Executives at all three automakers have been keen to stress that this practice will persist even after supply chain bottlenecks subside. “I would like to really emphasise that we are not driving a volume strategy,”Mr Antlitz said that even VW, which prided itself on being the world’s largest carmaker before losing the “volume crown” to Toyota and whose executives privately used to target selling 11 million vehicles in a single year, was no longer seeking to expand for the sake of size.
“We have [a significantly] lower fixed-cost base, so we are less dependent on volume and less dependent on growth,” he said, pointing to the fact that VW had managed to reduce fixed costs of €41 billion in 2019 by 10 per cent ahead of schedule while investing in software development and new units. Even VW’s €52 billion push into electric vehicles – the largest investment package of its kind – would not add unnecessary volume, Mr Antlitz added. “We are not adding capacity: we rework factory by factory,” he said, referring to plants in Zwickau and Emden where combustion engine production lines have been converted to construct electric cars, while workers have been retrained.
But he also admitted calculations that electric vehicles would soon be as profitable for VW as combustion engine models had been thrown into doubt by the soaring cost of raw materials for batteries. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2022