Autoeuropa is on track for its second best year ever
Palmela plant revises its production forecast for 2022, increasing from 200,000 to 230,000 vehicles.
Autoeuropa is on track for its second best year ever. The board has improved production forecasts for 2022, counting on an improvement in the semiconductor crisis that has affected the plant over the past 12 months.
The new projections point to a production of around 230,000 vehicles for the entirety of 2022, according to a statement from the plant’s workers’ commission. This new figure is only behind the record of 2019, when 254,600 cars left the Volkswagen group’s unit in Portugal.
At the beginning of the year, Autoeuropa’s board aimed to produce 204,000 units, 53,000 less than the current maximum capacity of the assembly lines. At the time, the Volkswagen group was facing problems in the supply of semiconductors and even went ahead with a redundancy plan, ECO reported at the time.
In recent weeks, however, the scenario of pessimism has been reversed. “We are increasing our production of cars, not only in Germany but throughout China,” said the CEO of the Volkswagen group, Herbert Diess, during a meeting with workers at the end of June. He anticipated fewer problems in the supply of semiconductors in the second half of the year.
In the first half of the year, Autoeuropa produced a total of 113,678 units, 1.2% more than in the same period of 2021. Between January and June this year, production was adjusted due to a lack of semiconductors.
