March 30: The Volkswagen Group’s radical Modular Transverse Matrix (MQB is the German acronym) platform, which will underpin the next Audi A3, VW Golf and Seat Leon, among other cars, could be sold to third parties in the medium to long term.

The MQB platform has been designed to be so flexible that it can be used to underpin everything from a Polo-sized car to a Passat-sized one, offering the company massive cost savings. It also means that the VW Group can build any cars on the platform on the same production line, which offers significantly greater production flexibility.

Speaking at the VW Group profits announcement, where it was revealed that the company made £9.4bn (Rs 75,200 crore) in 2011, up more than 50 percent year on year, Michael Macht, the board member in charge of group production, said: “The next two to three years are exciting for us, and during this time we intend to keep the technology to ourselves. We do not wish to share our excellence. But in the medium to long term we could sell the technology. We would have to look at the opportunities and evaluate whether they made sense.”

It is estimated that the VW Group plans to build more than six million cars on the platform across its VW, Audi, Seat and Skoda brands by 2018. Around six million modular petrol engines and around three million modular diesels will be pouring out of VW factories by the same time, although they won’t all be used in MQB; some will go into the Up’s New Small Family and Audi’s MLB platforms. The MQB-based model coming to India is likely to be Audi’s A3 compact saloon sometime in 2014. This could be followed by a wave of fresh new models from the Group which include the VW Golf, Tiguan and an MPV derivative. The next-generation Polo (built on the MQB) may also spawn a mini-MPV for the Indian market and the next-gen Audi A1 seems a certainty for India too in 2015.

VW Group chief Martin Winterkorn, who was given a £14.2 million (Rs 114 crore) bonus on the back of the company’s success last year, said the investment in the MQB structure would begin to pay off from 2014. Winterkorn estimates that the VW Group has invested around £50 billion (Rs 4 lakh crore) over four years in developing and implementing the MQB platform.

“The new Golf will be a quantum leap better than the car it replaces,” he said. “We have invested heavily in this technology, but we are convinced the benefits will be clear for the company. Creating the MQB platform and preparing the factories to produce it requires expenditure in 2012 and 2013, but after that the payback should start to come.”

Autocar UK (with inputs from Autocar India)