In total, the production facility costs of the Volkswagen brand amount to around 10 billion euros. Between 2019 to 2023, production is contributing two billion euros to the financial result by reducing personnel costs, procurement incidentals and overhead. In 2019, around 500 million euros will be contributed.

The company is striving to increase productivity across all sites by 30 percent by 2025. Of particular importance to Volkswagen is to bring production facilities with very different conditions all over the world to common production standards. A centralized process ensures that ideas and improvements in one location are quickly and bindingly transferred to other plants. At present, 220 such measures are being implemented. These range from the globally standardized automated surface inspection in the paint shop to the reduced complexity of bodywork press tools to modular special containers that can be used independent of the model.

Enforcing common standards, the new digital production platform developed with Amazon Web Services and Siemens will also help standardize the different IT systems of the individual plants. For example, maintenance requirements of production machinery can be uniformly controlled as part of predictive maintenance. Board member for production Dr. Tostmann explained: "In a large company like Volkswagen, we have to use economies of scale much more consistently. Improvements must be implemented quickly everywhere, and new systems must be developed only once."

On top, the production group at Volkswagen has set itself a comprehensive decarbonization goal. As an intermediate step, the CO2 emissions of the plants are to be reduced by 50 percent by 2025 compared to 2015. The figures from 2015 to the first half of 2019 demonstrate that the company is well on track. CO2 emissions per vehicle produced were reduced by 22 percent.