Swen Pfoertner / Pool via REUTERS
Under control of the crisis: VW boss Herbert Diess (left), here with Lower Saxony’s Prime Minister Stephan Weil
VolkswagenCEO Herbert Diess has the top management of the world’s largest car group in the Corona pandemic committed to further savings efforts. A spokesman for the company confirmed on Sunday that Diess had spoken at an internal event last week about how to save further. “There were fundamental considerations with which further cost measures can be used to react to the pandemic,” said the spokesman. However, there are still no concrete decisions. The industry newspaper “Automobilwoche” had previously reported on this.
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This therefore wants to massively tighten the austerity measures. “We have to cut R&D expenditure, investments and fixed costs significantly compared to the previous planning status”, quoted Diess from a speech to top managers on Thursday. The VW Group’s net liquidity will “continue to decrease at least until July due to weak demand”. According to the participants, the main brand VW passenger cars, for example, must now reduce their material overheads – such as material costs in administration and for auxiliary materials in production – by 20 percent. Budgets from previous years would no longer simply be updated for new projects. Nevertheless, “not all VW brands would generate a positive annual result in the current year”.
Model range on the test bench
Because everything does not run smoothly with the products either, the variety of models should be put to the test even more. So let Diess analyze which models could be completely eliminated in the future, which would also affect workplaces in the factories, it said in the “Automobilwoche”. Diess had previously announced that the range of offers should be tightened for cost reasons.
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Two important vehicle projects are currently doing a lot of work for the Wolfsburgers: The new Golf 8, which has been in production since last year, is still causing problems, VW has just ended a delivery freeze due to a malfunction in the emergency assistant. There is also the ID3, with which Volkswagen wants to continue the success of the Golf as a mass model in the electric era currently delaysbecause there is a problem with the software. After all, the ID3 should make money from the start. However, this was not the case with the previous pure electric models E-Up and E-Golf, the paper said. The two cars are based on a different platform than the upcoming ID3.
Overall, Diess still sees the group in terms of electromobility and networking in the car lagging behind the US electrical pioneer Tesla. “It will be years before we have reached the necessary levels of competence in software to be among the front runners in the competition,” Diess conceded to the managers. Under the leadership of the new Audi boss Markus Duesmann, who is also responsible for electrical ambitions in the group’s board of directors, has the aim of a new project to significantly strengthen software development. According to earlier information, VW wants to program more than 60 percent of the software in the car by 2025, previously it was less than 10 percent.
luk / dpa-afx