Announcing A Week Of BS At Volkswagen

Jeff Glucker absolutely LOVED his seat! Business Class – by the door! (Can get a bit drafty on long flights in an old 747 …)

Good news for a certain vociferous segment of TTAC’s readership: This coming week, you will read very little BS. On Sunday night, I will be on a flight from Tokyo to Hannover, graciously laid on by Vokswagen, and I will spend the better part of the week in Wolfsburg and Berlin, to hear the latest on MQB, to drive the Golf GTD, the Volkswagen XL-1 super saver, and to enjoy Volkswagen’s hospitality, which has come a long way since the days when hospitality consisted of slices of cold cuts between soggy buns, served on a piece of grey cardboard.

Taken from Jeff’s window at the Ritz Carlton in Wolfsburg: The “Kraftwerk” – old power plant on the other side of Volkswagen’s private port at the Mittellandkanal

This will be the first time since seven years, when I was last on the inside of Wache Sandkamp, the main gate of Volkswagen’s monstrous factory in Wolfsburg. For more than 30 years, I went, or drove through these gates, multiple times a week. Huge changes happened between 1973 and 2006, and I wonder what changes I will see on Monday afternoon and thereafter.

First Golf GTI – I was already an established copywriter when we did the launch campaign for this one. Volkswagen was convinced it would not sell more than 5,000 – and none in the U,S. . They changed that opinion after a while …

This will also be the first time I meet the creme de la blogs, from Automotive.com all the way to VWVortex, and of course our good friends at Jalopnik. In Tokyo, I usually hang out with the antisocial media from Reuters, Dow Jones, The Nikkei , and my “from the backset” driver Martin of Germany’s Handelsblatt. Let’s see how social the social guys really are – Berlin beckons! I hope they are all over 18 …

That’s Jeff Glucker’s flight back from Amsterdam. I would have staid the night in Amsterdam if I were Jeff Glucker

(The pictures are by Jeff Glucker of Hooniverse. He was with the first wave. As I type this, Jeff is on his way back to LA , with a sadly way too short stop in Amsterdam.)