All Press Releases

The new plant of the SAIC VOLKSWAGEN joint venture has been completed. It is purely built for the production of all electric vehicles on Volkswagen’s Modular Electric Drive Matrix (MEB). Celebrating the start of pre-production, a first China-specific all--electric Volkswagen ID. model rolled off the production line. The plant sets the next milestone in Volkswagen’s global electrification strategy. The start of series production of all-electric cars based on the MEB platform in Anting is scheduled for October 2020.

Volkswagen is launching in Lisbon the world’s first pilot project for traffic optimization using a quantum computer. For this purpose, Volkswagen is partnering with public transport provider CARRIS to equip MAN-buses with a traffic management system developed in-house. This system uses a D-Wave quantum computer and calculates the fastest route for each of the nine participating buses individually and almost in real-time. This way, passengers’ travel times will be significantly reduced, even during peak traffic periods, and traffic flow will be improved. Volkswagen is testing its system, which was developed jointly with the software specialists Hexad and PTV Group, during the Web-Summit technology conference in Lisbon from November 4 to 8 – during the conference, buses will carry thousands of passengers through the city traffic in Lisbon.

Volkswagen AG today announced the foundation of Volkswagen Autonomy GmbH (VWAT GmbH) with headquarters in Munich and Wolfsburg. Another subsidary in Silicon Valley will follow in 2020. A further subsidiary is planned in China in 2021. As a centre of excellence for autonomous driving from Level 4, VWAT will serve to build up know-how within the Group and bring a self-driving system (SDS) to market maturity. The company will be managed by Alexander Hitzinger, Senior Vice President for autonomous driving in the Volkswagen Group and Member of the Volkswagen Brand Board of Management responsible for Technical Development at Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles (VWCV). VWCV in Hanover is the leading brand within the Group for Autonomous Driving, Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS), and Transport-as-a-Service (TaaS).

In September, the Volkswagen Group delivered 904,200 vehicles to customers throughout the world, corresponding to a significant rise of 9.2 per-cent compared with September 2018. In a shrinking overall global market, the Group continued to significantly expand its market shares. As expected, this development was driven by Europe (+31.0 percent) and Germany (+58.1 percent). Here, deliveries had been at an unusually low level in September 2018 as a result of restricted vehicle availability following the changeover to the new WLTP type approval procedure. In the regions of North America and Asia-Pacific, the Volkswagen Group succeeded in slightly expanding its market shares in shrinking overall markets. In South America, the Group markedly boosted deliveries in contrast to the decreasing overall market and therefore significantly expanded its market share. Dr. Christian Dahlheim, Head of Volkswagen Group Sales: “In the current economic and geopolitical environment, which is tense, our strong brands are once again proving to be especially valuable. They offer our customers security for their purchasing decisions and therefore lay the foundation for the continual expansion of our global market share.”