This giant car company is tiny in the U.S. Its solution? Turn out a bunch of adorable EVs.

What do you do when your cars only command 4% of the U.S. market and you want to ride the EV wave?

Get cute. That, at least, is what Germany’s Volkswagen — the second-largest auto company in the world (after Toyota TM 0.00%↑) — is doing by introducing a couple of adorable and iconic electric vehicles to its lineup.

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Based on its Sixties-era Microbus — something that might now be called a minivan — the company last year launched the ID. Buzz, a three-row, all-electric cutie that wouldn’t have been out of place at Woodstock.

And upcoming is a revival of the adorable Scout line of pickups and SUVs that died out in 1980. (VW acquired the brand when the company’s truck subsidiary, Traton, acquired Navistar, previously known as International Harvester, in 2021.)

To make the Scouts, the company — which already makes its ID.4 electric SUV in Chattanooga, Tenn. — just broke ground on a factory in Columbia, S.C., which is expected to turn out vehicles in 2026. In doing so, VW hopes to be competitive with Ford and General Motors, which have already debuted all-electric trucks, and Stellantis, which is set to launch a Ram EV pickup this year.

The move comes as the firm — which has a whopping 26% share of the European market and about 15% in China — faces increased competition, especially from China, which has a burgeoning EV market and is making inroads into Europe.

Volkswagen “wants to have a strong global footprint,” Scott Keogh, the chief executive of Volkswagen’s Scout Motors division, told The New York Times, “not … an isolated footprint, where it’s only sitting strong in one region,” calling the moves “a strategic necessity.”

So, what’s up next for the company? Whispers at the Columbia groundbreaking were of a reintroduced VW Beetle, which is about as cute and iconic as it gets.

Sounds groovy.