VW starts delivering cars in Germany again as production resumes
Customers were able to pick up their new cars at Volkswagen’s futuristic glass factory in the eastern German city of Dresden on Thursday after a four-week pause due to the coronavirus.
And in another hopeful sign for Germany’s auto giant, Volkswagen has also resumed domestic production at its Zwickau plant.
The production lines have been still there for over five weeks. They will now be brought back online at half their usual speed.
“Health comes before quantity,” said Reinhard de Vries, head of technology and logistics for Volkswagen in the German state of Saxony, where the plant is located.
The vehicles delivered at the Dresden factory are being completely disinfected before delivery and handed over to their new owners in a contactless procedure, the company said.
Technical features are being explained in a video, with the carmaker foregoing its usual in-person rundown of how the car works.
Last year, around 1,300 people picked up their car at the factory in Dresden, with that figure set to double in 2020 despite the economic turmoil unleashed by the pandemic.
Production in Zwickau will resume at about a third of the site’s usual capacity, with 50 vehicles to be built in a shift per day, de Vries said.
Alongside the Golf 8, Volkswagen’s new, fully electric ID.3 model is manufactured in Zwickau.
The company says it has put in place comprehensive hygiene and social-distancing measures in order to protect the wellbeing of the 1,500 workers who are returning to work there.
Around 8,000 people are employed at the Zwickau plant, with the company relying on a government short-time work scheme to maintain many of their salaries.
A nearby plant in Chemnitz and the manufacturing sector of the Dresden factory are also set to gradually resume production, starting from Monday.
The same applies to the automaker’s headquarters in Wolfsburg and other factories elsewhere in Germany.
The gradual return to production also comes as a relief to Volkswagen’s external parts suppliers.
“Suppliers who manufacture components such as axles, cockpits or cable harnesses in sequence and are directly upstream of the vehicle plants urgently need the restart,” said Dirk Vogel, regional head of the AMZ industry body for such firms in Saxony.
Dwindling demand for cars and the massive production bottlenecks caused by the coronavirus crisis hit Volkswagen hard in the first quarter, when the group’s operating profit collapsed from 3.9 billion euros (4.2 billion dollars) in the corresponding period of 2019 to around 900 million euros.
Other German carmakers have also been dealt heavy blows, with VW rival Daimler reporting an almost 78-per-cent plunge in first-quarter profits on Thursday, falling to 617 million euros.
Source: dpa