Just the other day, the VW Group’s latest active manufacturing facility rolled its very first car off the line. The Volkswagen Changsha plant is expected to boost the German automaker’s production capacity in the Asian market by roughly 300,000 units per annum.
The Global Times reports that on the 24th of May, a brand new Lavida sedan arrived off the Volkswagen Changsha assembly line. That car will be the plant’s sole offering for the moment, until production expands to include the Touran compact MPV, and a Skoda A0 platform-based SUV.
Just about every major global automaker is taking a stab at cashing in on the Chinese auto market, and the VW Group is no exception. Last year, Volkswagen sold an astounding 3.68 million vehicles in China – more than any other automaker. The market for passenger cars in the country is starting to cool, suggesting that the days of double-digit segment growth may be limited. Still, ” it will still grow much faster than any other area in the world,” states VW China CEO Jochem Heizmann.
Heizmann projects a growth rate between 5 and 8 percent over the next 5 years.
Meanwhile, the SUV segment is still growing strong in the Chinese market, by somewhere around 40 percent, according to the Global Times. Heizmann suggested that Volkswagen is cognizant of the segment’s popularity, saying that the automaker will bring out several new SUV models in China in the near future.
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