After all, the car will be driving around on real roads later – not on a screen.” Designers Go Even More Digital In the age of COVID-19: Increased use of online meetings, data glasses, and an 18-meter-long LED wall Designers’ jobs are becoming more digital and climate-friendly: Marco Pavone, Head of Exterior Design Volkswagen, next to an 18-meter-long LED wall in the Wolfsburg Design Center. ter-long LED wall. Colleagues from China and Brazil, who would usually have travelled all the way, now join in online. Details can be seen in razor-sharp focus on the LED wall Pavone is presenting the virtual model of a new vehicle. He explains what his team has changed since the last meeting and why. He can even show details in razor-sharp focus on the video wall – almost like on a real car. “We know that we can trust the technology,” says Pavone. The digital formats not only make it possible for employees to work together during the pandemic – they’re also better for the environment. “I made 13 business trips by plane last year,” says Pavone. That’s about 133,000 kilometers and 50 tons of CO2 emissions. Online meet- Ingo Köhler is an economic and business historian at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In his book Auto-Identitäten (Auto-Identities), he explores the product and marketing strategies employed by car companies since 1965. Köhler is a die-hard motorhead and his first car was a Golf I LX. Transformation, new software architecture, and now the coronavirus crisis. How do you, as a historian, view the situation of the eighth Golf generation? No two crises are the same, of course. As historians, we’re not prophets who can reliably predict the future. Rather, our job is to research and compare historic constellations. And on that point I have to say, the Golf is good at transformation. What do you mean exactly? The Golf is a child of the great transformation of 1974. The company had held on to the Beetle for far too long.