MARCH 2006 :: AUTOS

How the Germans
Discovered America
Volkswagen Assigns a Team to Study U.S. Drivers and Culture

By Gina Chon
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Volker Jagodzinski, an engineer at Volkswagen, spent years wondering why Americans treat their automobiles like rolling extensions of their living rooms. Then he spent 3µ grueling hours on a Greyhound bus from Seattle to Portland, Ore., and it all made sense.

The long ride helped him appreciate the vast distances Americans travel in their cars, and why so few use trains or buses. "If you lose your car here, you're done," Mr. Jagodzinski says. "I was surprised by the amount of time people spent in their cars."

Mr. Jagodzinski's road trip was a part of a Volkswagen project dubbed "Moonraker," a year-and-a-half-long effort to gain a deeper understanding of American culture in hopes of making cars more appealing to U.S. consumers.

The project shows how far car makers are willing to go these days to get inside the heads of their customers. Auto manufacturers have long used focus groups to get feedback on models in development, but many go well beyond that. Ford now creates an imaginary persona for the target customer of new models-inventing, for example, an Asian-American teacher in her early 30s named Jenny for its just-launched Fusion. Chrysler even creates rooms to reflect the personalities of these imaginary customers.

'A Totally Different Approach'

Volkswagen's Moonraker is part of an effort to turn around the fortunes of the company's U.S. operation, where it has lost more than $1 billion in each of the past two years as a result of declining sales, unfavorable exchange rates and quality problems. It hasn't helped that for years, engineers in VW's headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany, paid little attention to feedback from U.S. customers asking for roomier, more functional vehicles such as minivans and sport-utility vehicles.

Although the company has its U.S. base near Detroit and a design center in Southern California, American tastes never had much influence in Wolfsburg.

"We needed a totally different approach," says Stefan Liske, VW's director of product strategy and creator of Moonraker. "We asked ourselves, 'Do we really know everything about this market?'"

In December 2004, VW put together the Moonraker team of 19 European and four U.S. engineering, marketing, design and sales staffers. Two months later, the team members came to the U.S. to live and work until June 2006. In their first 24 days in the country, the team traveled to 24 states, hitting such all-American landmarks as the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and the World of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta. In Dallas, the members went to a rodeo and a drag race. In Daytona Beach, Fla., they found out what spring break means for American high-school and college students. They also tried out every form of transportation, including taking subway rides, driving rental cars and taking red-eye flights. They had to drive a different vehicle every week.

The Moonraker staffers say they've learned a lot about American car buyers, like why storage space is so important to them and why they can never have enough speakers in a vehicle. While Germans prize a car's driving capability and frown on eating while driving, the Moonraker team found Americans think of their cars like a second home or office. "In Germany, it's all about driving, but here, it's about everything but driving," says VW designer Reto Brun. "People here want to use their time in other ways, like talk on their cellphone."

When not on the road, the group of three women and 20 men work together in a 12,000 square-foot secluded home in Malibu, Calif. Half the team members also live at the Malibu home, whose walls are covered with posters and charts that feature data about Volkswagen and its competitors.

For a day, Mr. Jagodzinski shadowed a single mother, traveling with her to drop her children off at school and pick up dry cleaning. On one of these trips, he realized American moms could really use a place to store a tissue box and space to put down burgers from the drive-through. "I began thinking about what specific features her car needed," he says. "It was about living the customer's life and putting ourselves in their place."

Party in a Parking Lot?

One big revelation came up at a Nascar event: tailgating. When Jens Berger walked into a parking lot at the Atlanta Motor Speedway, he was surprised to see many of the fans there listening to the race on the radio instead of watching it. And he didn't understand why they had set up a makeshift campground there. The Germans in the group never knew that Americans use their cars as portable buffet tables and partymobiles, a discovery that could factor into future vehicles, such as a minivan.

One exhausting exercise was dubbed the "Walk of Pain"-a three-day walk from Long Beach, Calif., to Hollywood to observe parking lots and street parking. Mr. Berger says it helped him realize that in the U.S. market, there is a need for a wide variety of vehicles: from small cars to pickups to convertibles.

Although Volkswagen has been receptive to Moonraker's suggestions, the team still finds it hard at times to get its message across to decision makers in Germany. For example, it has been difficult to convey the importance of cupholders, because it sounds trivial to headquarters staff. Sensitizing colleagues in Wolfsburg to American needs is why the team has been making two to three short movies a month that include interviews with consumers and clips of the Moonraker team at various events.

It seems to be working. By the time Moonraker wraps up this summer, VW hopes the project will have provided the basis for as many as three more vehicles within the next decade and helped expand the company's range of products. VW will also have to consider how to keep the insight coming, perhaps, continuing to send people to the U.S. for a similar, scaled-back program.

Volkswagen thinks Moonraker is successful enough that it is expanding the idea to other markets. The car maker started a similar cultural immersion project in China and another team is under way in India.