Volkswagen UK has sold out of its Polo Bluemotion allocation for the full year 2007. Speaking exclusively to just-auto, Rod Mcleod, Volkswagen UK’s marketing chief said that since going on sale in October, all 300 Polo Bluemotions assigned to the UK for the final three months of the year have been sold.
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The Polo Bluemotion is the cleanest ‘conventional’ car you can buy in Britain, and emitting just 99 g/km CO2, it’s even exempt from road tax. Bluemotion is the name given by Volkswagen to denote the cleanest and most efficient cars in its range.
Currently only available on the Polo compact car, six other models will be given the Bluemotion treatment in the next six months according to Mcleod. These include most of the Golf range (including the Golf Plus, GTI and Estate variants), and the Passat and Passat Estate. In the long term, VW hopes to have a Bluemotion derivative on every car in the range, but due to ‘timing priorities’ this cannot be achieved immediately.
Although VW would like all Bluemotion cars to follow the Polo and be best-in-class, Mcleod acknowledges that this is unrealistic: “We’re cannot control what our competitors do, and the world moves on. We want all Bluemotion models to have amongst the lowest CO2 in their class,” Mcleod said.
For the foreseeable future, Bluemotion will make up a tiny part of VW’s total sales. In 2008, VW says it aims to sell 7,720 Bluemotion cars in the UK, out of total annual sales of around 200,000, meaning that these eco-variants will account for between 3.5 and 4% of VW’s annual sales. So far, demand has come predominantly from retail customers, but Mcleod predicts that in time, fleet sales will account for an increasingly large proportion of Bluemotion sales. He said that VW has already had several enquiries from fleet companies wishing to lower their carbon footprint, despite the Polo not being a strong seller amongst fleet buyers.
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By GlobalDataRebecca Wright
See also: UK: VW kicks off BlueMotion green line with Polo
