VW To Bring Amarok Pickup To America If We Promise To Buy 100k Units
The Argentinian-produced Volkswagen Amarok pickup might be coming to the US if VW thinks it can sell enough of them. VW of America’s Stephan Jacoby tells pickuptrucks.com “we’d have to sell at least 100,000 Amarok pickups to make it feasible.” But don’t get too excited: the only compact pickup to sell in those numbers is the Toyota Tacoma, which sold 102,327 units year-to-date.
The compact pickup segment is declining. Consumers are going to big pickups, which is a very traditional conservative segment. A lot of our competitors have burned their fingers in it as late entries. Before we could bring [the Amarok] here we’d have to do a lot of homework. But we have other vehicles to bring into this market first. Once we do that, we can talk about the Amarok.
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Hilux/Tacoma is one of Toyota's best sellers around the world. That was part of the motivation for VW's JV with them as the Taro. VW even made them in Germany for a time. I wonder if they asked if they could use the name again?
Hot. Makes the Ridgelind look even uglier
A few months back our local newspaper did a story on rusting tacoma frames, right before the recall was issued. The frames on 2 trucks snapped in half in one day, when they were put on the lift at the local toyota dealer for an oil change. Mechanical parts can be replaced if they fail, but when the frame starts going the only thing left for the truck is the scrap heap.
Chicken tax (google it). A 25% tax on each of these unless Vw opens a plant in the USA. Break even point on that would most likely be 100k units a year.