Volkswagen

Volkswagen built its empire on the idea of a car for everyone, then nearly torched its reputation with the biggest emissions fraud in automotive history.

By Alexandre Le Hégarat · datastats · Updated June 27, 2026

VW_Werk_Altes_Heizkraftwerk.jpg: Richard Bartz derivative wo · CC BY-SA 3.0

Volkswagen was born in 1937 with one of the most democratic missions in car history and one of the most uncomfortable origins. The name literally means “people’s car,” and the goal was to put an affordable vehicle in the hands of ordinary German families. The catch: it was a state project of Nazi Germany, designed by Ferdinand Porsche, and the factory town of Wolfsburg was built around it. The Beetle that emerged went on to become one of the best-selling cars ever made, and the post-war company became the engine of Germany’s industrial recovery.

People search Volkswagen for two very different reasons. Some want to know whether it’s a smart buy: is it reliable, how does it compare to Toyota, which years to avoid. Others want to understand the corporate giant behind the badge: who owns it, how it relates to Porsche and Audi, and how it became one of the two biggest carmakers on the planet. The honest answer to the first group is that VW is a solid, refined, middle-of-the-road choice that costs more to repair than a Japanese equivalent.

No discussion of Volkswagen is complete without Dieselgate. In 2015, the brand was caught using illegal software to cheat diesel emissions tests, with cars pumping out up to 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides in real driving. It became the biggest fraud in automotive history, cost the company tens of billions of dollars in fines, settlements, and buybacks, sent executives to court, and accelerated VW’s pivot to electric cars. It is the single most important fact about the modern brand, and any honest page has to put it front and center.

What buyers actually want to know is practical: the DSG dual-clutch gearbox can be a weak point on older cars, the infotainment and electronics can be fiddly, and the ID. electric range is decent but not class-leading. Behind all of it sits the Porsche-Piech family, which controls the publicly traded company through Porsche SE, alongside the German state of Lower Saxony. Volkswagen is not luxury, but it owns most of the world’s great luxury badges. It is, in short, an ordinary car brand attached to an extraordinary empire.

People also ask

Volkswagen sits in the middle of the reliability pack: better than the Land Rovers and Alfa Romeos of the world, but well behind Toyota, Honda, and Lexus. Its engines and build quality are generally solid, but VW gets dinged in long-term dependability studies for electronics, infotainment glitches, and dual-clutch DSG gearbox issues. Buy a well-maintained, post-2015 model and you'll likely be fine; the brand's reputation suffers more from expensive repairs than from frequent ones.

Volkswagen AG is publicly traded, but the controlling shareholder is Porsche SE, the holding company of the Austrian-German Porsche-Piech family, which holds roughly 50.7% of the voting rights. The state of Lower Saxony also holds a significant stake (about 20% of voting rights) under a special law, and the Qatar Investment Authority is another large shareholder. So while anyone can buy VW stock, real control sits with the Porsche-Piech dynasty.

Yes, Volkswagen is German through and through. It was founded in 1937 and is headquartered in Wolfsburg, in the state of Lower Saxony, where its enormous flagship plant still dominates the town. The name itself is German, and the Volkswagen Group is one of the largest companies in Germany and a pillar of its industrial economy.

VW stands for Volkswagen, which is German for "people's car" (Volk meaning people, Wagen meaning car). The name reflects the brand's founding mission in the 1930s: to build an affordable, mass-market car that ordinary German families could actually buy. The Beetle was the first realization of that idea.

All over the world. The historic home plant is in Wolfsburg, Germany, but the Volkswagen Group runs over 100 factories globally. Golfs come mainly from Wolfsburg; many European models also come from plants in Germany, Slovakia (Bratislava), Spain, Portugal, and Mexico. The US-market Atlas and the long-wheelbase Tiguan are built in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and many models for North America come from Puebla, Mexico.

