@IAA: VW Chief Cites “Natural Fit” With Navistar

At the opening day of the IAA  Commercial Vehicles show in Hanover, Germany, the  head of Volkswagen Truck and Bus said the company’s new stake in U.S. truck builder Navistar is a “natural fit at the right moment.”

Andreas Renschler told a round table that the deal in which VW bought a 16% share of Navistar was completed in a short period starting from March and that many shareholders needed to be involved.

“We want to be a global champion,” he said. “Not volume wise, we want to be the most profitable and we want to be the most innovative and thirdly, we want to be represented globally.

“We have a mission to bring transport to the next level. We will move from being a hardware manufacturer to a lot of different kind of things.”

A further aim, Renschler said, was to generate more profit for VW customers.

“We are not a company of global scope but we are a big player in the North American market and have been so for quite a while,” added Navistar CEO Troy Clarke. “We have done a lot of things to prepare ourselves. We say that it all starts with the customer and we are customer-centric. We have a saying in the company that there is no shortage of people who know what a good truck is, but you need to know how to fix your customers problems.

“That is a rule that all truck companies will always play to. There will be a lot of truck companies that come into our space to try to occupy pieces of the value chain, but the thing they don’t know is how that truck is used — even most of our customers can’t spec a truck. That’s the role we play, they tell us their needs and we figure what is the right value for them.

“Unfortunately, in our history, we turned left and they went right and because of the technology that we chose to employ for emissions we really did not have the opportunity to share in the development and cross development of the (N13) engine so one of the great things that we are really looking forward to is immediate developments”.