Volkswagen will invest 2 billion euros (£1.65 billion) in a brand new factory in its German hometown to build its new flagship Trinity electric vehicle from 2026.
The company announced last year that it was planning a new facility in Wolfsburg and has now given the green light following board approval.
It will be located close to the company’s existing plant in Wolfsburg and will serve “as a key part of the largest modernization program in Volkswagen’s history at the main site”, Volkswagen said.
Construction is expected to start in the city’s Wamenau district in spring 2023. It aims to match the manufacturing efficiency of Tesla’s new Gigafactory currently in the final stages of construction in Gruenheide, near Berlin.
Volkswagen is aiming for a build time of 10 hours for each Trinity and will implement a new production philosophy at the Wamenau site: “Fewer variants, fewer components, more automation, lean production lines and new concepts logistics.”
Opening a new site, rather than building the Trinity in an existing factory, eliminates the need to disrupt production of any other vehicles and makes it easier to implement new production processes. Volkswagen said earlier that it would also be cheaper to build the new plant than to upgrade its existing Wolfsburg site.
The planned site is expected to produce up to 250,000 cars per year. This is in addition to the annual capacity of 500,000 units at Volkswagen’s existing Wolfsburg site.
Tesla has announced that its new German Gigafactory will show annual production of up to 500,000 cars per year.
The Trinity is described by Volkswagen as “a highly efficient flat seat concept with an iconic design”. It is expected to be one of the first Volkswagen models to be based on the company’s new SSP (Scalable Systems Platform). This is said to possess even greater modularity than Volkswagen’s existing MEB structure, in addition to providing the foundation for Level 4 autonomous driving technology, and is expected to underpin more than 40 million vehicles in its lifetime. lifetime.
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Source: www.autocar.co.uk
This notice was published: 2022-03-07 13:05:38
