ID.3 production to begin in late autumn at Volkswagen’s Zwickau plant

By the end of 2019, the first fully electric ID. models will be rolling off the production line at the Volkswagen plant in Zwickau, starting with the ID.3.

In the final stage, from 2021 onwards, 330,000 all-electric cars will be built per year. The employees here will then be manufacturing six models for three brands: Volkswagen, Audi and Seat. The Group is investing a total of €1.2 billion in the ultra-modern site in Saxony.

The vehicle plant in Zwickau covers an area of over 1.8 million square metres (equivalent to 252 soccer fields), of which 1.4 million square metres have been built on. Until mid-2018, the Passat was produced here, and the Golf and Golf Estate are currently still being manufactured. Production of the ID.3 will begin in late autumn. The Golf Estate will continue to be produced in parallel until mid-2020.

The future fully electric models from Zwickau will be based on efficient, stable and sustainable production. The plant's maximum capacity is being increased daily from today's 1,350 to a future 1,500 vehicles. And since the Zwickau plant will also increase the number of models from three to six, employment at the site will remain stable - even though electric vehicles are less complicated to build.

The conversion was started in the summer of 2018 with the modernisation of the production lines. Following the plant's summer shutdown, the first of two assembly lines for ID. production will be given the green light in August. To this end, the body shop, paint shop, assembly and infrastructure have been extensively modernised and renewed. Among other things, the entire conveyor technology had to be modified for electric cars.

The site's second line will be converted in a similar way by the end of 2020 and will go into operation that same year. A total of 9,000 tons of steel will be newly installed there, 50,000 square metres of hall space will be constructed and 1,625 robots will be set up. 50 partner companies are helping with the conversion. Many of the previous systems will be reused, some of them at other Group sites.

Ingolf Keller, Head of Utilities at the Zwickau site, has a precise overview of modernizations at the plant. What his many colleagues and external partners have been planning for months and will convert within a few years has one goal: to make production in Zwickau largely CO₂-free.

The Zwickau plant is supplied with electricity by Volkswagen Kraftwerks GmbH. For a few years now, this company has been offering pure green electricity sourced from hydroelectric power plants, wind farms and solar parks. This green electricity is TÜV-certified. Even though it costs a little more, Volkswagen Sachsen (with the Zwickau, Dresden and Chemnitz sites) has been using this green electricity since April 2017. By using green electricity the Zwickau site alone saves 106 tons of CO₂ a year. This currently covers 50% of the electricity requirement.

The other 50% is produced at Zwickau in the in-house combined heat and power plant. This is run on natural gas, which is significantly more climate-friendly than producing electricity with coal. The in-house power plant has another big advantage: it “incidentally” also covers 70% of the heating requirement for the Zwickau plant. “If we only used the gas for heating, we would not have this efficiency and we would have much higher CO₂ emissions,” said Ingolf Keller.

The halls which are being extended or newly built during the conversion are completely in line with the latest German energy saving ordinance (insulation, windows, construction cover). They minimise electricity, water and heat consumption depending on use. In addition, employees meet once a month to discuss how they can further reduce consumption. For example, the water cycle has been adjusted so that more water is recycled, meaning less fresh water is consumed. Another example concerns the hydraulic units, which are now shut down centrally over the weekend. This has been a success: the electricity consumption is now only 20% of that of a work day - a very good value for the entire Group.

Natural gas is known to be one of the major consumers in the production process. During thermal post-combustion in the paint shop, the exhaust gas temperature is now optimised so that on the one hand it is still high enough for good quality, but on the other hand not too many pollutants are blown into the air, meaning less gas is consumed overall.

New systems are now always equipped with what are known as frequency-regulated fans and pumps. While these are more expensive to purchase in comparison with the earlier three-phase motors, they regulate precisely according to need, which means that they only use the minimum amount of energy required.

“When all the conversion work is finished in 2020, we will aim to have our plant certified by the highly respected ‘German Society for Sustainable Construction,'” Keller explained. But even now, at the beginning of production of the ID.3, the Zwickau plant is running almost CO₂-neutrally. “From now on, the natural gas which we are not yet obtaining from CO₂-free sources will be offset by the purchase of certificates.”

The aim is to purchase only CO2-neutral gas in the future. At the moment, however, this is not available on the market in sufficient quantities. If the supply increases in the next few years, the Zwickau plant will be completely CO₂-free - even without certificates.