• Wall Street Journal, Monday, January 5, 2009 11 AM

Volkswagen and BMW are also confident that they can make lemonade out of the sour economy. Both are gearing up to expand their market shares in the U.S., Kate Linebaugh reports.

VW is building its first factory here in two decades, hoping to triple U.S. sales over the next decade. BMW, meanwhile, is expanding its distribution and will introduce the new One Series small car.

"To be sure, the Europeans have gone this route before," Linebaugh writes. But this time they feel that they have more diverse product lines, healthy marketing budgets and access to nonunion labor to avoid the fate that befell Renault, which once had a heavy stake in American Motors, and VW itself, which closed a U.S. factory in 1988 due to due to quality problems, high costs and slow sales.

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