Towards tomorrow’s automobile The Volkswagen

TOWARDS TOMORROW’S AUTOMOBILE

The Volkswagen Group’s ‘Future Tracks’ programme is developing the auto technologies of the future.

With 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 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 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

to see “in Europe in particular, a climate where new technologies are not eyed with suspicion right from the outset,” but rather a climate “where innovations are truly welcome. As a centre of automotive engineering and manufacturing, Europe must, for example, drive forward core technologies such as piloted driving with determination and speed. In this context I highly welcome the interest of Apple, Google and others in the automobile. Because that means the car will gain more acceptance from ‘Digital Natives’.”

Volkswagen is paying very close attention to issues of the future such as electromobility, the digitalisation of vehicles, factories and retail, or social change, which is altering, and to a certain extent redefining, the role of the automobile.

“Future Tracks’ programme is the umbrella for all of these activities,” Winterkorn said. Thanks to sensor technology and connectivity, the group already has the largest networked fleet in the world on the road as well as the world’s largest low-CO2 fleet, with the present lineup including 57 model variants that already meet the 95 gram target. VW also already offers the widest range of electromobility solutions in the automotive industry, with nine electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids.

Environmental goals

Winterkorn also insists that Volkswagen is fully committed to its environmental goals and that the present low level of oil prices would not change that. “Oil will not be as cheap as it is at the moment for ever. The CO2 limits apply irrespective of fuel prices. And, more importantly, this is about our responsibility for protecting the climate. That is why our approach to drive diversity is the right one. That is why ever more efficient petrol and diesel engines are indispensable. Let me be very clear about one point: those who talk down diesel are jeopardising CO2 targets.”

The current status of the group’s ecological realignment initiative launched in 2012 is very positive, and Volkswagen is well ahead of schedule with its most important environmental targets. For example, emissions by the EU new vehicle fleet were brought down to approximately 125 grams CO2/km last year. That is 13 per cent less than 2010 and 31 per cent less than 1995. This means the group is already well below the legal limit for 2015.

Production processes have also been made 19 per cent more environmentally compatible within the space of four years, well on the way to the group’s target of 25 per cent. But, according to Winterkorn, “The second half will be tougher than the first. Every additional gram and per cent we save will be a hard-fought battle.” n