Volkswagen’s supervisory board gave the thumbs-up to the construction of a new Trinity factory in Wolfsburg.
VolkswagenVolkswagen is already off to the races (figuratively speaking) with the MEB electric vehicle platform that underpins the ID 4 and the ID Buzz, but that doesn’t mean that all its EV eggs are going in that basket. Over a year ago, VW CEO Ralf Brandstaetter talked about something called Project Trinity. Now, that project’s production facility has gotten the official green light from the VW board, VW announced Friday.
What’s Trinity? It’s three things. First, it’s a new electric vehicle architecture that focuses on being affordable and highly environmentally friendly. Second, it’s a partially automated driver assistance system along the lines of SuperCruise from GM. Finally, it’s a new approach to production that VW claims will be net carbon zero by 2026 and radically different from the way it builds cars now, and it will happen in a new facility in Wolfsburg, Germany.
“We are setting benchmarks in the automotive industry with Trinity and the new factory and turning Wolfsburg into the global lighthouse for cutting-edge and efficient vehicle production,” Brandstaetter said in a statement. “This reaffirms that the economic transformation of Germany as a center of industry can be achieved.”
Volkswagen plans to begin constructing the new factory facility as soon as 2023. Among the goals for this new factory, Volkswagen wants to get vehicle construction time down to 10 hours. To achieve this, the company plans to increase the level of automation in the factory beyond what’s normal now, and to simplify vehicles with fewer variants and fewer components.
The folks from Volkswagen didn’t opt to go into detail about the first vehicles to be built with Trinity architecture, but the company does claim that it will be capable of hitting Level 4 autonomy, at least from a hardware standpoint, with a launch capability of Level 2. It plans to have full autonomy available in its vehicles by 2030.
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