Volkswagen was founded on 28 May 1937 in Nazi Germany, originally as a state-backed project to produce an affordable "people's car." The design came from engineer Ferdinand Porsche, and the car became the Beetle. The original plant and the town of Wolfsburg were built around it. The savings-scheme buyers of the pre-war era never received their cars because World War II redirected the factory to military production.

Dieselgate is the emissions scandal that broke in September 2015, when the US EPA revealed that Volkswagen had deliberately programmed millions of diesel cars with "defeat device" software. The software detected when a car was being emissions-tested and switched on full pollution controls, then turned them off in normal driving, where the cars emitted up to 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides. It is widely considered the biggest fraud in automotive history.

Estimates of the total cost run to roughly $30 billion or more globally, including fines, settlements, and buybacks. In the US alone, VW agreed to a $14.7 billion civil settlement plus a $2.8 billion criminal penalty, and bought back nearly 500,000 vehicles. Some tallies, counting all related legal costs over the years, put the figure as high as around $38 billion. Several executives faced criminal charges.

No. Volkswagen is positioned as a mainstream, mass-market brand, slightly above budget rivals but below premium. However, the Volkswagen Group does own a stack of luxury and performance brands: Audi, Porsche, Bentley, Lamborghini, and Bugatti all sit under the same corporate umbrella. So VW the car brand is not luxury, but VW the company is one of the biggest luxury-car owners in the world.

The Golf is the brand's all-time best-seller, with more than 35 million sold since 1974, though the Tiguan SUV has overtaken it in recent annual sales. Other high-volume models include the Polo, the Passat, the Jetta (big in the US and China), and the Atlas and Taos SUVs in North America. On the electric side, the ID.4 is VW's best-selling EV, joined by the ID.3 and ID.7.

ID. is Volkswagen's family of fully electric vehicles built on its dedicated MEB platform. It includes the ID.3 hatchback, the ID.4 and ID.5 SUVs, the larger ID.7 sedan, and the retro-styled ID. Buzz electric van. The ID.4 has been the family's global volume leader. The lineup is central to VW's plan to transition away from the combustion engines that caused the Dieselgate disaster.

They're competent rather than class-leading. VW's ID. cars drive well, are spacious, and use a solid battery platform, but early models were criticized for buggy software, clunky touch controls, and slower-than-promised charging updates. VW has been steadily fixing the software, and the ID.4 has sold strongly worldwide. They're a reasonable choice, but they don't lead the segment on tech the way Tesla or some Chinese rivals do.

On the used market, avoid early dry-clutch DSG (DQ200) gearboxes, broadly the 2007 to 2011 era, which generated the most failure complaints. The 2009 to 2015 diesel TDI cars are the ones caught up in Dieselgate and may have been modified post-recall. Early ID. electric cars (around 2021) had immature software. As a rule, a well-serviced wet-clutch DSG model from 2013 onward is a far safer bet.

The recurring complaints cluster around the DSG dual-clutch transmission (rough shifts, slipping, mechatronic failures on early units), electrical and infotainment gremlins, water pump and timing chain issues on some TSI engines, and carbon buildup on direct-injection motors. None of these make VW unreliable in the disastrous sense, but they can make ownership pricier than a comparable Japanese car, especially out of warranty.

It depends on what you value. Volkswagen generally offers a more refined, European driving feel and a more upscale interior. Toyota wins decisively on long-term reliability, resale value, and cheaper running costs. If you prioritize how the car drives and feels, VW has the edge; if you prioritize never thinking about your car again, Toyota does. The data on dependability favors Toyota.

Very big. The Volkswagen Group is one of the two largest automakers in the world by volume, trading the top spot with Toyota year to year. It owns Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, Skoda, SEAT/Cupra, Bentley, Lamborghini, Bugatti, Ducati motorcycles, and commercial-vehicle brands. The Volkswagen passenger-car brand alone delivered around 4.7 million vehicles in 2025.