{
  "id": 2075003,
  "title": "Autobauer: Kooperation mit Ford wird für Volkswagen zum Bulli-Bumerang",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/20/autobauer-kooperation-mit-ford-wird-fur-volkswagen-zum-bulli-bumerang",
  "topic": "business",
  "section": "Business",
  "published": "2026-08-20T05:05:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Handelsblatt",
    "slug": "handelsblatt",
    "url": "https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/autobauer-kooperation-mit-ford-wird-fuer-vw-zum-bulli-bumerang-01/100244960.html"
  },
  "original_language": "de",
  "account": "Volkswagen CEO Oliver Blume is touring VW's factories in the coming week to explain the future of the company's German sites. One particularly sensitive case has been left to his finance chief, Arno Antlitz: Hannover. It is in Hannover where an earlier decision by Blume's predecessor to cooperate with Ford on building light-duty vehicles has turned into a major problem for the 12,000 employees at the site. This cooperation is now the subject of internal presentations by VW's board, which highlight Hannover as a particularly expensive location. The plant in Lower Saxony's capital city is considered an outlier, with factory costs sometimes reaching five-figure euros per vehicle, compared to a new benchmark of 3,000 euros for Europe. The parent company Volkswagen declined to comment on the scale of the issue. The problem in Hannover stems from the fact that the site lacks volume. In 2017, more than 200,000 light-duty vehicles rolled off the line, but by 2025, that number had dropped to around 113,500. Blume emphasizes that the current crisis is \"not a Volkswagen crisis, it's an industrial crisis.\" In fact, global events such as discounts in China, tariffs in the US, weak demand for electric cars, and geopolitical tensions are affecting the industry as a whole. However, a significant portion of the misfortune in Hannover is homegrown. The story takes us back to July 2019 in New York, where then-VW CEO Herbert Diess met with then-Ford CEO Jim Hackett. Diess, seated in a bland conference room in a mid-range hotel in Manhattan, called Hackett his new \"friend.\" The two powerful automakers decided on several far-reaching cooperations, including one on developing light-duty vehicles, which has been in place for decades and affects the Hannover plant. Despite the deal's clear advantage for Volkswagen in terms of shared development costs and consolidated volumes, it also had a critical downside for Hannover: the main volume generator for the plant, the current generation of the VW Transporter (T7), is now built at Ford in Turkey, not in Hannover. The T7 is technologically similar to the Transit Custom and its sibling model Tourneo Custom, with platforms, engines, and key drivetrain components supplied by Ford. With the classic transporter no longer being produced in Hannover, the site now relies primarily on the electric ID.Buzz and higher-priced models Multivan and California, both based on VW technology. While Diess believed this was manageable at the time, the loss of the traditional transporter left Hannover with a significant burden. The ID.Buzz, intended as a major future project, has been delayed and eventually abandoned due to software issues, delays in the new vehicle architecture, and changed production plans across the group. Today, when managers mention the \"Landjet\" project, they nod politely. The ID.Buzz still hasn't reached the production volumes VW once anticipated. Sales in the US, in particular, remain below expectations, with only over 60,000 electric Buses produced in Hannover in 2025, which is considered significantly less than the plant originally planned. The Hannover plant is now stuck in a \"fix cost trap\": the factory is designed for significantly higher production volumes but is producing far fewer vehicles. \"We lack a product,\" says a senior decision-maker about the situation at the site. The criticism extends to the Hannover cooperation with Ford, which the current transporter is essentially a Ford model, not a VW one. Ford, benefiting from this arrangement, now sells nearly 200,000 Transporters compared to VW's roughly 120,000.",
  "summary": "Mit Ford wollte VW Milliarden sparen und Hannover zugleich in die elektrische Zukunft führen. Doch die Rechnung ging nicht auf. Nun kämpft das traditionsreiche Bulli-Werk um seine Zukunft.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 2,
    "also_reported_by": [
      {
        "outlet": "Handelsblatt",
        "title": "Autobauer: Kooperation mit Ford wird für Volkswagen zum Bulli-Bumerang",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/19/autobauer-kooperation-mit-ford-wird-fur-volkswagen-zum-bulli-bumerang",
        "published": "2026-08-19T05:07:00.000Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}