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Volkswagen Brand Boss Confirms Project Trinity Was Postponed to 2028 To Save $2 Billion

When Herbert Diess was the Volkswagen Group CEO, the company announced it would invest €2 billion ($2.069 billion at the current exchange rate) to build a new factory for Project Trinity. It would manufacture a sedan at the same pace Tesla allegedly produces them elsewhere: in 10 hours instead of 30 at Volkswagen. Autocar confirmed that Oliver Blume radically changed these plans just by postponing everything to 2028 or 2029.
Volkswagen postponed Project Trinity, its factory, and the Scalable Systems Platform 14 photos
Photo: Volkswagen
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According to Thomas Schäfer, the new factory was necessary because all four factories located in Wolfsburg would be pretty busy around 2026. However, the new Volkswagen Passenger Cars CEO said that if the project could wait until 2028 or 2029, the demand for combustion-engined models would be low enough to allow the carmaker to integrate the Trinity sedan into the existing plants.

That only makes sense if you are talking about an ordinary model, but Project Trinity was supposed to be revolutionary. Volkswagen would adopt huge castings – just like Tesla – to create the car’s platform. That would allow the company to make vehicles in a third of the time they usually demand. Either Volkswagen scrapped these plans to make the Trinity a more conventional model, or it will have to refurbish one of its four factories to deal with the new manufacturing concept the project originally proposed.

Another matter is timeliness. Diess proposed building a new factory and spending €2 billion to make Volkswagen competitive against Tesla as soon as he could. That apparently does not worry Blume as much as it worried Diess. That could relate to the lower demand for Tesla vehicles, but it could be a more crucial difference: Blume may agree with Oliver Zipse that there are “much more efficient ways to build a car body” than with massive cast parts. That was how the BMW CEO dismissed Tesla’s manufacturing strategies because “partially lower manufacturing cost is overcompensated by casting costs.”

If Project Trinity is compromised, so is the new Scalable Systems Platform (SSP). Strategically speaking, the electric sedan would be just the first vehicle to present the new architecture, which Diess considered crucial for Volkswagen's future. Autocar did not ask Schäfer about that. For the record, Blume had given up on using SSP when he was in charge of Porsche – and the brand was still part of the Volkswagen Group. He may have decided all other Volkswagen brands also do not need it.
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About the author: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo
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Motoring writer since 1998, Gustavo wants to write relevant stories about cars and their shift to a sustainable future.
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