EVwire brief: Volkswagen has scrapped the large-casting hall it was days away from starting in Wolfsburg, and with it "Gamechanger," the new production program that was supposed to make its next-generation EVs cheaper to build. Ground-breaking on the hall had been set for the following week.
Cost was the deciding factor. VW's Group Board of Management signed off on the cut at its most recent meeting, and the works council made it public on November 11 in a special edition of Mitbestimmen, its newspaper for staff. A VW spokesperson then confirmed the decision, pointing to the company's finances:
Against the background of the company's tense economic situation, all investments are currently under review.
Hat tip to Luca Greco, who broke down the decision and its background in his Gigacasting Newsletter.
VW's large-casting pitch at IAA Mobility 2025: 123 parts in one, 10% lighter and 15% cheaper (Image: Volkswagen)
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VW insists the Scalable Systems Platform (SSP), the EV architecture its next models will ride on, is still on track. Wolfsburg will still get its two planned SSP models, an electric Golf and an electric model in the T-Roc class, but according to the works council, they now look likely to be built largely with today's conventional methods.
Daniela Cavallo, who heads the works council, says the cut breaks the deal the two sides struck in December 2024, calling it "a flagrant breach of our agreement." She also accused the board of walking away from its ambition to lead in manufacturing technology, saying "only short-term profit thinking is in the foreground now."
The works council is now tying the decision to the combustion Golf's planned move to Mexico. Cavallo said that move won't go ahead until staff get full transparency on jobs, production volumes and timing. Handelsblatt, citing people familiar with the matter, links VW's savings to Audi's planned factory in the US state of Georgia.
VW plans to move combustion Golf production from Wolfsburg to Mexico. The works council wants answers first.
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Context:
Wolfsburg was supposed to be Gamechanger's starting point. The program bundled several new production processes, including large single-piece aluminum castings for body parts, and VW planned to prove them at its home plant before using them elsewhere in the group. They were also central to the December 2024 deal with labor: Wolfsburg's electric Golf and T-Roc would be the first cars built with the new processes, and the combustion Golf would shift to Mexico to free up space.
VW already uses large casting in series production on a smaller scale. At IAA Mobility in September 2025, it showed a cast battery-tray frame for its compact EVs, the ID. Polo, ID. Cross, Cupra Raval and Škoda Epiq, which replaces 123 separate parts and is 10% lighter and 15% cheaper to make.
This is the second cost cut to hit Wolfsburg's electric future in a matter of weeks. At the end of October, VW paused development of the next electric Golf, a car it had already pushed back to the end of the decade, with brand chief Thomas Schäfer telling staff "we simply cannot afford this work right now."
This summer, VW also ordered 16 gigacasting machines from Bühler to make front and rear underbody castings for its next-generation platform. As Greco points out, no report so far says what will happen to those machines, or where VW will now cast the large parts for SSP.
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