Audi is a maker of higher-end vehicles and part of the Volkswagen group. As part of my Grand Tour of German Automotive, I visited their plants in Ingolstadt and Neckarsulm. This first blog post looks at their main plant in Ingolstadt. My next blog post looks at the second plant in Neckarsulm.
In my previous post I looked at Porsche and the Porsche plants in Zuffenhausen near Stuttgart and the plant in Leipzig. In this post I will go deeper and look at three final assembly lines in these two plants. In Zuffenhausen I visited two final assembly lines, the 911 and 718, as well as the fully electric Taycan assembly line. In Leipzig, they have only one assembly line where they produce the Panamera and the Macan. Let’s go through them from the oldest (forty-year-old line for the 911 Zuffenhausen) to the intermediate (twenty-year-old line in Leipzig) to the latest (five-year old line for the Taycan in Zuffenhausen). Let’s go!
Porsche is part of the Volkswagen group. Yet, this luxury sports car maker maintained its own style and the shop floor feels (and performs) different from the Volkswagen group. In this blog post, I will look deeper into the main plant in Zuffenhausen and the second manufacturing location in Germany, Leipzig. The next blog post looks in detail at three Porsche assembly lines, from the oldest to the newest. The oldest is the forty-year-old 911 & 718 Cayman line in Zuffenhausen; then the twenty-year-old line for the Panamera and Macan in Leipzig; and finally the line for the electric Taycan in Zuffenhausen from 2020.
The last plant of my visits to Mercedes-Benz as part of my Grand Tour of German Automotive, was not a car plant, but the world’s largest heavy-duty truck plant, in Wörth (albeit it is technically a separate company, not Mercedes-Benz but Daimler Truck). Seeing three parallel heavy-duty truck assembly lines popping out a truck every minute is quite impressive. And it is one of the few instances where they actually use an Exoskeleton for work rather than merely to impress others. Read on!
The third and last Mercedes-Benz (also known as Daimler) is its newest and comparatively smallest plant, in Rastatt. I have been to Rastatt many times, but this blog post is based on public information and on information from the guided tour. It is in my view the best-performing plant of Mercedes-Benz, and among the top automotive plants in Germany (albeit behind BMW and Porsche). Read on…
The second plant of Mercedes-Benz (also known as Daimler) in my Grand Tour of German Automotive was their plant in Bremen. This was also their second final assembly plant. It produces a few cars more than Sindelfingen, and hence claims to be the largest Mercedes-Benz plant by the number of cars. It was also a good and interesting visit. Keep on reading…
My Grand Tour of German Automotive continues now with plants from Mercedes-Benz (also known as Daimler). I visited a total of four plants from Mercedes-Benz, including all three automotive final assembly plants Sindelfingen, Bremen, and Rastatt. I also had a tour at their quite good Daimler truck plant in Wörth, the largest heavy-duty truck plant in the world.
My first tour was in Sindelfingen. I had spent quite a few months in Sindelfingen in the past, but this was long ago, and what I learned is also covered by confidentiality. Hence, for this series I relied on public plant tours combined with public knowledge.
The last plant of BMW I visited in Germany was in Spandau, Berlin. This was different from BMW Munich and Leipzig. For one, it makes motorbikes, not cars. But its performance was also not as stellar as the best of (German) benchmark plants Leipzig and Munich. But despite some issues, it still performed on an equal level with German car plants. Let’s dig deeper.