Volkswagen Phaeton
by Sam Livingstone

The Volkswagen Phaeton is quite a conventional looking saloon, but it is the manifestation of a particularly unconventional strategy from one of the industry's most well known brands and its much respected outgoing chairman, Ferdinand Piech. For a mainstream brand whose largest car to date has been the Passat, to produce a car designed to take on and beat the Mercedes S-class is unprecedented.

Phaeton is slightly bigger, better equipped and substantially cheaper than its illustrious competitor, and has a W12 cylinder engine with the might to take the car to over 200mph. But the unconventional strategy is that it exists not for its own sake, not to take on the S-class and win, but as an ambassador for the brand. It is for this reason that its design embraces the elegant, if rather sober, corporate aesthetic established by its lowlier siblings; its presence on our roads shall be as a moving billboard to demonstrate an elevated centre of mass for the Volkswagen brand.

And with this elevation of the brand, more people will choose to buy a high profit margin, upper echelon Golf or Passat and the Phaeton will pay for itself through the increased sales of other Volkswagens. As a less ostentatious alternative to the conventional luxury sector cars from Mercedes, Lexus, BMW, Audi and Jaguar, the big Volkswagen also presents a case for its existence in its own right - it is the egalitarian choice for a new breed of younger minded luxury car consumer.

This is underpinned by being a phenomenally capable car that is set to raise the bar within its class in many objectively measurable categories. In the flesh the Phaeton delivers more than the pictures suggest. Its elegance is conservative, but it is supremely well resolved, assured and elegant in its form.

But in the long term the Phaeton shall deliver far more than would seem even upon first acquaintance. It will change the way Volkswagen customers perceive the Volkswagen brand, and thus change the way automotive brands use products to directly effect their customers' perception of who they are.

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