Cars have only been produced in Chattanooga – known for the Choo Choo song of the same name – for a good ten years. Since then, cars like the VW Passat and the two variants of the Atlas have been rolling off the assembly line on the site of a former ammunition factory. The success was manageable and that is exactly what should change now. The American VW Passat is now a thing of the past. It was replaced by the electric ID4, which had previously rolled off the assembly line in Zwickau and Emden and had to be imported into the USA at great expense. That’s enough of that. Volkswagen invested 800,000 million dollars in the still very modern plant on the outskirts of Chattanooga / Tennessee and within a few months made production suitable for electric vehicles. “A total of 4.3 billion dollars has been invested here in recent years. We have created a total of 1,200 new jobs for the ID4,” explains Burkhard Ulrich, who is responsible for human resources at the Chattanooga plant. “A new battery laboratory, battery production and a new body shop for the ID4 were also created.” in the north-east of the city of 180,000 has increased considerably as a result – by 73,000 square meters.
Those responsible at Volkswagen make no secret of the fact that they have big plans for Chattanooga in the coming years. Production of the electric VW ID4 is currently ramping up. With the start of production, a new base model will be introduced to the American market, which costs $37,500 with a 62 kW battery pack, 204 hp and a range of 330 kilometers and is intended to prevail against the strong competition from electric SUVs in the US market. Areas such as logistics and production in particular have grown significantly. 480 new robots alone ensure a production that should lead into the future quickly and as efficiently as possible. The production of the VW ID4 should not stop in the medium term. Other electric models such as the too small ID3, the ID5 or the large ID6 – currently only intended for China – are initially left out; but in the medium term, production of the still young ID Buzz would be just as conceivable as the Audi Q4 E-tron, for which North America is an important market. The new Volkswagen brand Scout, under whose label large SUVs and pick-ups with electric drives will be offered from 2025/2026, should not play a role in Chattanooga. One reason: the vehicles of the current production are on the smaller platform MEQ / MQB, which do not fit the new Scout models.
In a first step, 7,000 electric models are planned per month. But the plant in the US state of Tennessee could be expanded just as easily as the supplier park that delivers the components to the plant “just in time”. In the medium term, more than 100,000 vehicles per year are to be produced here for the North American market. “We’re just beginning to write a new chapter for Volkswagen in America, and it’s a very American story,” says Volkswagen CEO Thomas Schäfer, “when we promised to make Volkswagen EVs accessible to millions of people, we closed We always hire American workers to build these e-vehicles here in Chattanooga.” Local manufacture also means regional components in the American market. The vehicle consists of materials that are assembled in eleven states, starting with steel from Alabama and Ohio Interior parts in Indiana and South Carolina to electronic components in Kentucky and North Carolina The battery pack in the underbody – optionally with 62 or 82 kWh – is delivered by SK Innovation in the neighboring state of Georgia.
But not only the combustion SUV Atlas and the electric ID4 are produced in Chattanooga, but also developed. Wolfgang Maluche heads the battery laboratory, which is one of the most modern within the Volkswagen Group and in the entire USA. For this alone, 22 million dollars were spent. “We stress the batteries here seven days a week – around the clock,” says Wolfgang Maluche. “We can drive 9,000 kilometers in one week on the test stand.” future battery packs. Here, racetracks, everyday operations or the in-house remaining route in Ehra-Lessin are traced with millimeter precision – with a maximum of 16 times the gravitational acceleration in a maximum temperature window.
In other climatic chambers, the battery packs are cooled down from plus 70 to minus 40 degrees Celsius within 15 seconds, immersed in a gigantic water basin with a volume of 8,000 liters or exposed to dangerous micro-dust – the dust grains are just 1/70th the size of a human hair. You don’t want any surprises with future battery packs. “So that everything runs faster, we test ourselves and do not pass the tests on to other laboratories,” says Maluche. Within a few days, the results come together that the technicians in Chattanooga or Wolfsburg would otherwise have to wait three to four weeks for. Volkswagen wants to score and win new customers as an electric brand. 65 percent of ID4 customers are driving an electric car for the first time and many of them are getting into a Volkswagen for the first time.
Incidentally, the ID4 is not the first Volkswagen produced on the American continent. As early as 1978 there were five VW Bulli and five VW station wagons that were used jointly by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) for test purposes. The 24 twelve-volt batteries of the eight-seater VW bus were enough for a distance of almost 75 kilometers – with a maximum speed of 80. Its weight: almost 2.1 tons and thus at the level of the current VW ID4.
