VW’s EV boss and the ID.3
Jürgen Stackmann and the zero-emission ID.3 have a common purpose: to move VW out from beneath the shadow of Dieselgate and into a bright, electric and software-driven future
Welcome to Wolfsburg, or Stadt des KdF-Wagens (‘city of the KdF car’) as the Nazis originally called it. It was built to manufacture the ‘people’s car’ commissioned by Hitler, and to house its workers. Slave labour, many from the local concentration camp, manufactured military vehicles there during the war. It was renamed Wolfsburg after the local castle, on the advice of the British occupying power. The giant factory was dismissed by UK, US and French motoring experts as unworkable, and the Beetle as unsaleable. They would become, respectively, the world’s biggest car plant and the world’s best-selling car.
Some 70 years later, Volkswagen would become the world’s biggest car maker and, at about the same time, the most scandal-ridden. Jürgen Stackmann agreed to join Volkswagen just 14 days before the diesel crisis broke, in the autumn of 2015. As Volkswagen’s electric car tsar, he is now leading the company’s path to redemption. ‘Do we continue as the bad boys or do we become part of the positive change?’ the 59-year-old global head of sales and marketing for Volkswagen asks over a coffee in Wolfsburg. We know the answer. Or at least the aspiration.
Stackmann is positively evangelical about electric cars. He has been a key driver of the ID project and its first progeny, the upcoming ID.3 Golf-sized hatch. This is not some half-baked EV conversion of an ordinary petrol car, like most battery-electric dullards on the market. It’s a bespoke electric car, bristling with ingenuity, 360º environmental logic and, in all probability, a rosy sales future. No car maker invests as much in EVs as the one-time dirty diesel diehards from Lower Saxony.
We meet in a modern glassy showroom, which contrasts with the old brick-and-smokestacks factory surrounding us. This factory is the heart of Wolfsburg. The site is about the size of the Principality of Monaco, though that’s where the similarities between Monte Carlo and Wolfsburg end. There are almost 50 miles of roads, 40 miles of railway tracks, seven locomotives and a canal. It’s the world’s single biggest car-making complex. It’s not just VW’s home, it’s also invariably home to Volkswagen’s most important model. Once, that meant the Beetle; nowadays it’s the Golf.
The factory even has its own power plants (two of them), which also supply power to the city. Disappointingly, they’re coal fired. Cleaner natural gas will replace them next year, apparently saving 1.8 million tonnes of CO2 a year, but they’ll still contribute to Volkswagen’s enormous global carbon footprint. Including all global manufacturing and customer vehicle use, it works out at one per cent of the world’s total man-made CO2 emissions, ‘…or roughly the same as Australia’s,’ says Stackmann.
His excellent English is partly due to a 20-year career at Ford, including a stint in the UK. He joined the Volkswagen Group in 2010 and rose to become chairman of Seat before moving to VW in its darkest hour.
‘In mid-October 2015, just three weeks after the diesel crisis began, our boss Dr Diess gathered his new board for an off-site meeting at the old Volkswagen guest house. [Then, Diess was CEO of Volkswagen cars as well as boss of the wider VW Group; he remains the latter but not the former. This June it was announced that the VW board had accepted an apology for comments Diess made in a meeting, and that it would ‘continue to support him in his work’.] We were in crisis. Big change was needed and we all knew that. The issue wasn’t a technology crisis, it was a trust crisis. Before 2015 we thought we could manage the demands of the future with the technology we had. That came from our traditional industrial, engineering logic. After 2015, we knew we had to change. Our future would be electric.’
It’s di¨cult to grasp the scale of this turnabout. Volkswagen was on the brink of becoming the biggest car maker in the world. Its stand-out engine technology was diesel. Its bosses were still dismissing EVs as aberrations. Volkswagen has had many watershed years in its 80-odd-year history, from its post-war rebirth (1948) to betting everything on the Golf (1974). But none was more significant than 2015 and its fallout.
Unequivocally, VW would transform itself into a maker of electric, not petrol- or diesel-powered, vehicles. The entire ‘old school’ car industry, ⊲
‘Before 2015, we thought we could manage the future with the technology we had’
JÜRGEN STACKMANN
hitherto full of doubters and ditherers, would follow VW’s lead.
‘We plan to stop developing new combustion engines by the late 2020s,’ says Stackmann. ‘Somewhere in the 2030s, we’ll sell as many battery-electric vehicles as combustion-engine cars worldwide. It’s likely to be faster in China and Europe than in South America or Africa. The US depends on political decision-making.’
