The Volkswagen brand has announced plans for a “massive reduction in the complexity” of its model portfolio as it seeks to “significantly improve its earnings performance in the coming years”.
This will allow the Wolfsburg-based firm to “finance investments in future technologies from its own resources”.
“To this end, the model portfolio is being streamlined and the number of variants reduced. At the same time, productivity at the plants is to be increased and the platform orientation for vehicle production extended,” the firm said in a statement.
In Europe, VW announced it would be discontinuing 25 percent of the engine-transmission variants with “low customer demand” in the coming model year, with “corresponding positive effects on the complexity of production and the supply chain”.
In total, the Volkswagen brand said it would be investing over €11-billion in e-mobility, digitalisation, autonomous driving and mobility services from 2019 to 2023, of which over €9-billion will be spent on what the company describes as its “electrification offensive”.
The statement added VW planned savings amounting to more than €2,2-billion by the end of 2018, with further “massive savings” expected from measures such as the “strong expansion of the platform model”.
“Currently, approximately 60 percent of the conventional models are based on the MQB [platform], and this is set to increase to around 80 percent by 2020,” the brand said.
