The Volkswagen Group’s all-electric Scout Motors is making strides, breaking ground Thursday on its new assembly plant in Blythewood, S.C.
The company plans to build off-road capable pickup trucks and SUVs inspired by the International Harvester Scout produced from 1960 to 1980. This $2 billion electric vehicle plant will span 1,600 acres and bring 4,000 jobs to the area. It will be the home for Scout’s next-generation trucks and rugged SUVs.
200,000 vehicles a year sounds overly ambitious. The Bronco is only selling in the low 100,000’s. Wrangler is closer to those numbers, but still…That’s a lot of Scouts.
If they make a truck that does away with the whole “absolutely massive with no real gains in cargo capacity” trend that every automaker has been following and give it 350 miles of range, I’d be interested.
Plus, that’s total vehicles. If they made 4 models, two different sized trucks and two different sized SUVs, 200,000 total isn’t a bad estimate, especially if they ramp production over 2 years.
Yeah. The key is this will be a whole USA tastes specific brand for VW Group. Not just a single model. They are pouring lot of money into this and even VW Group don’t make a 2 billion dollar factory on a whim.
Infact I would say what and how well the brand does couple first years isn’t that important to VW. If course they want it ramped up and profitable as soon as possible. However this has to be long term play. Otherwise they would have just launched SUV and Pick-up under VW or one other of their existing brands.
Stellantis has Chrysler, RAM, Jeep and so on in place in USA. VW Group wants something similarly matching in place for North American Market. VW went through their brand and IP catalog and realised via Traton they own Navistar, which owns rights to International and well would you look at that International had a pick-up range named Scout. This all went on the burner pretty soon after the Traton-Navistar deal finalised in 2021.
I would even say I wouldn’t be surprised, if other stuff wouldn’t later on appear from the design catalog as Scout branded for US Market. For example I wouldn’t be at all surprised say on a Scout Transporter cargo van later on and so on.
So it might be VW Group has existing model somewhere around the world in place and think it might sell in USA. Well send the blueprints to Scouts factory and have them slap Scout badging and maybe some design curves on the outer paneling. Badge-engineering is a thing.
Well ofcourse they have limited VW brand presence also, but we’ll it might be once Scout is up and running Scout might fully take over. Depends I guess how they see the brand caches.