The promise is net zero carbon emissions by 2050. That means, says Stackmann, Volkswagen will have to stop selling all combustion engines, including plug-in hybrids, by about 2040 in the vast majority of countries.
The ID.3 is mostly for European roads. Sales were due to begin earlier this year… ‘The software isn’t at the level that we want. We need a few more weeks of work,’ Stackmann told CAR in May. Mainland European sales should be starting as you read this, with first UK deliveries in the summer.
The ID.4, a Tiguan-sized SUV (above), will follow. It will be the first ID sold in America. ‘The electric-car era will force SUVs to change. Because of the need for better aerodynamics, they’ll be more elegant, more fluent in design. We’ve always wondered what’s the next big thing after the SUV. It’s the fully electric SUV, like the ID.4; a different kind of vehicle. Roomier, more handsome, more ecient.
‘With bespoke electric cars you can get a flat floor, you can push the front of the cabin to the front of the car and you have small overhangs and a long wheelbase. The ID.3 is as compact as a Golf, the perfect size for European roads. Yet it has the interior space of the Passat, the turning circle of an Up and the accelerative punch of a GTI. It almost goes back to the Beetle: short nose, strong eyes, strong visual impact and rear-wheel drive.’
Volkswagen’s plan to cut carbon starts with manufacturing. ‘Our Zwickau plant [where the ID cars are being made] will be Europe’s biggest electric-car factory. It runs entirely on renewable energy. Our [EV] battery creation is done in Poland by LG. Battery production takes a lot of energy, a common criticism of electric cars. Our battery plant uses only certified zero-emission green electricity. We will guarantee that the ID.3 has net zero CO2 when it’s handed over to our customers. It will not leave a negative footprint.’ Suppliers will be ordered to clean up their act or else lose their VW business. Any work that can’t be done sustainably, like digging holes to extract minerals for manufacturing, will be carbon-offset.
But what about all the CO2 spewed out by the power stations, charging your clean-as-mountain-air ID.3? The Volkswagen 2050 net zero carbon promise (although here it’s more of an aspiration) includes cars in use.
‘It assumes we move to renewable energy for charging. To this end, we have a new company [Elli] that manages sustainable energy supply to our customers, and we already offer this in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. We invest in Ionity [a joint venture to build a network of rapid chargers throughout Europe], which uses green renewable energy.
‘We are not dreamers. We can’t insist, for example, that Poland stops using coal power. But we can help and influence Poland, the EU, and other places to change. And things are moving positively, with the UK an excellent example. Of the big industrial economies of Europe, Britain has made the biggest transformation in its power generation. Electric cars are already greener than petrol or diesel cars. Every time power generation gets cleaner, so electric cars get even cleaner.’
The coronavirus pandemic has clearly caused VW great pain: ‘It will change some of the ways we do business. We saw it first in China. There was a very deep, very sharp decline. But we expect now to be at or above our normal sales level there, amazingly enough. The rest of the world is likely to take longer to climb out of this. The UK car market was down 97 per cent [in April]; basically no sales. Nobody can remember ever having a big market with no sales for a month. We saw the same in France, Italy and Spain. But we believe that underlying demand remains strong. There is a drive towards online selling, and we will do this.
‘Fortunately for us, in times of crisis people tend to go back to trusted brands. We’ll have great financial offers and “bundled” products, with security in case of unemployment. It’s important to reassure people that whatever happens, there’s a solution, and that we’re backing them with regard to mobility. More than ever, I also think the ID.3 will be the perfect car for Europe at exactly the right time.’
There will be some pain in this electric transformation. ‘It will mean a major shift in what we do, how we do it and how many people we will need do it. The employment needed for powertrain engineering will drop significantly after 2025. The labour intensity of building battery cars is about 20 per cent less, so fewer people will be employed to make cars.’ VW is discreetly shedding about 1500 jobs globally a year.
He denies more production will be shifted to China, already the major producer of car battery and electrical systems for the world motor industry, and thus far the biggest beneficiary of the growing popularity of EVs. ‘Half of Volkswagen’s global production is already in China and that won’t change. China is where innovation comes faster than anywhere else. I expect we’ll also develop more in China, too.’
Despite the upcoming EV revolution, Stackmann says electric drive isn’t Volkswagen’s toughest task. ‘I know we can manage that. The bigger challenge is the move to fully connected cars. Moving this company from hardware thinking to software thinking is much harder than moving from combustion to electric. We have to keep our hardware and process excellence while also changing into a software-driven tech company. Until we achieve that, and deliver on our sustainability promises, we have achieved nothing.’
‘Moving this company from hardware thinking to software thinking is harder than moving from combustion to electric’
JÜRGEN STACKMANN