In VW's EV plant in eastern Germany, gas engines are now verboten

The massive, worldwide transition to electric-powered vehicles is about more than changes in mechanical parts, or about the societal effect of abandoning the century-old habit of finding and burning gasoline.

It’s also about the massive realignment of the factories that will create the electric cars, trucks and SUVs in the next decade.

To explain and exemplify these momentous, often wrenching shifts, the New York Times has chosen to visit Zwickau, a modest town in the former East Germany, the birthplace of Audi, and now the site of a sprawling Volkswagen factory converted to build EVs after years of making gas-powered Golfs.

In the case of Zwickau, the paper dispatched veteran reporter Jack Ewing to describe how the conversion, announced six years ago, would affect the more than 10,000 people who worked for Volkswagen and “tens of thousands more for suppliers.”

Because EVs use fewer, and less complicated, parts than ICE (internal combustion engine) cars, predictions were that the assemblies would require far few workers and lead to mass unemployment.

Ewing found however, that “employment hasn’t fallen off a cliff, and suppliers of combustion vehicle parts haven’t been forced into bankruptcy en masse. Its experience offers some hopeful lessons for other places that depend on the auto industry. Yet people in Zwickau are still uneasy.”

Buying habits, especially in Europe, can be unpredictable; the best selling EV on the continent is aTesla Model Y. Last year, the story says, Volkswagen sold fewer than half as many of its equivalent SUV, the ID.4, according to Schmidt Automotive Research. Disappointing sales “have prompted Volkswagen to cut a shift on one of its two assembly lines in Zwickau, where the company makes the ID.4, the ID.5, two Audi models and two small electric cars. The decision illustrated the downside of going all-in on electric vehicles.”

The future prognosis — a positive one, as you’d expect to hear from VW — is that sales will improve as new models are introduced. “We are aware of our current challenges and are tackling them rigorously,” Oliver Blume, the Volkswagen chief executive, said last month in a statement.

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