Zwickau is the future of the Volkswagen Group factories in Spain

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The first thing you notice as soon as you enter the Volkswagen Transparent Factory in Dresden, the capital of the state of Saxony,
are your parquet floors. One look is enough to know that it is a completely different factory from the others of the German consortium, which produced 6.4 million units in the period up to September 2022, 4.9% more.

Dresden has held a special place in the strategy of the Volkswagen Group since its foundation in 2002. Two decades ago, the manufacturer’s CEO, Ferdinand Piëch, decided that he wanted to compete in the same arena against the premium giants BMW and Mercedes-Benz and created the Phaeton, a technical jewel that for the first time
the group’s W12 engine producing 444 horsepowerthe mechanical predecessor of the W16 used by the current Bugatti Chiron.

To manufacture this model, a matching factory had to be built: a first-class center, with little production volume, respectful of the environment and in the center of a city as important as Dresden.

Today, all these elements are still present at the Glasfabriek, except that now, instead of the Phaeton, about 5,000 ID.3s come out per year – the maximum capacity is 8,800 units. However, volume is not a priority for Dresden, it never has been. The factory also serves as a museum, a pilot test center for other factories, a car delivery center for customers and an application for autonomous supply robots.

The daily cadence is 40 vehicles, which, together with the transparent walls, is perfect for school visits, available in 10 different languages. They occasionally had to get away from a possible run over by an autonomous robot, busy transporting the necessary parts to assemble an ID.3 in time.

In addition, this rhythm makes it possible to carry out tests that would be impossible in centers with the volume of Wolfsburg or Zwickau, such as the implementation of 5G.

Although Dresden looks like a factory straight out of an Asimov novel, the Spanish factories of the Volkswagen Group have to look at another, already operational center of the consortium in the same state of Saxony:
zwickau.

This is the star center in Europe in terms of electromobility, and the numbers show it. It has an annual capacity of 300,000 units and is responsible for six different models for three brands: the Volkswagen ID.3, ID.4 and ID.5; the Audi Q4 e-tron and Q4 Sportback e-tron; and the Cupra Born, all electric and all based on the modular MEB platform. 11,000 people work here and it is essentially the example to follow when it comes to transforming a factory focused on thermal cars to assemble only zero emissions.

This is especially interesting for Spain, as the centers of Landaben (Navarra) and Martorell (Barcelona) will start making this type of model from 2025.

“Zwickau’s transformation was completed in 26 months, a record time,” said Volkswagen Saxony’s Director of Planning.
Lars Thieleman. When making industrial decisions about plant performance, the consortium takes some of its plants as scale. In the field of electric cars, Zwickau is the example to follow. In thermals, it is Pamplona, ​​responsible for the Pole, with the unit hour designation.

“Landaben is very efficient,” said the manager, “and Zwickau still needs to improve his performance to reach Polo’s level.”

To receive the MEB platform, the Saxon factory received an investment of 1.2 billion euros between 2019 and 2021, after which it gradually moved from making the Golf and Passat to electric ones.

Key transformation steps were changing the mounts to easily move the extra weight of the batteries, installing anti-static floors and, in Thielemann’s words, “changing the mindset of operators to work on electric cars”.

In total, the transformation has led to a 15% increase in productivity and also in the number of employees,
it went from 8,000 to 11,000. While these figures cannot be compared exactly to other plants, it is important to note that Seat Martorell has more capacity than Zwickau and Volkswagen Navarra is in the same vein. It remains to be seen whether the 26-month transformation will be exceeded.

Source: La Verdad

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