VW to Invest $800 Million to Build New Electric Vehicle in US

CHATTANOOGA, TN—Volkswagen will invest $800 million to make a new electric vehicle (EV) at its assembly plant here.

In an announcement at the Detroit Auto Show, the German automaker said that it will add 1,000 jobs at the factory and that EV production there would begin in 2022.

VW is already building its first dedicated EV assembly plant in Zwickau, Germany. That facility will begin producing a modular electric vehicle chassis, called MEB, by the end of 2019. VW designed the MEB to be the basic building block for its EVs, and it is intended to consolidate all of the vehicle’s electronic controls and reduce the number of microprocessors. The MEB chassis will be the base of EV’s to be produced in Chattanooga.

VW will add EV production at two factories in China in 2020 and two additional German cities by 2022.

VW plans to commit almost $50 billion through 2023 toward the development and production of EVs and digital services. The company plans to sell 150,000 EVs by 2020 worldwide, increasing that number to 1 million by 2025.

The ASSEMBLY Show South

ASSEMBLY is thrilled to return to the Music City Center in Nashville, TN for The ASSEMBLY Show SOUTH on May 1-2, 2024. This is a booming time for manufacturing and the U.S. South is right in the heart of the action. According to ASSEMBLY’s most recent annual capital spending survey, the South is projected to account for 31 percent of total spending this year, marking the fifth straight year this region has accounted for at least 30 percent of capital spending in the U.S.

In this session, manufacturers will learn how Quality function deployment (QFD) can transform consumers’ qualitative demands into quantitative parameters that will shape the design of their product and, ultimately, their manufacturing process.

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