Volkswagen will add 800 new jobs at its Tennessee plant to boost production of the popular Passat sedan.

The jobs will increase the plant’s work force to more than 3,500 by the end of the year, the German company said Thursday. The additional workers will be used to bolster the existing two shifts at the plant, and expand production to Saturday.

“We’re adding a third team at this plant for a simple reason: Customers want to buy Passats,” said Jonathan Browning, the president and CEO of Volkswagen Group of America.

The plant will operate 120 hours per week with the new workers, up 40 hours from current levels, he said.

Browning said the extra work force will help the plant ramp up and be able to produce 170,000 vehicles next year, most of which are destined for the U.S. market. Others are exported to Canada, Mexico and South Korea, he said.

Volkswagen sold nearly 23,000 Passats in the U.S. last year, an 83 percent increase over 2010. Sales have been stronger so far this year. Through February, sales of the redesigned sedan topped 14,500, according to Autodata Corp.

Browning said March sales are on pace for 10,000.

VW built its first Passat at the plant last April. It now rolls out 35 cars an hour at the plant, which surpassed 50,000 vehicles in February.

“Volkswagen is definitely on a roll in this market,” Browning said. “I can assure you, we don’t plan to stop.”

Volkswagen AG, the world’s second-largest car company, said last week that it intends to increase deliveries and revenues in 2012 despite difficult conditions in Europe.

Volkswagen Chattanooga CEO and Chairman Frank Fischer said producing vehicles in the U.S. allows the company to be “very strongly independent of the exchange rate.”

The award-winning version of the Passat is targeted at customers with different priorities than those in Europe, ranging from a larger size to more cup holders, Fischer said.

“After all, the U.S. customer doesn’t drive 240 kph (149 mph) on the Autobahn,” Fischer said in an interview in German.

Fischer said it’s out of local VW officials’ hands whether the company decides to add more production or build other models at the plant.

“At this point it’s only about Passat, no model has been decided yet,” he said. “The Passat is selling so well so we should really concentrate on what we’re doing right now, and continue to ramp up the factory.”

Thursday’s jobs announcement was in addition to 200 new positions the company announced in January. VW officials said they expect to see a spike in hiring among their main suppliers located near the plant, creating several hundred new jobs among them.

Earlier this month, the company said it will open a $40 million distribution center for parts about 80 miles from Chattanooga. VW plans to hire about 45 people at the center.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam welcomed the announcement.

“Twenty-five percent of the Volkswagens sold in America will be made in Tennessee now,” he said. “That’s a pretty significant achievement for a company that rolled off its car here in April of last year.”

Haslam said VW will qualify for economic incentives that are part of a formula agreed to as part of negotiations to bring the $1 billion plant to Tennessee. He did not specify how much the incentives will be worth.

Volkswagen defied the gloom in Europe and cemented its status among the global leaders of the auto industry, reporting record results and saying it sold more than eight million vehicles last year for the first time in its 75-year history.

VW, the top European automaker, said net income more than doubled to €15.4 billion, or $20.6 billion. Revenue soared almost 26 percent to €159 billion.

Pretax profit rose to €18.9 billion from €9 billion. Profit was aided by “positive effects” from equity investments and the valuation of its Porsche options, VW said.

The German company said unit sales rose almost 15 percent from 2010 to 8.3 million vehicles, led by the Volkswagen and Audi brands. The annual profits, revenue and unit sales were all records. VW said last week that 2012 had also gotten off to a positive start, with sales rising 1.3 percent in January from a year earlier.

Volkswagen’s sales move it to the No.2 spot worldwide, behind General Motors, which sold 9.03 million vehicles last year, and ahead of Toyota Motor, which was hamstrung by the earthquake and tsunami disaster last March. VW’s net profit was almost triple the $7.6 billion G.M. earned last year .

Volkswagen’s 2011 showing marked a sharp contrast with other mass-market carmakers in Europe.

The French automaker Peugeot and General Motors’ Adam Opel unit both lost money on their carmaking operations and revealed this week that they were talking about a tie-up to try to cut costs. Another French automaker, Renault, was barely profitable on its carmaking business.

Fiat, the Italian company, continues to make money from its Chrysler business in the United States, but the Italian company’s home factories are using only about 50 percent of their capacity, too little to make money in Europe.

Sergio Marchionne, Fiat’s chief executive, told the newspaper Corriere della Sera in an interview published Friday that Fiat might have to shutter two of its five domestic plants if it was unable to crack the U.S. market with its own cars. “Italian factories will survive only if we export to America,” he told the paper.

VW’s worldwide operations insulates it to some extent from the slumping European auto market, which is expected to contract in 2012 for a fifth straight year. For example, the company’s two Chinese joint ventures, Shanghai Volkswagen and FAW-Volkswagen, together sold 2.26 million vehicles in 2011, up nearly 18 percent from 2010.

But VW also did better than most of its peers in Europe. In Germany, the main bright spot in Western Europe, VW’s sales rose more than 11 percent; even in Western Europe excluding Germany, VW beat the prevailing trend, selling 7 percent more cars last year than in 2010.

“We know the car business is a volume and scale business and today Volkswagen is the only carmaker in Europe that has that scale,” Philippe Houchois, head of European auto industry research at UBS in London, said. Despite their strengths and ability to charge premium prices, “even BMW and Daimler don’t have the same scale.”

Noting that Volkswagen went through “years of pain” and heavy investment to get where it is, Mr. Houchois said the question for Europe’s weaker car industry players was whether they would have to go through the same convulsions.

He said it was somewhat misleading to think of Volkswagen as a mass-market carmaker, because the company’s brands include Audi and Porsche, which are more profitable than VW cars, as well as the truck makers MAN and Scania. He said that while the company’s overall 2011 operating margin, a measure of profitability, was about 7 percent, that figure disguised the wide variation between the Audi division, with a margin of more than 11 percent, and the VW division, which was likely on the order of 4-5 percent.

Volkswagen, based in Wolfsburg, Germany, said it was also raising its dividend on common shares to €3 from €2.20, and on preferred shares to €3.06 from €2.26. The figures announced Friday were a preliminary statement of 2011 results. It will provide detailed fourth-quarter data on March 12.

Christine Ritz, a Volkswagen spokeswoman, declined to give a breakdown of the contributions to profit of the equity investments and the revaluation of the Porsche options, saying those would be provided next month. But she noted that the equity investments included the China business, and said the contribution from the Porsche options — a put/call structure giving VW the right to buy the sports car maker — would be “on the same order of magnitude” as the €6.8 billion figure the company announced in September.

Volkswagen said in September that its management board had concluded that legal hurdles — including lawsuits and an investigation of Porsche’s former chief executive Wendelin Wiedeking by Stuttgart public prosecutors — would prevent the timely consommation of its planned merger with Porsche. Board members, it said, nonetheless “remain committed to the goal of creating an integrated automotive group with Porsche and are convinced that this will take place.”