Zwickau, Tyskland: The small East German town of Zwickau has extensive experience in car production – Sachsenring produced its Trabant in the town until 1991.
Now it’s electric cars. Volkswagen’s Zwickau factory pumps out cars built on the car giant’s MEB platform. It goes right enough in jerks and snatches. When Russia invaded Ukraine, supplies of Leoni cables stopped. It came on top of the challenges the car industry has as a result of the lack of semiconductor components.
When we are let into the factory, there is still no downtime. Cables are again delivered from Ukraine, and 900 cars roll out of the factory every day. However, it is not enough to meet demand, and still well below the target of 1,500 cars per day by the end of 2020, which Volkswagen set as a target in 2018.
The factory now operates with two shifts, and aims to be able to return to the production of 1300 cars that they had before the war in Ukraine broke out. Then they had three shifts a day, while they are now down to two shifts. The fact that they have not yet reached the goal of 1,500 cars a day is about the fact that they have started production of six different vehicles in the last 26 months, and at the same time have had to juggle pandemics and lack of semiconductor components.
If it goes as planned, production will go full speed next year, with a maximum capacity of over 300,000 cars produced in Zwickau.
– The demand is higher than what we can produce. We have a 12-month waiting list. This is the first time I experience it. This is extremely good news for us. Not for the customer who has to wait for the car, but for us it is very good news, says factory manager Dr. Stefan Loth.
Loth manages a factory with 9,000 employees, which covers an area of 1.8 million square meters. The transformation to a pure electric car factory started in 2017, and the last fossil car – a Volkswagen Golf station wagon – left the assembly line in the summer of 2020.
Electrical friction
In 2021, they produced close to 180,000 electric cars here. The boss calls it one of the biggest transformations ever made in the automotive industry. This does not happen completely without friction.
– When Herbert Diess (VW director, editor’s note) in 2017 said that electric mobility was the future, some of our people shook their heads and said “never in the world”. Do we have the infrastructure? What do those who live in apartment complexes do, should they have extension cords out of the kitchen window?
Today, all employees agree that Volkswagen has chosen the right strategy, Loth claims.
They have had to work to reach that agreement. Volkswagen has established a training center for electric mobility where all employees must stop by. So far, 8,000 factory workers have been through the program, of which 1,500 have received the certification required for work on electrical components in the voltage level in the cars. A total of 20,000 training days have been completed.
Measurements they have made show that employees who were previously skeptical of electric mobility are much more positive after reviewing the training program. Not through coercion, explains Matthias Roth, who heads Volkswagen’s education program.
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It was not only among the factory workers that there was skepticism about the changes. The spread in attitudes was just as great in the factory management, Roth explains. They were also required to participate in the training program.
We ask if the training has made everyone positive about the changes. Roth says that they have high motivation, that they have come further than they expected in 2017, and that the belief in electric mobility is high today.
The technical progress has been high, and faith in Volkswagen is strong. The training program is exported to other Volkswagen factories.
Dr. Stefan Loth manages the factory in Zwickau. He has been responsible for converting it from the production of fossil cars to electric cars.Photo: Marius Valle
Like renovating the bathroom
Zwickau is an example of the old way of doing things in the Volkswagen group. Converting a factory from building fossil cars to electric cars must be done in steps and over a long period of time. Electric car production must to a certain extent be adapted to older production methods.
This is one of the reasons why the Volkswagen Group’s next generation of electric cars will be built in new factories built from scratch. The first will come in Wolfsburg, where the so-called Trinity generation of electric cars will be in production.
We ask factory manager Dr. Loth about the limitations they have to deal with when converting an existing factory compared to building a brand new one.
– It’s a bit like your bathroom. If you build a new house, it is easy to build a bathroom. If you have an old house, you have to move everything out and the new one in. Anyone who has renovated an old house knows that it is much more work than setting up a new house. It’s the same in the factory. You have to move out, have a strategy for the people and what they are going to do while building a new production line, you have to synchronize the training of people with the new generation of robots in the body shop, and it has to be synchronized with holidays.
– It is quite a lot of work, says Loth.
Installation of the cockpit is done exclusively by robots at the factory. It reduces production time.Photo: Marius Valle
Major upgrades
It’s not just about replacing existing assembly lines and production lines with new ones. Among other things, they needed a fully automated system for handling batteries. They had to have automated storage systems for parts. Body production also had to be expanded. Volkswagen has put in place a press that can make body parts on site instead of having them sent from Wolfsburg.
