INSIDE VW'S EV COMEBACK

First Tesla outmaneuvered Volkswagen. Now Chinese EVs are challenging VW's dominance. The world's largest automaker was late to the EV revolution, but it's racing to catch up by reaching into its deep pockets and leveraging its massive scale.

- Vivienne Walt

ABOUT 180 MILES south of Berlin sits the small town of Zwickau, home to a sprawling Volkswagen factory—and a perfect encapsulation of the past century’s epic history. Generations of German autoworkers have built cars in the area, since the dawn of the combustion engine in the early 1900s, through the Nazi regime, the devastating Second World War, and decades of Cold War isolation from the West, when Zwickau’s auto production was a prized Communist asset in the heart of East Germany.

But step inside the Zwickau factory now and the clanging noise of robots and steel car parts is the soundtrack of a new epic drama—one that will define the $4 trillion global auto industry for decades to come: the EV revolution. Here in Volkswagen’s first all-electric car factory, the company is live-testing the strategy for its long-term growth, in which EVs will become an ever bigger part of the world’s auto market.

The question in this new battle is not whether Volkswagen can survive the world’s steady shift from the combustion engine vehicles that it began making 87 years ago; its endurance seems assured. Last year it earned a whopping $348 billion in revenues and delivered 9.24 million vehicles. On the 2024 Fortune Global 500 list, the group—which comprises the Volkswagen brand, Audi, Porsche, SEAT, and several others—is the world’s biggest carmaker and Europe’s biggest company. Globally, it’s the 11th largest corporation by revenue.