VW is the short way of writing and saying Volkswagen, the German car company. You say the two letters separately: 'vee-double-you'. It is what people use in ordinary talk and casual writing — a VW van, my old VW, VW dealers — while the full name Volkswagen belongs to more formal writing, news reports and the company's own documents. The letters are also the company's badge: a V sitting above a W inside a circle, which you have almost certainly seen on the front of a car. In English you can use VW on its own to mean a car made by that company ('she drives a VW'), or in front of a model name ('a VW Golf', 'a VW Beetle'). Two of those models matter for understanding the word's feeling: the old round Beetle and the camper van are strongly tied in English-speaking countries to the 1960s and 70s, to hippies, surfing and cheap travel, so a 'VW van' often brings that picture with it rather than just a vehicle. The German name means 'people's car', which was the original idea in the 1930s — a car an ordinary family could afford. English speakers usually do not know this, and pronounce the full word roughly as 'FOLKS-vagen' or 'VOLKS-wagon' depending on how German they are trying to sound. As an abbreviation it takes no full stops in modern writing: VW, not V.W.