The Zwickau factory has also upgraded assembly line production with an increased degree of automation. Before the transformation, 18 percent of production was automated with robots. Now close to 30 percent is automated.
Among other things, installation of, among other things, the cockpit and windows is now done entirely by robots. There are production steps that are normally labor-intensive when done with manual work.
In the autumn of 2021, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess compared Zwickau with Tesla’s new factory in Brandenburg, and pointed out that the Americans spent 10 hours on their cars, while Volkswagen spent over 30. The goal is to reduce production time to less than 25 hours during the year. Right now they are spending 28 hours – a good first step, men diess.
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It is unclear whether Diess compares apples and pears, since it is unknown when Tesla estimates that production of a car will start and when it will end.
Tesla uses large casting machines that can produce large parts of the cars, and claims that this contributes to the car production going at a much higher pace. Such machines are not found in Zwickau. At least not yet.
Goes over to large cast parts
When Volkswagen builds the next generation of electric cars in Wolfsburg from 2026, they will also use so-called “megacasting”. They are already working on developing such production methods at their foundry in Kassel, for use in future models.
The fact that there are production techniques intended for future cars on new platforms does not necessarily mean that it is impossible to integrate it into production in Zwickau. However, we do not get an answer when we ask directly if this is something that is in the cards here.
The Zwickau factory is what in industrial jargon is called a “brownfield” plant. The opposite is “greenfield”, where the factory is built from scratch and you do not have to take into account existing restrictions.
Zwickau now serves as a kind of floor plan for the rest of Volkswagen’s brownfield plant, which will be converted to electric car production.
Such a transformation is demanding, and it is not possible to stop, the factory manager explains. They never stopped building cars along the way. It has been a demanding logistics job. Production volumes declined during the period, but never stopped.
These cables have been causing problems for Volkswagen lately. They are produced by Leoni in Ukraine. When we visited the factory in May, they had secured cables for the production of cars for three to four weeks.Photo: Marius Valle
Lack of parts continues to stick sticks in the wheels
But it has not been painless. A major challenge has been a little over three weeks of production stoppage due to lack of parts. The parts from Ukrainian subcontractors have created headaches, but this has gone better than they thought.
– We get wiring from Ukraine, and in the beginning we had some challenges, but they have been solved and we now get parts from Ukraine again, says Loth.
The challenges are still in line. Whether it is semiconductor components or the situation in China, where Shanghai has been in complete lockdown for a long time.
The factory manager says that right now they know for sure that they have enough cables from Ukraine to maintain production for three to four weeks.
This is a real challenge in many industries, and the solution is to be prepared for bottlenecks to emerge. For example, they are constantly working to have alternative transport options ready if transport is to become a problem. They are in close contact with their subcontractors to get delivery problems in advance.
If a supplier can supply parts completely unforeseen, as in the case of Leoni in Ukraine, they have contingency plans ready.
– The logistics work 24 hours a day to keep the factory running, Loth explains.
Faster than expected
Although production is not quite at the level Volkswagen indicated in 2018, with 1,500 cars a day, things have gone better than they thought a few years ago, says the factory manager.
He is of course full of good words about how excellent the cars they make are, but emphasizes that it only gets better. They will produce cars with a range of over 700 kilometers. If they wanted to, they could today produce an ID.4 that goes from zero to a hundred in 5.5 seconds (ID.4 GTX uses 6.2 seconds). Loth is quick to point out that this is not something that is on the production schedule.
What will come, however, is the production version of ID.6, hitherto presented as the concept car ID. Vizzion, which will be called ID.6, and ID.6 Shooting brake in station wagon version. ID.6 has so far only been launched in China.
The goal is for 30 per cent of car sales to be fully electric in the EU by 2025, and 70 per cent by 2030. Thereafter, all cars Volkswagen sells will be electric cars from the period 2033–2035.
Then the factories must be rebuilt. Production of ID.4 has already started in their factory in Emden.
Must understand the processes
– Are you ever down in the production hall and participate in production yourself?
– Yes. Especially when we start new production. Some things you know, some things you have to learn, sometimes you have to observe how others experience and do things. It’s not just me, but hundreds of other colleagues as well. This is how you understand the processes in detail.
