Europe's biggest carmaker, headquartered in Wolfsburg, Germany. The VW Group includes Audi, Seat, Skoda and Porsche.
In 2024 VW sold 5.2m VW-branded vehicles, slightly fewer than the year before. The VW Group as a whole sold 9m. Net profit dropped by nearly a third, as demand from China slumped while a bloated workforce kept costs high.
A protracted and bitter battle with union leaders over job cuts and factory closures ended in December 2024 with an agreement to keep all ten of VW's German plants open but to shed 35,000 jobs by 2030—around a quarter of the company's domestic workforce—through retirement and other voluntary attrition.
VW said that 70% of its European sales would be electric by 2030, later increasing this to 80%. But only around one in five cars sold in Europe in 2025 will be purely battery-powered, far from the trajectory needed. On December 16th 2025 the EU dropped an earlier ban on the sale of petrol cars from 2035, opting instead to require a 90% cut in emissions from new cars by that date; a quarter of cars sold in 2035 could still include some form of fossil-fuel power.
Four-fifths of the cars VW sold in America in 2024 were produced outside the country, making the company particularly exposed to tariffs on imported vehicles.
At the Shanghai auto show in April 2025 VW announced it would launch 11 models exclusively for China, including six electric vehicles and two plug-in hybrids. It has set itself a target of selling 4m cars in China annually by 2030, up from 2.9m in 2024—a difficult task, given that its Chinese sales shrank by nearly 10% in 2024.
VW has partnered with Horizon Robotics, a Beijing-based company, to develop self-driving systems and chips, part of a broader trend among Western carmakers choosing to work with nimble Chinese suppliers and software firms to compete on the mainland. Mercedes-Benz has similarly partnered with Momenta.
In 2023 VW bought roughly 5% of Xpeng, a Chinese carmaker, for $700m, with which it is co-developing two EV models. An agreement between the two allowed VW engineers to temporarily move to Xpeng's headquarters in Guangzhou to learn how it makes cars. VW also bought reams of code from the company.
VW has built a fully owned innovation centre in Hefei employing more than 3,000 engineers, most of them Chinese. The facility can make many decisions without approval from headquarters in Germany—helping reduce the time to develop a new EV by about 30%. VW is planning to release 30 new mass-market EV models in China over five years (from late 2025), with the first due in early 2026, featuring advanced self-driving capabilities and large display panels.
Foreign carmakers' share of the Chinese market fell from 62% in 2020 to 35% in 2024. VW sold only around 200,000 EVs in China in 2024. Oliver Blume, VW's chief executive, says designing cars in Europe for the world has "had its day"; the carmaker is now engineering vehicles at its Hefei R&D facility 30% faster than in Europe, some of which will be sold in overseas markets. VW is launching 20 new models in China in 2026 alone.
VW also produces its own currywurst—a German sausage with spicy tomato sauce—sold in corporate canteens, the Wolfsburg football stadium and supermarkets. In 2024 the company sold 8.5m sausages (around 6m currywurst and 2m frankfurters), comfortably outnumbering VW-branded vehicle sales. In 2021 a plan to make the Wolfsburg canteen vegetarian provoked a rebellion; Gerhard Schroeder, a former chancellor, declared the currywurst the "power bar" of the factory worker. By 2023 the sausage was back on the menu.
Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.