Volkswagen reclassifies Australia to boost future performance

Some of the hottest models sold in Australia by Volkswagen, Skoda and Audi are eligible for a power boost courtesy of a reclassification of the Australian climate by Volkswagen Group, which now considers conditions here to be ‘moderately hot’ rather than ‘hot and dusty’.

At an event this week in Queenstown, New Zealand, Volkswagen Group Australia product marketing manager Jeff Shafer confirmed that the reclassification will benefit Volkswagen, Skoda and Audi brands in Australia – even though the latter has a different local distributor – after “years” of negotiations with the German parent company.

“The good news is – combined within the Group – we’ve been lobbying quite strongly to have head office take another look at our market and understand where people live and the conditions in which they drive. And that hard work has paid off,” he said.

“In terms of practical effects, it’s still way’s off in the sense that you can’t just snap your fingers and bring stuff in. It opens some doors, but there’s still some hurdles we’ve got to jump through.”

Mr Shafer also clarified that efforts by VGA to have the local climate reclassified were not coordinated with Audi Australia, which has nevertheless benefited by this action.

He revealed that whenever VGA staff met with Volkswagen Group executives and engineers on home soil or overseas, they took “every opportunity” to inform them about Australia’s climate and where the majority of high-performance vehicles were sold and used.

“I can remember using Australian Bureau of Statistics heat maps of Australia and average temperature by region,” Mr Shafer said.

“And then we did stuff like plot our dealer network and population across that so you could see that in north-west Australia, it gets very hot but there’s no dealers there, very little roads there and there’s not kilometres driven there.

“It wasn’t just one side of the business; it was our colleagues on the aftersales that had to also support that.”

Although it was the Volkswagen Golf R hot hatch and wagon that was pivotal in the push by VGA to have Australia’s climate designation changed, the first model to launch under the new rules will be Skoda’s 176kW/500Nm twin-turbo diesel Kodiaq RS large SUV for which orders open later this year.

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Mr Shafer indicated that until the eighth-generation Golf arrives in early 2021, Australian-delivered R versions are expected to continue with their 2.0-litre turbo-petrol four-cylinder engines in 213kW tune, compared with the more potent 228kW version sold in Europe.

“With any change to an engine, then there’s obviously new homologation that you’ve got to conduct and that’s a big bottleneck at the moment from a Group perspective, so when we look at a model that’s starting to enter its runout phase, it doesn’t really make sense to bring that forward,” he said.

“But the good news is in the future, we can go into Mark 8 (Golf R) without that as one of the issues we face from a technical standpoint.”

The climate hurdle may have been passed, but Mr Shafer explained that further obstacles had to be overcome before European-spec engines could be successfully used in hot VW Group vehicles sold here.

“We do have to make sure that we have the engine that will meet our requirements in other ways,” he said. “The WLTP and NEDC split can also affect things, but I’m pretty confident that we’ll be seeing output for Australia that’s matching what’s in Europe,” he said.

“The more that things can be made common … the easier it is for us to get stuff. (Climate) was an internal barrier, but we’ve been able to overcome that. Now there are still some external barriers, but it does make it that much easier.”

Europe’s recent switch from NEDC to WLTP fuel consumption and emissions-testing standards has caused delays, stop-sales and mounting costs while vehicles get homologated – and Volkswagen Group has suffered more than most.

Australian-delivered Golf Rs are powered by a 213kW 2.0-litre turbo-petrol four-cylinder engine, but in Europe the same powerplant is available with 228kW.

Locally, this has forced VGA and other brands to prioritise homologation for its most popular models and variants, with slow sellers such as the Tiguan 110TSI being unavailable for long periods or, as with high-performance Golf models with manual transmissions, discontinued until further notice.

Mr Shafer declined to confirm what other models were now in the pipeline for Australia following the climate reclassification but said the existing engine line-up on most models would remain until the next generational change.

“Again, the more we can get a sense of opportunities, we will do them, but it will be a little while before we probably see any practical implementation, just because it takes a while to do the negotiations, and then get that through the technical side and if there’s therefore additional engineering work to homologate the engines,” he said.

“We would be looking at whatever the next milestone is, where you might already be going through the process to change engines at that facelift or generation and therefore it’s much easier to introduce those engines at that time.”

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