With year over year sales of sports utility vehicles in the United States up 5.5 percent, Volkswagen has decided to go all in with the popular style.
The carmaker announced at the New York International Auto Show Wednesday it would produce a second SUV at its Chattanooga plant.
VW's new Atlas SUV is already being assembled here and is expected to be in showrooms around the country in about a month. No time frame was given for production of the new SUV, which is expected to be smaller than the Atlas, but - according to industry watchers - it is expected to be before 2020.
The manufacturer already produces the Touareg and the Tiguan, both of which are SUVs. In addition, the company said earlier this week it would offer an all-new, larger Tiguan later this year - built in Mexico - but continue to sell the current Tiguan as the Tiguan Limited. Thus, the new, Chattanooga-produced vehicle, expected to be a five-seater, would be a fifth SUV line.
Volkswagen invested about $600 million in the state and added about 1,100 workers locally when it tacked on the seven-seat Atlas line and is expected to top out at 3,400 employees when the line is fully engaged. How many more employees might be added, how much more investment might be made and what other suppliers might light nearby are unclear.
Even without a time frame and employee and investment figures, though, the second SUV line only can be seen as a positive for the city, county and state. It would have been easy for Volkswagen to play it safe after its 2015 emissions cheating scandal broke, but the manufacturer plunged ahead and became the world's largest automaker in 2016 even while working out its penance.
Now, with SUVs, and more and more with the United States driver in mind, the German carmaker sees a niche to fill.
Numbers for the Touareg fell by 2,800 in 2016 and were down for the first quarter of 2017, but overall U.S. numbers for the Tiguan rose for the third straight year in 2016, were up 39 percent in January from 2016 and were up significantly in the first quarter of this year from 2016.
Sales of the Chattanooga-made Passat, a passenger car and the first VW model produced here, fell in 2016 but were up in in the first quarter of 2017 over last year.
Hinrich Woebcken, president and CEO of Volkswagen Group of America Inc., as much as told reporters in New York Wednesday that SUV and USA have a lot in common - besides two letters.
"We are now, in this year," he said, "shifting the brand much more into a family-friendly and SUV, all-wheel drive brand in order to get [to] a really full-line automaker here in the United States."
Since VW is about to have SUVs coming out of its ears, we hope the manufacturer has read the car-buyer tea leaves accurately.