Martin Buckley Backfire
‘The Phaeton was mistaken by many for a giant Passat minicab – in the same way most people thought the Fiat 130 was a big Lada’
I’m not sure I will ever own a Volkswagen phaeton, but I’ve always liked the idea of them: pointlessly complicated, expensive, unwanted and rare – just my kind of car. As an example of a manufacturer going all out to build a supersaloon with little thought to cost, or buyers’ perceptions, it was a misplaced gamble that ranks with the likes of the awful Maybach and the mid-’50s Continental II. In other words, born of a mindset that naïvely believed mere excellence was enough to convince sophisticated customers that this was all the luxury car they needed.
It differed from most attempts at automotive status-seeking in that it was a reserved and undemonstrative thing to look at, probably mistaken by many for a giant Passat minicab in the same way that most people thought that the Fiat 130 (another luxobarge lemon) was a big Lada.
Introduced in 2002, these V6-, V8-, V10- or W12-engined limousines were built to a specification that left few doubts about VW’S ambition. Rarely did a car offer so many features you never knew you needed, yet by all accounts it was as spectacularly capable, fast and refined as its spec suggested, as well as being beautifully built.
VW handmade 84,000 of all types in a glassfronted factory in Dresden for a surprising 14 years, sustained by the Phaeton’s popularity in China combined with a corporate determination not to lose face. The fact that the VW Group already built the Audi A8 appears not to have occurred to Wolfsburg managers. In any event, they dared not question the Phaeton’s progenitor, Dr Ferdinand Piëch. This despotic and recently deceased genius conceived the car to be the best in the world and famously set its performance parameters – best known being an ability to run all day at 186mph in 50ºc heat, while maintaining an interior temperature of 22ºc.
A disciplined boffin, but certainly not a monk (he is thought to have had 13 children by four women), Piëch was more interested in making great cars than making friends in his five-decade career. Obsessed with quality, he once promised to sack a room full of engineers if they didn’t get the tight panel gaps he wanted on the latest Golf; he inspired a climate of fear compared in the German press to a North Korean labour camp.
The grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, one of his earliest memories was of riding on a train supplying Wolfsburg with raw materials: as a nipper, he could not have known the factory was mostly run on slave labour, but he realised at once that he somehow wanted to work with cars.
For his engineering degree, Piëch wrote a paper on the development of the Formula One engine, and in 1963 he went to work for Uncle Ferry at the Porsche factory. By ’68 he was head of development and oversaw the creation of the 917. His 1972 move to Audi was a result of internecine boardroom squabbles, but Piëch saw his departure as a way of proving his talents outside the Porsche family. At Audi he became chief exec and went on to transform a range of worthy but hardly thrilling middle-class vehicles into a premium marque the equal of Mercedes-benz and BMW – and brought us the quattro.
VW is said to have been three months from filing for bankruptcy when Piëch joined in 1993. Within a few years it was a 12-brand empire that included Lamborghini, Bugatti and Bentley.
Cold in manner, technically brilliant but socially awkward, he was a man widely admired, not widely loved, but one who inspired some of the greatest German cars of the past 50 years.
The Phaeton is not one of them. Far removed from VW’S everyman image, it seemed to mirror the character of the man himself, combining merciless technical superiority with a complete lack of charm. Buyers thought the same: in the trade it was renamed the VW Fatal. Perhaps its only claim to fame is that it provided the basis for the current slew of plastic footballers’ Bentleys, but it also proved that Piëch was possessed of that most human of qualities: fallibility.