Volkswagen reveals how it will deliver 27 EVs by 2025

For decades, the core of the Volkswagen brand was the Beetle. Then it was the Golf and the Passat, but now the unthinkable has happened.

One of Volkswagen's best-selling vehicles will be unceremoniously shoved aside and manufactured by Skoda to make room for a flood of electric cars.

Shifting the Passat -- Volkswagen’s solid, reliable big business car -- will give the world’s biggest car-maker more than a million units of EV capacity a year by 2022.

It is a key move in the Group’s plans to deliver 27 EVs off its modular MEB electric-car architecture by 2025, spreading them across its Volkswagen, Skoda and Seat brands, as well as the volume end of the Audi premium brand.

The Volkswagen Group’s Supervisory Board confirmed today the poorly kept secret that Passat production would be shuffled across to the Czech Republic’s Skoda Superb and Kodiak plant from 2023.

Shifting the Passat from Emden, in northern Germany, to Skoda in Kvasiny will give Volkswagen three dedicated EV plants, with its Zwickau plant coming online next year, and both the Hanover and Emden plants switching over in 2022.

While Volkswagen hasn’t confirmed it specifically, the move effectively locks in its sub-€20,000 ($A30,000) small crossover EV challenger, based on the 2020 I.D. Neo hatch.

Volkswagen has the E-Golf and E-up! EVs on sale today, but the I.D. hatch will be the first dedicated EV on sale using the Group’s new MEB modular electric-vehicle architecture.

The unnamed car will seat five, use an exclusively front-drive powertrain and will carry roughly the same on-road footprint as the T-Roc crossover.

It will be the fifth I.D. model for Volkswagen, following the Neo, the Crozz, the Buzz and the Vizzion concepts into production, and is clearly aimed at delivering the brand what it craves most – to put working-class drivers behind EV steering wheels in the same way the Beetle did with conventional cars.

It will be built at Emden, which has a capacity of around 300,000 cars a year, including the Passat and the Arteon. Volkswagen’s Supervisory Board today confirmed that it would be built there from 2022, along with other small- and mid-size EVs for “multiple brands”.

“We have redefined the strategic guideposts for future plant assignment. We are making our plants fit for the future," said the Volkswagen Group board member for production, Oliver Blume.

“Among other things, this includes bundling cross-brand product families to maximise synergies and cost benefits. That is how we will be realising the full potential of the Volkswagen Group.

“German plants are particularly well suited to making the transformation to the production of electric vehicles, given the high manufacturing expertise and qualification level of our employees.

"We are aligning the three plants in Zwickau, Emden and Hanover to our electrification strategy and thereby laying the groundwork for expanding our electric fleet and thus meeting the CO2 targets,” Blume said.

Blume also answered the question of what would happen to the Skoda Karoq and Seat Ateca, both of which are produced in Kvasiny. Both models will be moved aside to a new greenfield plant in Eastern Europe, most likely in Bulgaria.

“I am particularly proud that we have succeeded in locating a large share of e-mobility production at our plants here in Germany, because the markets in Germany and Western Europe, along with China and the USA, will lead the way in introducing electric vehicles,” said General Works Council Chairman, Bernd Osterloh.

“The transition to e-mobility is no longer wishful thinking, it starts right here. And fewer jobs as a result of this transition is also part of the overall picture. That is something we have stated on several occasions.

“I am aware that is why many colleagues, particularly in Emden and Hanover, are worried about the transformation. As employee representatives we have taken action: a ten-year employment guarantee excludes compulsory redundancies until the end of 2028. We can make adjustments via the demographic curve so that no one loses their job.”

Volkswagen’s Supervisory Board met today to decide whether or not to accelerate the EV plans of the world’s biggest car-maker, and delivered a resounding confirmation to CEO Herbert Diess’s ambitious EV plans.

Company management voted to swap traditional production at two plants – Emden and Hannover – to EV to both speed up the supply of its EVs and to guarantee the jobs of union members, whose representatives make up half of the Supervisory Board.

It will switch the Hannover site, just an hour from Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg headquarters, from building commercial vans to building the I.D. Buzz kombi-style EV bus and its derivatives, though some traditional commercial production will remain.

It joins additional EV pushes from inside the Group, with Porsche squeezing in a new plant in Zuffenhausen, Germany, inside its existing factory footprint for the Taycan and its followers.

Audi has also tripled the capacity of its Böllinger Höfe R8 factory, near Neckarsulm, to accommodate Audi Sport’s upcoming e-tron GT (based on the Taycan).

It has also converted part of its engine plant in Gyor, Hungary, to supply its electric motors (it has already supplied more than 33 million internal-combustion engines to Audi, Bentley, Porsche and Lamborghini over the last 25 years).

The added EV plant is part of the Volkswagen Group’s confirmed €20 billion plan to deliver 50 EVs and 30 plug-in hybrids by 2025. It has targeted EV sales of between two and three million vehicles a year by 2025, largely underpinned by its Chinese operations.

It is committed to EVs already via a €50 billion battery procurement contract, signed earlier this year.

The rise of EVs in the Volkswagen Group’s plans has taken a sharp acceleration under Diess, who is even entertaining radical ideas such as sharing its new MEB modular electric architecture and its autonomous-driving technology with Ford.

While the European plants grab the attention, it also has EV plants with its Chinese joint-venture partners, SAIC (the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation) and Foshan’s FAW (First Automobile Works).