VW is well aware of the existential threat that emerging Chinese car manufacturers pose to it and has revealed that it will slash the development times of new vehicles from 54 months to 36.
The forthcoming ID.2, previewed through a near production-spec concept in mid-March, is the first of three models that VW is developing on this new 36-month cycle. It will hit the market by the end of 2025, just three years after the first sketches for the car were completed.
While recently speaking with Autocar at the Munich Motor Show, VW technical boss Kai Grunitz noted that Chinese carmakers have shown it is possible to accelerate the development cycle of a car but doing so will require a lot of work. For example, Grunitz says a shorter development cycle will require VW to build new simulation tools, remove certain on-road validations of simulation work, and reduce cold-weather testing for two or three winters to just one.
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“You see with Chinese competitors that it’s doable,” Grunitz said. “We have concrete ideas about how to do this. The risk is that you don’t know where you’ll end up when you start the development process. In Germany, we have clear lines about what we want, especially at Volkswagen, and we don’t want to go into a development process with any risks.”
VW’s technical boss added that Chinese brands find solutions when issues arise during a short development cycle and said that this is what it needs to do in Germany. Grunitz also said that VW is working more closely with suppliers to integrate their technology and ideas as opposed to “wanting to develop everything on our own.”
This new philosophy also means that new generations of vehicles from VW will be much more similar to their predecessors than they are now. In fact, Grunitz said that rather than always starting from scratch, the carmaker will look to retain 70-80% of a model between generations.
