TOWARDS TOMORROW’S AUTOMOBILE W
ith a new future-oriented programme, the Volkswagen Group intends to provide answers to the major challenges faced by the automotive industry. This was announced by the chairman of the board of management of Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft, Prof. Dr Martin Winterkorn, directly before the opening of the Geneva Motor Show: “With our ‘Future Tracks’ initiative, we intend to break new ground and to reorient our thinking and our action. For this purpose, the best developers, production experts and strategists will all work together.” Winterkorn said “Over the next few years, our industry will face one of the greatest upheavals since the invention of the automobile. People’s mobility expectations are undergoing a fundamental transformation. Their wishes concerning their own cars are changing faster and faster. There are fundamental differences between lifestyles and needs from region to region. And digitalisation is increasingly redefining the way we live and work. Against the backdrop of these challenges, the automobile industry must 12 Industry Europe
not bury its head in the sand but must welcome these developments and take them into account in its long-term strategies. “One of the main challenges for our industry will be to adapt even faster to the changing needs of customers. Customers will call upon us to react faster and more flexibly in order to offer precisely the right car with the right technology at the right time. This will force us to think about whether we may need to significantly shorten the normal model cycles of seven to eight years. And the fact that the car is more and more becoming a mobile computer will have revolutionary consequences for future operation. The new Audi TT, for example, with its virtual cockpit gives a foretaste of these developments.” In Winterkorn’s opinion, progressive digitalisation will challenge conventional model strategies. “In future, customers may well implement part of the next facelift themselves, via a software update in their own garage. This development could soon place us in a position to offer additional added value for customers, irrespective of previous model cycles.” Against the backdrop of increasingly diverse customer
The Volkswagen Group’s ‘Future Tracks’ programme is developing the auto technologies of the future.
wishes changing at a faster and faster pace, he said that it was necessary to ask “whether every current model would automatically have a successor. It is more probable that people will increasingly expect us to provide entirely new body variants or designs of which we currently have no idea. These are questions that touch the future of our industry to the core, questions that will call for intensive efforts on our part.”
Future mobility Volkswagen currently employs a total of 46,000 researchers and developers as well as over 10,000 IT experts, all of whom are working on the mobility of the future such as alternative drive concepts or the digitalisation of vehicles and factories. But Winterkorn stressed that “at Volkswagen, technology is never an end in itself. All these technologies serve people, our customers. Because they make driving safer and more comfortable, because they conserve resources and protect the environment, and because they bring together the mobile and the digital worlds.” That is why he would like
