Today was the first of several factory tours we have booked for this holiday at the Volkswagen Wolfsburg plant. Wolfsburg is about 269km from Berlin, an easy train ride of 1-1.5 hours. We started at the Volkswagen Autostadt. This is a complex of buildings, seperate from the factory with a museum, pavilions for each of the VW associated brands, restaurants, gardens and the car towers where cars are stored for the people who are picking up from Wolfsburg. We started at the museum which traced various important milestones in car design. Following up with the Skoda and Audi pavilions before going to the Tachometer for lunch.

After lunch we had booked a tour of the car towers but when we arrived we found out it had been postponed which wasn’t going to work with our factory tout so we had to be content with just having a look at the towers.

Soon it was time for the main reason for our visit to Wolfsburg, the factory tour. We crossed back across the river and took the underground tunnel to gate 17 with the factory workers who were just changing shifts. The Volkswagen factory at Wolfsburg is the largest automotive factory in Europe with 60,000 employees and more than 6.5 square kilometres. The factory occupies several listed buildings on the site,

We travelled in a “golf train” around the factory seeing most parts of the production apart from the spraying. It was surprisingly interesting, even for me. We saw the massive presses that cut and shape the body, the robots assembling the pieces together and the parts of the assembly line that were still completed by hand. We even saw the cars coming off the production line … one comes off every 14s. Sorry, no photos allowed once on factory grounds.