The End of an Era: Will Tesla and Google Kill the German Car?

History will be written on Nov. 4 at the VW plant in Zwickau, Germany. Anyone lucky enough to recently visit the factory, which is sealed behind blue rolling doors, entered into a secret world, a hidden industrial laboratory to which only a few Volkswagen employees have access. In its "ghost run," or test operation, orange-colored robots run by highly complex programs and aided by humans and machines assembled eight electric model-ID.3 Serial production is now set to begin on Nov. 4. Depending on how you see it, this marks either the beginning or the end of an era. In the future, 1,500 electric Volkswagen cars are to roll off the assembly line at the plant in the eastern state of Saxony every day, a total of 330,000 vehicles every year, in what the company describes as the "largest and most efficient electric car factory in Europe." The designers of the new compact, C-class ID.3 want to make it a 21st century icon, just as the VW Beetle and VW Golf were in their heydays. That's advertising language, of course, but even from a neutral perspective, it is difficult to overestimate the significance of what is happening: In Zwickau, Volkswagen is ringing the death knell for the combustion engine.