WOLFSBURG: Volkswagen’s Zwickau plant will focus on making electric vehicles (EVs) following the final rollout of a car with a combustion engine last Friday.
The seventh generation Golf R Estate with 2.0-litre petrol engine in Oryx White Pearl Effect was produced for a customer in Germany.
Volkswagen aims to make the Zwickau plant Europe’s largest electric vehicle factory, producing six electric models of the brands Volkswagen, Audi and SEAT from 2021.
Planned annual capacity of EVs will increase to 330,000 units.
Work has already started in Hall 6 where the Golf Estate has been produced so far. After a conversion phase lasting several weeks during the summer, the first electric vehicles will be produced there at the end of the year – alongside the ID.4, an SUV from the sister brand Audi is also planned. Series production of the ID.3 1st Edition already started at the site in west Saxony in November 2019, and the start of production of the ID.4 will follow this summer.
With the step-by-step transformation of the Zwickau plant, Volkswagen is for the first time switching a large car factory completely to electric mobility.
The investments for conversion amount to around 1.2 billion euros. In the final expansion stage from 2021, six MEB models will be built for three Group brands in Zwickau. All 8,000 employees will be prepared for production of electric cars and for handling high-voltage systems as part of various training measures.
The Zwickau team will complete around 20,500 days of training by the end of 2020.
The ID.3 is the first vehicle based on the modular electric toolkit (MEB) from Volkswagen.
The platform was developed specifically for electric cars and optimally exploits the possibilities offered by electric mobility.
The ID.3 is characterised by long ranges, plenty of interior space and dynamic driving behaviour. The base version will cost less than 30,000 euros. Early birds have been able to place binding orders for their reserved vehicles since June 17. The market launch of the ID.3 1st Edition will take place almost simultaneously throughout Europe in September 2020.
The bodies for the Lamborghini and Bentley luxury SUVs will continue to be produced in Zwickau.
The e-Golf will roll off the production line at the Transparent Factory in Dresden by the end of the year, and from 2021 the ID.3 will also be produced there.
The leap into the modern automobile age has been a long one: since 1904, cars with combustion engines have been built in Zwickau – initially for many years, including Horch models, and in GDR times the Trabant came off the assembly line here.
In May 1990, Volkswagen started production at its plant in western Saxony. Over the course of the past 30 years, 6,049,207 Volkswagen cars of the models Polo, Golf, Golf Estate, Passat Saloon and Passat Variant have been produced in Zwickau.
Keyword: Volkswagen's Zwickau plant to focus on making electric cars