Volkswagen To Shorten New Car Development Time To 3 Years

Volkswagen recently revealed a new three-year plan aimed at growing the brand’s sustainability through a myriad of measures to increase revenue and reduce costs. The company revealed that its new “Accelerate Forward/ Road to 6.5” program targeted achieving 6.5 per cent sustainability by 2026 with one of these measures being speeding up the turnaround times for new model development.

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VW has said that under its new three-year plan it plans to bring down the development period of new Volkswagen cars from the current 50 months (a little over 4 years) to 36 months (3 years). The company said that the faster turnaround times of new cars would not affect quality or safety and would help reduce development costs by up to 1 billion euros by end-2028. The company also said that it would half the number of test cars used for technical development reducing costs by as much as 400 million euros per year. The company said that this was possible as “digitalisation and technological advances enable more testing to be carried out on test rigs.”

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Other measures put in place on the product and aftersales side of its business included streamlining its procurement services, enhancing the brand’s after-sales business and production optimisation at its plants.

The company said that these measures would come into place from 2024.

“With its current and future car models, the Volkswagen brand is on track with executing on this strategy. We will now strengthen our economic foundation to support our success in years to come. This will boost our efforts to make VW the world’s leading volume brand. In recent weeks we’ve made good progress in detailing the most comprehensive program the brand has ever launched. The precise contributions for all the action areas have been defined, the measures have been agreed and are already being implemented. Our efforts will in part start to bear fruit as early as 2024. This is crucial if we are to withstand the increasingly tough competition in extremely challenging market conditions,” said Thomas Schäfer, CEO, Volkswagen Passenger Cars.

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Aside from product-related measures, the company also announced administrative measures to control costs including selective job cuts and offering partial retirement to employees born in or before 1967.