VW will first focus on software to reduce car development time by a quarter

Volkswagen says it is rebuilding its technical development division at its base in Wolfsburg, Germany. The department will increasingly focus on high-tech car parts and will evolve in the coming years.

Automaker, among the largest in the world, is interested in making his vehicles easily fit into the owner’s digital ecosystem. By restructuring the technical development unit, its largest engineering unit, he hopes to focus these 11,500 employees on “transforming into a technology company”.

“As the car becomes more and more an electrically powered software product, its development must also evolve in all dimensions,” said Thomas Ulbrich, Head of Technical Development, VW. “We make TD more connected and efficient by focusing our processes and organization on systems and functions rather than components. First of all softwarenot hardware in the first place. ”

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This will mean investment in the new 800 million euros ($ 873 million) technical campus over the next five years. The development center will raise the bar of car development and will accommodate more than 4,000 employees, the company said. It will act as an umbrella for design, conceptualization, UX, product strategy, lineup, technical project management and more.

Employees who make the conversion of VW possible will partly benefit from the number of people already working on it. By 2030, it hopes to raise 6,000-8,000 workers, and another 4,000 fully retrained to work in this new wing.

These investments will be important for the development of a new car platform known as Trinity Project. The fully connected all-electric vehicle platform will be deployed for the first time in 2026 and will eventually become the basis for all Volkswagen Group cars as well as some cars for other customers.

These investments in the technical development division will allow VW not only to create the platform, but also to continue its modernization for many years and develop new cars on it.

“This will allow us to reduce development time by 25 percent – in the future, car projects will be completed in 40 months from the introduction of the main software architecture, and not in 54 months, as before,” – said Ulbrich. “Thus, we emphasize that TD is accelerating the pace of transformation Volkswagen to a technology company ”.

Taken together, the restructuring of the technical development unit and the platform it creates will help VW achieve its goal of being completely carbon-neutral by 2050.