Dusseldorf Volkswagen is doing it like Tesla and is building a completely new electric car plant. VW is investing around two billion euros in the Warmenau district of Wolfsburg. The company wants to produce the new “Trinity” generation of electric cars in the factory from 2026. As the world’s second largest automaker announced on Friday, the supervisory board has now approved the new building project.
“With Trinity and the new plant, we will set standards in the automotive industry and develop Wolfsburg into a beacon for the most modern and efficient vehicle production. This shows that economic transformation is possible in Germany as an industrial location,” said Volkswagen brand boss Ralf Brandstätter on the decision of the supervisory board. VW had also examined a conversion of the Wolfsburg main plant, which had been built in the 1950s and 60s.
In the end, however, the group opted for the green field, i.e. a completely new factory. With the new building, the planned high productivity targets can be reached much more easily than in an existing factory, Volkswagen explains the decision. The head of the works council, Daniela Cavallo, spoke of a “historic decision” that the VW headquarters would become the “power center of the group”.
The new factory site in the north of Wolfsburg is only about one kilometer away from the existing main factory as the crow flies. Employees from today’s Volkswagen factory can thus switch to the new production site comparatively easily and without much additional effort. The VW Group can fall back on the existing infrastructure and does not need an additional factory fire brigade, for example.
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The future Trinity factory is expected to employ around 5,000 people. Volkswagen wants to produce around 250,000 electric vehicles there every year. The Wolfsburg-based car company is planning to start construction work in spring 2023, two years of construction time have been calculated. That corresponds pretty much exactly to the time it took Tesla for its new factory in Grünheide near Berlin.
VW: After the construction of the Trinity factory, the main plant will be converted
From 2026 onwards, the first all-electric “Trinity” models from Volkswagen will be produced in the new factory. After that – probably in 2027 – VW wants to start converting the existing main plant to electric cars. In this factory, combustion models are currently being produced on four production lines, primarily the Golf and Tiguan.
According to Volkswagen, two of these four lines will initially be converted to electric production. The existing main plant would then produce around 250,000 conventional combustion engine models and just as many electric vehicles annually until the 2030s. Together with the new factory, Wolfsburg would then have an annual production of around 750,000 vehicles, similar to today.
Brand boss Brandstätter had already expressed his confidence in advance that VW would be competitive with the new plant compared to competitors such as Tesla or Nio and Xpeng from China. Similar to Tesla, Volkswagen wants to achieve a production time of ten hours per car in the new factory, the group is currently more than double that.
With the new factory and the subsequent conversion of the existing main plant, Volkswagen does not want to significantly reduce the workforce of 13,000 employees in production in Wolfsburg. VW will nevertheless cut jobs. The company had previously agreed with the works council on programs for partial retirement and early retirement. Further programs to cut jobs are not to be launched.
>> Read here where Volkswagen will continue to invest in the coming years
The decision to build a completely new building met with general approval among industry experts. “Current and future requirements can best be implemented in a new factory,” said Stefan Bratzel, Professor at the Center of Automotive Management (CAM) at Bergisch Gladbach University of Applied Sciences.
Due to the strong competition from new providers such as Tesla, Volkswagen should not lose any more time and must implement the new building plans as quickly as possible. Tesla has already started pre-series production in Grünheide and is now also getting approval to start series production.
From the automotive professor’s point of view, however, it is not enough for Volkswagen to build a new and highly productive factory in Wolfsburg. “The products manufactured there must also be competitive,” said Bratzel. Volkswagen will go through a critical phase in the next four to five years. Then it will be seen “whether VW can maintain its strong position.” The Wolfsburg-based group has recently made many promises. But in the future, VW must also succeed in implementing them.
VW promises improvements in fast charging and software
Volkswagen also wants to make its cars more modern and better. The majority of the current e-models from the group are based on the so-called “MEB” platform (“modular e-drive system”). From a technical point of view, this modular system is more than five years old – and not competitive in all respects.
With the future “Trinity” models, Volkswagen wants to close the existing quality gaps in fast charging. Volkswagen also promises significant improvements in software over the coming years. “Trinity” cars do not yet have to be able to drive autonomously in every situation and in all weather conditions. But the vehicles should already be able to drive independently on the Autobahn, for example.
With “Trinity”, Volkswagen is also planning to drastically reduce the variety of variants, which simplifies production and increases productivity. There are currently around ten million different ordering options for the current Golf. Such a variety of variants makes production unnecessarily expensive, for example due to the additional storage for many different components.
“We want to come out with 140 variants in the future,” said VW development director Thomas Ulbrich. Via wireless updates of the software “over the air”, VW could update the cars at any time without calling them to the workshop. Where Volkswagen is significantly reducing the number of variants in production, many customization options remain via the software.
In addition, Volkswagen wants to ensure that new cars come onto the market faster than before. Ulbrich announced that the development times of a single model would be reduced from 54 to 40 months. This creates a greater variety of products.
More: Brand boss Brandstätter on the VW investment plan: “This is a whole new way of car production”