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Company

A new era for Volkswagen innovation in America begins with the Type 20 Concept

Some two decades ago, the Volkswagen Group opened a three-person office in Silicon Valley, looking to tap the region’s burgeoning tech scene for new transportation breakthroughs. Today, that office includes more than 180 engineers, designers, researchers and social scientists – the largest such office outside Germany. Earlier this month, Volkswagen announced a new name and increased responsibility for the site: the Innovation and Engineering Center California. And to demonstrate how it wi

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Company

Volkswagen collaborates with DonorsChoose.org to support classrooms across America

Chances are if you have a child in public school in the United States, that school has received support from DonorsChoose.org. From its start in 2000 by a Bronx teacher, the crowdsourced giving network has raised more than $830 million for some 500,000 teachers. Four out of five public schools nationwide have had at least one DonorsChoose.org project, and educators have turned to the network to help fund everything from classroom decorations to clothes for needy students – helping some 34 mil

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As the Beetle ends, a look at its impact on design and Volkswagen’s future

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) holds over 200,000 works of art in its collection from around the world that represent the best modern and contemporary art. One of these is a 1959 Volkswagen Beetle, acquired as an example of iconic industrial design and cultural impact.  With approximately 21 million Beetle units built, it was one of the best-selling vehicles globally of the 20th century. With the Beetle’s third generation coming to an end, Volkswagen convened a panel of design experts at

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Company

What becoming ‘carbon neutral’ means to Volkswagen – and why it’s the only way forward

It’s clear the world is getting warmer. It’s time to stop avoiding the question of what to do about it. Under its “Drive Bigger” brand direction, Volkswagen of America plans to embrace this challenge as our calling for the years ahead. By building a future designed to help tackle the problem, we plan to drive a big change in American transportation, just as we did with the original Beetle. As one of the world’s largest automakers, the Volkswagen Group has a global responsibility – one it p

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Company

Watch the Volkswagen ID. R drive the fastest all-electric lap around the Nurburgring

Thirty-six years ago, one of the world’s fastest race cars – a Porsche 956 – tore around the 12.9 miles of the Nürburgring Nordschelife race track in a scant 6 minutes, 11.13 seconds. That record stood for more than three decades as an ultimate testament to power, engineering and skill, only falling to an experimental Porsche last year that was custom-built for the task. Last Monday, that record was surpassed for the second time – by an all-electric car. The Volkswagen ID. R electric race

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Company

From “Think Small” to “Drive Bigger,” Volkswagen embraces a new purpose

In the 1960s, Volkswagen came to America’s attention through ads like the “Think Small” campaign that dared to be different than other automakers. They emphasized the connection owners make with their vehicles. And they spoke to a cultural moment, resonating with drivers who were less conspicuous in their consumption. Today, Volkswagen launches a new direction for itself in America with an advertising campaign that breaks with convention again. “Drive Bigger” isn’t just a slogan – it’s th

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The next step in autonomous cars? Helping avoid motion sickness

Carsickness can happen to anyone: the confusion between the motion your eyes see, and the motion your body feels, can lead to a queasiness in your stomach or something worse. About a third of all people are susceptible to it—women more than men, children more than adults—but under the right conditions, anyone can suffer from it. And many of those conditions could become more common once autonomous vehicles hit the road. At the Volkswagen Group research labs in Wolfsburg, scientists are st

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Vehicles

How To Speak Smartly About Beautiful Cars, Like The Volkswagen Arteon

Even as it hits the United States, the Volkswagen Arteon already has won awards for its unique style. A blend of four-door sedan, hatchback and sport-car cues, the Arteon looks like no other vehicle on the road, and its role as the flagship of Volkswagen in America suggests where the brand’s future designs will evolve. There may be no more challenging job in the automotive world than designing a vehicle. It’s not just taking a blueprint of a chassis from engineers and making it look prett

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Golf R

One of the first Golf R Spektrums heads north to a true Volkswagen enthusiast

Imagine designing your favorite car in your dream color. Thanks to the new Volkswagen Spektrum Program, Jennifer Jensen was able to turn her vision – a 2019 Volkswagen Golf R in Violet Touch Pearl – into a reality. Jensen was one of the first customers in the United States to receive the 288-hp, all-wheel-drive Volkswagen Golf R in one of the 40 custom-order Spektrum colors. The Auto Exotica magazine publisher and TV host resides in Oshkosh, Wis., and her collection of high performance an

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Magazine

9 Things You Didn’t Know About the All-New Arteon

The camera flashes popped and the crowd “oohed” and “aahed” when Volkswagen unveiled the 2019 Volkswagen Arteon at the Chicago Auto Show. Two fastback sedans, in metallic red and yellow, rotated on the stage, and although the iconic VW logo adorned both trunks and hoods, the cars were unlike any Volkswagen vehicles attendees had ever seen. That was by design. With the Arteon, Volkswagen set out to establish a new design direction for the future, providing a glimpse of the next generation o

