Volkswagen Slashes Tiguan Prices
Did ‘Crazy Eddie’ get a job at Volkswagen?
Volkswagen sent a notice to dealers on Thursday instructing them to cut prices on the Tiguan SUV, reports Automotive News. The S model gets a $600 price cut, the top-of-the-line SEL gets $1,460 off, and the mid-range SE gets a whopping $2,180 discount. The price change is effective immediately.
This reduces the price of a 2018 Tiguan S by $400 from the 2017 model to $24,595. The SEL drops from $34,500 to $31,090, a $3,410 price reduction. There was no Tiguan SE for 2017, but the 2018 SE starts at $26,750, undercutting last year's Wolfsburg and Sport models by thousands of dollars. These prices are for front-wheel-drive models, but 4Motion model prices are reduced accordingly as well. The entry-level Tiguan Limited remains competitively priced at $22,860.
The price reduction is almost certainly a move to sway potential customers closer to buying a Tiguan rather than the competition. The all-new 2018 model is larger and better-equipped than the outgoing model, in line with the larger VW Atlas. The mid-size SUV market is rather flooded, with models like the Toyota RAV4, Honda CR-V, and Nissan Rogue being the most popular. But to gain mainstream appeal in the U.S., Volkswagen needed a competitive entry here, which the old Tiguan was not. The significant improvements in the 2018 model combined with its lower price may change that if VW can overcome customers' loyalty to other brands.
It's too early to tell, but VW may already be on the way to success here. Volkswagen's U.S. sales rose 5.2 percent in 2017, spurred mainly by a whopping 62 percent increase in light truck sales. That's the Atlas and Tiguan talking.
