VW also switches tapes back on at the headquarters

After almost a month and a half in the Corona crisis, the VW Group is slowly leading the car production again at the Wolfsburg headquarters.

The company had recently started to restart in Zwickau, Sweden, where the new ID.3 E-Model is being manufactured, as well as for SUVs and small cars in Bratislava (Slovakia). In addition to Wolfsburg, Hanover and Emden as well as further locations in Europe are to be added.

During the interruption – triggered in mid-March by the slump in car demand, globally cut supply chains and contagion risks in the factories – VW had only kept small on-call teams at its plants. They prepared a cautious resumption of operations. Stricter hygiene concepts, distance rules and shorter cleaning intervals now apply. In addition, shift plans should be modified in order to have fewer employees in the same room at the same time.

Core brand manager Ralf Brandsttter, Chief Human Resources Officer Gunnar Kilian, core brand production manager Andreas Tostmann and works council chief Bernd Osterloh want to explain details on this. Lower Saxony’s prime minister and VW supervisor Stephan Weil (SPD) is also expected on Monday for the early shift of the first day of production.

The German component factories (Braunschweig, Salzgitter, Kassel) have also largely resumed operations with intra-group supplies. In China, all locations are back online.

“Health comes first,” said Reinhard de Vries, Managing Director of Technology and Logistics at Volkswagen Saxony, at the start in Zwickau last Thursday. For the time being, 50 vehicles will be manufactured there in just one shift – a third of the previous quantity. The new production rules should be imported for now. VW is also ramping up operations at the Chemnitz engine plant in stages. The Glserne Manufaktur in Dresden, where cars have been delivered since Thursday, also follows today.

The truck and bus subsidiary MAN in Munich will also start on Monday. The VW-US plant in Chattanooga (Tennessee) will return from the break on May 3. In contrast to Germany, where short-time work had been registered for tens of thousands of employees, the US colleagues recently mostly had unpaid forced leave. Factories in Latin America and South Africa are scheduled to start operating in early May.

–

–