the company set a goal to jump into first place in global sales, vaulting ahead of Toyota and General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM). To achieve that goal, U.S. sales were slated to triple. That did not happen, and the failure certainly played into Browning being replaced by VW’s global head of after-market (parts) sales, Michael Horn.

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