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FORTUNE.COM // SEPTEMBER 2019
ies—each nearly as big as two coffins side by
side—that have a nagging propensity to ignite.
What’s happening here in Shanghai is no
incremental industrial tweak. It’s Volkswagen
AG’s bet-the-corporation bid for supremacy in
the electric-car age. “Volkswagen” translates
as “the people’s car,” and for much of the eight
decades of VW’s existence, the people were un-
derstood to be European or American and the
cars to run on petroleum. But now VW’s biggest
market is China, and the company, squeezed
by new environmental mandates, has resolved
to remake itself largely as a producer of electric
vehicles, or EVs. Which makes this new Shang-
hai plant the forward base in the fight of VW’s
life. When it starts producing electric vehicles
next year, it will be VW’s “most modern fac-
tory worldwide,” says Fred Schulze, who heads
production in Shanghai for VW’s joint venture
in China with SAIC Motor, the Shanghai-
based firm that is China’s biggest state-owned
automaker. Schulze, a VW veteran, previ-
ously oversaw production of sport-utility and
crossover vehicles from VW’s Audi unit—mostly
gas-guzzlers such as the Q7 and Q8 but also the
electric E-tron. From now on, Schulze says of
VW, “our growth should be from EV cars.”
All across the global economy, titans of
the fossil-fuel era are scrambling to adapt
to an existential shift: the soaring economicTaxi drivers wait for
their electric cars to
power up at a charging
station in Shenzhen.
All but 100 of the
city’s 21,000 taxis are
electric vehicles from
Shenzhen-based EV
maker BYD.