VW to become chairman of the company. Under his leadership, Volkswagen entered a cooperation agreement with the Spanish car brand SEAT in 1982, bought a majority interest in 1986, and by 1990 owned the entire company. In 1985, Hahn was able to push VW's earnings up 140 per cent to $225 million based on sales of more than $21 billion, and he was credited with pushing VW beyond the one-car strategy left over from the era of air-cooled Beetles and the early success of the Volkswagen Golf Mk1 in the 1970s. The second-generation edition, introduced in Europe in 1983 and in North America in 1984, was one of the best-selling cars of the 1980s worldwide. Two out of every three Volkswagen vehicles sold in 1985 were Golfs, and 97,128-second-generation Golfs were produced at Volkswagen's Volkswagen Westmoreland Assembly Plant in Pennsylvania that year. Despite Hahn's earlier success in leading Volkswagen of America, VW sales in the United States dropped during his tenure as VW chairman, from 171,281 units in 1982 to 75,873 in 1992, largely due to intense competition from American and Japanese carmakers. Soon after Hahn became chairman of VW, he tested an American Volkswagen Rabbit built at the Westmoreland plant, which had opened in 1978, and he was deeply disappointed in how the Rabbit had been changed. The car had been re-engineered to drive like an American family sedan, with softer suspension and shock absorbers. "When I drove the American Rabbit, it felt like a Chevrolet", he complained. "If you want a Chevrolet, you should go to General Motors." Hahn fired Volkswagen of America president James McLernon, a former Chevrolet engineer who had been tapped by VW to get the Westmoreland plant up and running. Hahn brought in new management and kept the Westmoreland factory open to produce the second-generation Golf as a hedge against currency fluctuation between the German mark (DM) and the U.S. dollar, but inefficient production and soft sales in North America caused VW to close the plant in 1988. In 1984, Hahn initiated engagement in the Chinese market, sooner than European competitors. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1991 Volkswagen entered a joint venture with the Czech company Škoda Auto. Hahn's acquisitions made Volkswagen a global force, and affirmed its place as Europe's largest automaker. Hahn could not keep manufacturing and development costs under control in the early 1990s, and he was replaced