The Wolfsburg plant will become an electric vehicle factory over the next few years, following on from the Zwickau and Emden passenger car plants. To support this fundamental transformation, Volkswagen has opened an eMotionRoom, where over the coming months, 22,000 production employees can enjoy an entertaining experience of the transformation process from ICE to electric vehicles.
The eMotionRoom is part of a one-day training program called eMotionDay for production employees in Wolfsburg. The program will run until 2025. Wolfsburg will begin production of the ID.3 model this fall, which is the first model at the plant to be based on the modular electric drive (MEB) platform. By summer, around 1,200 employees are to have been given training in ID.3 production.
Like classic escape rooms, the teams (each made up of four people) must solve various problems in each room to open the door. Each group is guided by two instructors from the Group Academy via a video link. The eMotionRoom is part of the one-day eMotionDay that also includes other training modules – such as the use of VR headsets in production. The eMotionRoom will be in use at least until the end of 2024.
Subassembly of the ID.3 begins at the Wolfsburg plant this fall, and will be followed by full production of substantial numbers of the popular electric model from mid-2024. “The new production line in Wolfsburg will give us more flexibility than ever before,” Plant Manager Rainer Fessel said. “The assembly line will be the first at one of the Volkswagen brand’s passenger car plants in Germany that is able to build both MEB and ICE vehicles on the same line. With the future SSP platform, this will make Wolfsburg Volkswagen’s first multi-platform factory a few years from now. That will give the main plant a major advantage in terms of capacity utilization over the next ten years. It is how we are safeguarding jobs at the Wolfsburg plant and giving our workforce a clear perspective for the future.” (SSP = Scalable Systems Platform).
The new production line for the ID.3 and the new Tiguan will be installed over the coming months. An initial €460 million is being invested through early 2025. The lion’s share will be invested in production facilities, the rest is earmarked for retraining – such as the eMotionRoom – and necessary conversion measures.
In addition to the ID.3, the Wolfsburg factory is to begin building a further model based on the MEB (SUV) in the near future. This will strengthen the location as the “heart of the VW brand” over the coming years.
Source: Volkswagen