Volkswagen is cutting hundreds of jobs at its electric car factory in Zwickau. The company announced on Thursday after a works meeting that 269 fixed-term contracts that are about to expire after a twelve-month term will not be extended. Shift work will probably also have to be adjusted.
The specific procedure will be coordinated with the works council in the next few days. The reason given was “the current market situation”. In view of high inflation and declining purchase premiums, customers are holding back on electric cars. In Zwickau, only electric cars are built for Volkswagen, Audi and Cupra.
It is feared that other temporary employees – currently around 2,200 according to information – will meet a similar fate and their contracts will not be extended. A total of around 10,700 people work at the plant. “Volkswagen remains 100 percent convinced of the path to electromobility,” said a spokesman. A course correction is not planned.
At the works meeting it was made clear that the Zwickau plant was not up for grabs and that further investments would be made there. To date, it has been a pioneer of electromobility within the company. In addition to the ID.3, ID.4 and ID.5 models, the Q4 e-tron and the Q4 Sportback e-tron from Audi as well as the Cupra Born are also produced there.
The last combustion engine rolled off the assembly line in 2020. Despite sluggish capacity utilization at the plant, production of the Audi Q4 e-tron and the ID.3 is to be expanded to other locations. “We will also produce the Q4 e-tron in Brussels from the end of 2023, in addition to production in Zwickau,” an Audi spokeswoman told dpa. The ID.3 is also scheduled to roll off the production line in Wolfsburg from autumn, initially in small numbers. The parts for final assembly will initially be delivered from Saxony, with full production planned in Wolfsburg next year. Originally, all six models from VW, Audi and Cupra that are built in Zwickau were produced exclusively there.
VW also initially served the US market from Saxony and brought the ID.4 to America by ship. This increased the already long delivery times for the electric cars. VW is now building the vehicles for the US market in Chattanooga (Tennessee), where production of the model started in October 2022. Exports from Zwickau were then stopped.
The ID.4 also arrived in Emden in May 2022. And the group awarded Cupra’s second electric model, the ID.5 sister model Tavascan, to China at the end of 2022. It is scheduled to start production at the Anhui plant later this year. VW justified the location decision by saying that the capacity in Zwickau would not have been sufficient for the additional model.