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Magazine

All in the VW Family

Zoey. Gretchen. Henry. Izzy. In any other family, it might be a list of children’s names. But Chris and Erin Scheureman of Oregon aren’t like any other family. They’re Volkswagen enthusiasts who would be hard-pressed to find a family as passionate as they are for their air-cooled models. The oldest VW in their collection of 8 dates from 1959 (Henry, a red-and-white 1959 SO 23 Westfalia). Erin still has the 1966 Beetle (Gretchen) she got in high school, and it’s still running at 368,000 mil

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Community

The magic in the Bus: One woman’s push to restore classic car know-how

Fallon Taylor is not your typical classic-car restorer: she is young, talented and female. She is also an expert at what she considers a “dying trade,” which is repairing and restoring vintage Volkswagen Beetles, Karmann Ghias, and Buses, using old school tools and tricks to regain their former glory. More than half of U.S. drivers are women, but they comprise less than three percent of auto service technicians and mechanics, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. The statis

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For EV battery recycling, Volkswagen thinks ahead to the end of the road

One of the great success stories in recycling may lie under the hood of your car. In the United States, 99 percent of all lead-acid automotive batteries are recycled, making them among one of the most-recycled goods you can buy. When your battery wears out, you can easily turn it in when buying a new one; that old battery can then be shredded or melted down, and its raw materials reused. The new generation of electric vehicles will bring a massive increase in the number of batteries on

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Community

Tailored bodies, Beetle basics: The quirky world of coachbuilt Volkswagens

A one-of-a-kind car celebration calls for a one-of-kind car – or 12. To celebrate the 70th anniversary of the first Volkswagen Type 1 sold in the United States, a dozen Beetle-based cars with coachbuilt bodies were presented at the prestigious Amelia Island Concours d’ Elegance. Having a custom body tailor-made for your car was a power move among the wealthy from the start of the auto industry through the 1930s. Following World War II, the European carrozzeria (or karosserie) builders look

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Company

Volkswagen collaborates with composer Jacob Collier for new SUV campaign

Volkswagen enlisted British composer Jacob Collier to score the music for three new television spots featuring the Volkswagen Atlas and Tiguan. At age 24, Collier has already won worldwide acclaim as a musical protégé and mulit-award-winning artist; both in composing and performing. Largely self-taught, Collier had learned how to play a variety of instruments by age seven, and he gained viral fame for a series of inventive, jazz-tinged cover songs that he recorded in his home and uploaded to

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Company

Next challenge for VW’s electric race car? Breaking a Nürburgring record

It’s called the Green Hell for a reason. The color half of the nickname for the Nürburgring Nordschelife race track comes from the German forests surrounding it on the Eifel Mountains, where it was built in the 1920s. The second part comes from the sheer challenge of driving the 12.9-mile track at speed – a cavalcade of at least 75 curves, bumps and undulating surfaces. It was so dangerous that it stopped being used as a Grand Prix race track after the 1976 German GP, but has served as an uno

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Community

Volkswagen helps America’s ski and snowboard instructors get you on the slopes

With winter in full swing, thousands of people head to the mountains every weekend to enjoy their first taste of snow sports, and to level up their skills. Helping them at every step are the 32,000 members of the Professional Ski Instructors of America and the American Association of Snowboard Instructors (PSIA-AASI) – the world’s largest organization dedicated to skiing and snowboarding. And for the third year in a row, Volkswagen will help America’s ski and snowboard instructors get where t

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Vehicles

The new 2020 Volkswagen Passat brings style and value to the sedan game

Over the past 45 years, the Volkswagen Passat has quietly grown into the world’s best-selling midsize sedan, with more than 29 million sold. Since 2011, Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tenn., factory has assembled more than 730,000 Passats, for sale in America and elsewhere. Yet to hear some automotive experts say it, the popularity of SUVs has rendered sedans all but obsolete. Last year, some U.S. automakers have said they would pare back or stop selling sedans altogether. At the Detroit auto show

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Company

Volkswagen plans to produce EVs in America starting in 2022

The future of personal transportation is electric, and for Volkswagen, building the vehicles of the future means expanding in the United States. Volkswagen announced today it plans to expand its Chattanooga factory to build the next generation of electric vehicles – a investment of about $800 million that anticipates creating about 1,000 jobs in Tennessee and elsewhere in the United States. The Chattanooga plant will become the North American hub for Volkswagen’s all-electric vehicles bui

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Community

Volkswagen kicks off with U.S. Soccer, aiming to become America’s preeminent sport

Around the world, more people watch and play soccer than any other sport. In the United States, soccer has steadily gained fans and players over the past few decades; it’s now the third-largest participatory sport in the nation, and its popularity among people under 35 years old is surpassed only by American football. Today, Volkswagen of America announced it was taking a major step to bolster soccer in America by becoming the presenting sponsor of U.S. Soccer for the next four years – su

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