Volkswagen building new factory for flagship Trinity

Volkswagen has announced it will expand its manufacturing capability at its Wolfsburg HQ with the addition of a new factory that will assemble its pioneering new battery-electric Volkswagen Trinity sedan that goes on sale around mid-decade.

According to the car-maker, the building of a dedicated plant for the 2026 Volkswagen Trinity was necessary because it was cheaper than overhauling its existing Wolfsburg factory in Germany to produce EVs at the same efficiency as Tesla.

Once built, Volkswagen says the new plant will be capable of building one Trinity model every 10 hours.

A site has already been identified, but is yet to gain approval from VW's supervisory board.

Once green-lit, the Trinity factory will produce up to 250,000 cars per year, in addition to the 500,000 annual capacity of the main Wolfsburg site.

Tesla's new gigafactory in Grünheide, Germany, just 250km east of VW's Wolfsburg plant, is reportedly in the final stages of construction and will build up to 500,000 cars a year.

Volkswagen has yet to release full details of its Trinity model, but has described it as being a vehicle with "a highly efficient flat-seat concept with an iconic design".

Built on Volkswagen's next-generation SSP (Scalable Systems Platform), the cutting-edge sedan is claimed to be a huge leap forward over existing electric cars.

Claimed to cover up to 1000km between charges, the VW flagship will take between 5-10 minutes for a full charge.

Significantly lighter than current battery-powered vehicles, the image used to tease it reveals the futuristic VW will feature an ultra-low drag coefficient designed to make it slip through the air.

When it’s launched, the Trinity will also debut the German car-maker’s latest autonomous driving systems that, initially, will see it introduced with Level 2-plus self-driving ability.

This will be rapidly upgraded with little more than over-the-air updates to ensure that, by 2030 at the latest, it will be capable of fully autonomous Level 4 driving in geofenced areas, allowing the driver to watch TV, read or answer emails and texts on the move without having to monitor progress.

Full details on the Trinity plant, meanwhile, will be released in December in a move that's hoped to placate the German labour unions which have been angered in recent weeks over VW CEO Herbert Diess' remarks that suggested job cuts were on the way to boost production efficiency.