Tesla will soon find Volkswagen a serious EV competitor following the latter's revelation that it is working to transform the Wolfsburg car factory in Germany into a modern vehicle manufacturing facility. It's quite obvious that the automaker's minimum goal is to match the production capabilities of Giga Berlin.
The massive Tesla factory in Germany is designed to mass-produce all-electric vehicles by using the latest manufacturing techniques. It is nearing completion and by estimates shared by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Giga Berlin will be online in the summer of 2021 and should start rolling out Tesla EVs in big numbers.
It's clear that Musk wants to dominate Europe and Volkswagen is not letting the U.S. automaker's aggressive incursion into the region go uncheck. That is why the automobile group is upgrading the Wolfsburg factory, which is already the largest vehicle manufacturing site in the world.
Citing a report first published by Bloomberg, The Driven said the Wolfsburg factory will soon boast of the latest EV manufacturing technology and the facility upgrade will include hardware and software enhancements.
From the conversation conducted by Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess with this team, parts of which were obtained by the same Bloomberg report, it was understood that the German company intends to be at an equal level with Tesla in terms of producing EVs with great speed.
Tesla, for instance, can put together the Model 3 or the Model Y in just 10 hours and Diess wants to achieve the same pace when the Wolfsburg upgrade is completed. Currently, the factory is assembling 800,000 units per year but it is still unknown if Volkswagen is gunning to hit the same numbers in churning out EVs.
What Diess has already established is Volkswagen's long-term plan of flooding the market with some 22 million all-electric cars by 2030.
Volkswagen is unlikely to admit but the company is certainly looking at Tesla as the benchmark for its increasing push and possibly eventual transition to electric-powered vehicles, according to Teslarati. Tesla has a big lead in the market segment and is in a strong position to deliver 500,000 EVs by the end of 2020.
By the end of 2021, Musk projected to increase his firm's output by 100% and the minimum goal is to deliver one million units that proudly bear the Tesla badge. The U.S. automaker is upbeat that the target will be met with the Giga Berlin, Giga Shanghai in China, and the Giga Austin in the United States providing the bulk of the required EVs.
For its part, Volkswagen is taking the huge step of adjusting the Wolfsburg factory to the requirements of ramping up the production of its EV models, headlined for now by the ID.3 and ID.4.
