Volkswagen cuts costs: MEB+ and ID.Roc platforms at risk

The Group plans to invest €20 billion less. This will be at the expense of advanced architecture and the compact electric SUV.

By: Francesco Barontini

Sep 25, 2024 at 4:01am ET

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These are not easy times for Volkswagen. Faced with the need to cut costs, the company is planning to reduce investment by around €20 billion. Over the next five years, the idea is to reduce it from €180 billion to €160 billion.

This is according to the German magazine Manager Magazin, which has also drawn up a list of areas that will receive fewer resources and will therefore be working with the handbrake pulled.

MEB+ is one of the illustrious victims

In anticipation of the group's new generation of electric vehicles, those that will emerge from the Trinity project and the SSP platform, Volkswagen has planned to evolve the current MEB platform and take it to a more technologically advanced stage, called MEB+.

The MEB platform+ was announced to arrive in 2026, bringing a number of improvements in terms of efficiency, performance and load speed. However, given the cuts envisaged by senior management, the MEB+ might not arrive or might arrive late. In the first case, we would go straight from the MEB to the SSP, which is expected in 2028; in the second case, however, the SSP would also be delayed (it was originally scheduled to arrive in 2025).

The MEB platform will be used by all brands

Longer range and ultra-fast charging

Models at risk

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Volkswagen is currently considering closing a number of German plants and laying off a considerable number of employees. While there was previously talk of 15,000 redundancies, there are now numerous reports of a double figure of 30,000. The company is not confirming these figures, and is content to explain that it "needs to reduce costs at its German sites".

But cost-cutting also involves consolidating the range. The compact electric SUV that is due to be produced at the historic Wolfsburg plant is likely to be one of the casualties of this cost-cutting exercise. This model, called the ID.Roc, since the name has been registered, was first mooted in the spring. It would be a kind of ID.4 on a smaller scale, with the difference that it would not adopt the styling of the ID family, but that of the company's combustion-powered models, as shown by the ID.2 All.