VW ends Phaeton production

Production of Volkswagen’s loss-making Phaeton limousine fizzled out almost anonymously on Friday.

Launched as a flagship car to take Volkswagen into a semi-premium future and built at a high-cost, custom-made flagship plant in Dresden, Germany, the Phaeton has no immediate replacement atop the Volkswagen line-up.

It’s hard to say if the Dresden plant’s 500 employees will notice the absence of Phaetons coming up the production line for the first time since 2002, so few of them have they seen in the last half a decade, with production reportedly slowing to less than eight cars a day.

A hundred workers will remain on hand in Dresden, the plant dubbed the 'Crystal Palace' by the English or the 'Transparent Factory' by Volkswagen’s official spokesmen, as it moves from an actual car plant to become a showcase for electromobility and digitalisation. The rest will be moved to Volkswagen’s nearby Zwickau plant.

The three Volkswagen spokesmen we talked to would not acknowledge the irony in a plant designed to demonstrate Volkswagen’s future to the world closing to be turned into a showcase to demonstrate Volkswagen’s (new) future to the world.

The plant will officially close on March 29, to be reopened 10 days later as a visitor’s centre for electrified driving.

“Our D-Class employees in Zwickau and Dresden have demonstrated outstanding manufacturing expertise with the Phaeton over the past 14 years,” Volkswagen Sachsen board member Professor Siegfried Fiebig said.

“This know-how is also well known and highly valued at other facilities and by the Volkswagen Brand and the Group.”

Works Council Chairman Thomas Aehlig remained hopeful the plant would return to its original purpose at some point, though Volkswagen’s Dieselgate-enforced belt-tightening officially killed off a replacement for the Phaeton.

“The production of the highest-quality vehicles should be resumed here under the eyes of customers and visitors in the near future,” he said.

“Until then, the deployment of our colleagues to other locations will call for considerable flexibility.”

There has been speculation that the Phaeton badge, and the Dresden plant, will be reborn with a standard-bearing all-electric, semi-autonomous Volkswagen limousine, as hinted at by Volkswagen Group CEO Matthias Müller not long after he took the role in September last year.

The idea was to show a disenchanted public that the discredited brand had a clear path out of its emissions-cheating scandal and towards an indisputably cleaner future.

However, Volkswagen back-flipped on that in December as the potential costs of the scandal mounted, even though it had already developed the scalable battery-electric car architecture. That platform will now see service at Audi and Bentley, while Porsche’s Mission E production car will use its own stand-alone battery-electric architecture.

Instead, Volkswagen has hinted that another car with more conventional technology may sit above the Passat in its four-door sedan hierarchy. Officially, the Phideon (note the cap-tip to the Phaeton’s name) will be built in China for China, but by launching it in Geneva this month, Volkswagen gave the rest of the world’s potential buyers the chance to show some interest in the sleek-looking limousine.

There’s no reason why it couldn’t replace the (then) high-tech Phaeton. It is the first Volkswagen-branded model to use the high-tech MLB architecture, with its longitudinal engine layout, from Audi’s all-new A4 and Q7.

Insiders at Volkswagen have implied that selling the Phideon outside China would let it save the Phaeton badge for its all-electric, semi-autonomous flagship in 2018.

The German-developed, all-wheel drive Phideon will begin selling in China in the third quarter of this year, arriving with a 220kW version of the Volkswagen Group’s 3.0-litre V6 turbocharged engine, which also delivers 440Nm of torque.

The four- or five-seater is pre-engineered with plenty of semi-autonomous driving technology, including active cruise control, hands-off steering and self-parking, and a plug-in hybrid will launch next year.

The 5.05-metre Phideon is also 1.87 metres wide and 1.48 metres high, with a wheelbase of more than three metres, and it borrows Bentley’s active air suspension system.