About 180 miles south of Berlin sits the small town of Zwickau, home to a sprawling Volkswagen factory—and a perfect encapsulation of the past century’s epic history. Generations of German autoworkers have built cars in the area, since the dawn of the combustion engine in the early 1900s, through the Nazi regime, the devastating Second World War, and decades of Cold War isolation from the West, when Zwickau’s auto production was a prized Communist asset in the heart of East Germany.
But step inside the Zwickau factory now and the clanging noise of robots and steel car parts is the soundtrack of a new epic drama—one that will define the $4 trillion global auto industry for decades to come: the EV revolution. Here in Volkswagen’s first all-electric car factory, the company is live-testing the strategy for its long-term growth, in which EVs will become an ever bigger part of the world’s auto market.
