Volkswagen Group of America history

The American advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach was hired to represent the brand in 1959, and the result was a landmark advertising campaign that helped to popularize the car as the “Beetle” and promoted its size and unconventional design as an advantage to the consumer.

Joint ownership of Volkswagen by the West German government and the state of Lower Saxony continued until 1960, when the company was mostly denationalized with the sale of 60 percent of its stock to the public.

Under him and his successor as president of Volkswagen of America, J. Stuart Perkins, VW's United States sales grew to 569,696 cars in 1970, an all-time peak, when Volkswagen captured 7 percent of the United States car market and had over a thousand American dealerships.

Most significant, however, was the Golf, initially called the Rabbit in the United States, which was introduced in 1974.

Volkswagen of America's sales hit rock bottom in 1993, with fewer than 50,000 cars sold that year.

The Volkswagen New Beetle and the fourth-generation Jetta (along with the 1996 incarnation of the Passat) boost sales significantly in North America.

By the end of the decade, thanks to effective advertising and the launch of more competitive new products, including the New Beetle in 1998, the VW brand was back on firmer ground.

The “Place of Remembrance of Forced Labour in the Volkswagen Factory” is a permanent exhibition which opened in 1999.

Profitability still remained an issue, though; Volkswagen of America had not turned a profit for its parent company since 2002.

In January 2007, Volkswagen of America president Adrian Hallmark publicly stated that he planned to get the subsidiary back to profitability in two to three years.

Volkswagen of America began its move from Auburn Hills to Herndon in April 2008.

In October 2009, Interpublic Group's Deutsch, Los Angeles, the ad agency of renowned ad man Donny Deutsch, won Volkswagen's American advertising account - fourteen years after Deutsch had tried for VW's advertising business against Arnold Advertising.

In mid-2015 Volkswagen briefly held the distinction of being the world’s largest car manufacturer by volume after surpassing Toyota Motor Corporation.

Since 1st September 2017, certain new vehicles are already being type-approved according to the Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicles Test Procedure (WLTP), a more realistic test procedure for measuring fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.

Starting on September 1st 2018, the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) will be replaced by the WLTP in stages.