The multinational has announced that in 2024 it will produce 250,000 cars, 150,000 in 2025 and 200,000 in 2026, including the electric car. This means that between 2,000 and 2,300 jobs at the Landaben plant in Pamplona. There are currently about 4,800 workers on the plant.

Volkswagen’s management (VW) has explained that this transition is due to the need to adapt the plant to make the electric car and to the Euro 7 standard that will enter into force in the European Union in 2025 to reduce gas emissions from cars, which will require major changes in combustion engines.

Workers concerned

By 2026, the management announced that it plans to produce 200,000 cars. This data is far from the 288,000 of 2022 or the 296,000 achieved in 2016 and further from the 353,353 cars of 2011, record 40 years.

The car that has been historically made has been a brand of poles, but also in recent years T-Cross and Taigo, both much more expensive than the Pole. In 2021, 141,379 T-Cross, 70,899 Poles and 8,844 Taigo were made. In 2024 the Polo would fall and in 2026 they would start with two electric cars, one from Skoda and one from the VW brand.

While it is true that after the pandemic the production data for cars fell sharply and gradually rose, if we look at the 2011 record and the forecasts for 2026, it is easy to see that they are not only pandemic factors, but also many more, as demonstrated by the fall in production in 2021. In that year the semi-conductor crisis, the energy crisis and the widespread drop in sales brought cars into production. The increase in electricity is being very important in the last three or four years, but it is still far from gasoline engines. For example, 61.4% of cars sold in the South in 2019 were gasoline and 34.6% in 2021 were electric (eye, the latter five times more than in 2018).

Sales decrease

In 2021, car sales in Europe have been the worst of the last three decades. In 2019, 14.9 million cars were built in Europe and in 2022 they were reduced to 10.7 million. 2022 has been the worst in the last nine years in the Spanish state. In 2022, a million cars were registered in the State, 7.3% less than in 2021, and 35.3% less than in 2019. All these data come from the CCOO report on the automotive sector in March.

Forecasts are not higher for the future. And yet today, car manufacturers are making a lot of money, because they increase their profitability. They make less cars, but those who do sell are much more expensive. And if they do less cars, they are also expected to need fewer workers in the near future.

In today’s world it is very difficult to make forecasts in the world of the economy, but the VW believes that by 2027 there will be 300,000 cars. Given the development of sales, the data does not seem very credible. Moreover, it is to be assumed that the decline in production over the next two years will significantly affect the small automotive industry in Navarra, and if the price adjustment is already tightening, many of them could disappear within that period. This belief is also based on data, as in 2022 the Spanish automotive industry suffered a loss of 5,700 jobs.