The most extensive qualification and advanced training campaign in the history of the Volkswagen Group is currently underway at the Zwickau location. Nearly the entire workforce there – 8,000 in total – is being made ready to build six electric models for three brands in the future: Volkswagen, Audi, Seat. That is the plan for the final construction stage starting in 2021. From that point onward, the Zwickau employees will ensure that up to 330,000 purely electric cars annually will roll off the assembly line.
Volkswagen gets down to business starting November 4th: that’s when mass production of the ID.31 will start – the next milestone in making the e-car accessible to millions of people. That makes Zwickau an essential part of the largest-scale electrification campaign in the automobile industry. In addition, Volkswagen is ensuring that their German factories and the jobs there remain viable in the future through the transformation to e-mobility.
The corporation is preparing the employees there for new production methods and jobs to reach that goal. The changes are coming about primarily because of the special characteristics of the e-car, the new vehicle architecture with the Modular Electrification Toolkit (MEB platform) and increasing automatization in the production process. Around 13,000 training days were planned for 2019 alone. That presumably makes Zwickau the automobile industry’s largest training campus.