The confusion that almost made Volkswagen’s Group CEO Martin Winterkorn lose his job the previous week stems from the automaker’s difficult situation in the United States where Volkswagen has made very little progress during the eight years Winterkorn has been in charge.
The whole recent feud between the CEO and the supervisory board head Ferdinand Piech seems to actually come from Piech’s dissatisfaction with the way Volkswagen is doing in the U.S. Analysts agree that the lack of success to get onto the U.S. auto market in spite of large investments stands for a big part in the dispute. Volkswagen invested about $1 billion to build a factory in Tennessee in order to produce an affordable Passat sedan to cater for U.S. customers. The carmaker’s U.S. market share fell 2% in the first quarter of this year, a level which has not been so low since 2009 even with the added tailwinds from the depreciation of the euro in the face of the dollar.
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