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39 AutoData | March 2019 Volkswagen Brasil and its exporter DNA Volkswagen is the company that exports the highest number of vehicles and components. Since 1970, more than 3,7 million vehicles have been exported to 147 countries. One of the most famous cases was the contract that allowed the shipment of more than 170 thousand Passat models to Iraq, from 1983 to 1988. To Canada and the United States, from 1987 to 1989, more than 200 thousand Voyage and Parati were shipped. The peak of Brazilian VW exports was in 2005, when markets from Africa, the Middle East, Russia, Ukraine, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan received models produced in Brazil. From 2005 to 2011, in the last great export action to outside the borders of Latin America, Europe received more than 305 thousand units of Fox models, a car entirely developed by Volkswagen do Brasil. sors. There are three optional packages available for the version, starting at R$ 109 thousand 990. It also brings VW Connect, a sys- tem developed by the company to at- tract smartphone users. What enables that integration with mobile devices is the app available for Apple and Android smartphones, for free. Besides allowing the owner to monitor information such as fuel tank level, tire calibration, mileage and detect mechanical faults, it allows the owner to transform the driving into a kind of video game, with the challenges. It’s nothing new for smartphone users, who have fun collecting points in apps like Waze, Swarm and inflate their egos with likes on Instagram and Facebook. The process is the same: points are added by means of distance traveled, driving to predetermined places and driving effi- ciency, with consequent fuel consumption reduced. For Pablo Di Si the T-Cross equipped with VW Connect is a “watershed for Volkswagen in the region. It is the first connected car to be produced in Latin America”. PRE-SALE Volkswagen did not reveal sales or production expectations for the model, which divides line with VW Golf and Fox and Audi A3 Sedan at the factory in Para- na. The president Di Si said that the goal is to be one of the two best-selling compact SUVs in the Brazilian market - the leader last year, Hyundai Creta, had around 50 thousand sales. The first signs were positive. During the model’s presentation and celebration of twenty years of operation in Sao Jose dos Pinhais a pre-sale was opened with eight hundred T-Cross models available, with differentials in relation to the other ver- sions. In less than an hour, 131 consumers showed interest in receiving the model at first hand, by an advance payment of R$ 5 thousand. The construction standard certificates the Brazilian T-Cross even for the European consumers