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Volkswagen to 'streamline' leasing service

Date: 28 June 2013   |   Author: Jack Carfrae

Volkswagen's new fleet boss is planning to improve the company's service to the leasing industry following the introduction of a series of back-office systems, as revealed in BusinessCar's 19 March issue.

Commenting on the changes, Michael O'Shea, who took over from long-serving VW fleet boss Vince Kinner in late March, told BusinessCar: "Leasing companies are where we believe there are opportunities to identity more streamlined processes, from a back-office sales administration point of view.

"The remit of the Group Fleet Services structure is very much around trying to consolidate back office efficiencies, which will make Volkswagen Group an even easier and more effective organisation to deal with.

"The brand is still front of house - customers and leasing companies will still get a brand representative. The Group Fleet Services is about supporting and enabling the brands to do their job."

He also said that VW's contract hire agency programme for supplying the contract hire industry would be altered to a common system for other companies within the group.

"Volkswagen, Skoda and Seat already have existing agency platforms. There is an opportunity to consolidate slight variations within that into one common platform for those three brands. It'll then be on an individual brand level as to whether they feel it's appropriate to operate that process."

Away from the fleet arena, VW has a series of key products on the way over the next two years.

The next-generation Passat is expected to arrive in 2015 and is likely to be unveiled at the Paris motor show in September 2014.

Stop/start systems are tipped to be standard across the range, while equipment will likely follow suit with the latest Golf and include autonomous emergency braking and adaptive cruise control.

The firm is also set to broaden its electric portfolio, with an electric version of its Up supermini by the end of this year, a fully electric Golf in mid-2014 and a plug-in hybrid Golf the following year.

A VW spokesperson hinted that the latter car is likely to bear similar figures to the Audi A3 E-tron (also a plug-in hybrid), unveiled at this year's Geneva motor show in March and capable of 188mpg and 35g/km.

He stressed that VW sees plug-in hybrids as "a much broader solution" to fully electric vehicles.

Every major concept car that the company has unveiled over the past two years has had a plug-in hybrid drivetrain, which suggests it's an avenue that VW is more than likely to pursue with its production cars in the run-up to 2020's lower emissions targets and beyond. 



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