The Volkswagen plant in Emden is the traditional home of the VW Passat.

The model, which is mostly used as a company car or family car, has been built in the East Frisian port city since 1977 - but now the era is coming to an end.

Sales of the vehicle have been falling for years, which has raised anxious questions about the factory and its around 8,000 permanent employees.

With the start of the factory holidays, production of the Passat sedan has now come to an end.

Coming summer, but no later than 2024, will also be the end of the station wagon variant.

Despite all this, the workforce is confidently looking ahead, because after a long struggle there are new perspectives in Emden.

Reinhard Bingener

Political correspondent for Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Bremen based in Hanover.

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Christian Muessgens

Business correspondent in Hamburg.

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The VW Group has invested around one billion euros in the past two years to convert the plant in the extreme north-west of Germany to e-mobility.

Since the end of May, the production of the mid-range SUV ID 4 has been running in the newly built Hall 20. During a visit by Prime Minister Stephan Weil (SPD), VW recently gave an insight into the new processes, the structure of which the workforce is using with their own East Frisian calm and composure - unimpressed by all the management turbulence in the Wolfsburg VW headquarters.

Work processes have to get used to it first

Emden currently produces around 110 e-cars a day, which is only a small part of the capacity of the production lines that have been set up.

By the end of 2023, when the all-electric Passat successor ID Aero has also been launched alongside the ID 4, full capacity utilization in three-shift operation should then be achieved.

It enables the production of 1,250 electric vehicles per day.

The work processes first have to become familiar, explains plant manager Uwe Schwartz.

The 1,000 employees in the hall will gradually get used to higher speeds.

For Europe's largest car company, the conversion in Emden is a further step in the transformation of its German plants - a project that fell significantly in the era of the outgoing CEO Herbert Diess.

Around 200 employees from Emden spent months at the Zwickau plant to learn from their colleagues there.

After all, the series production of electric cars at the site in south-west Saxony has long been in full swing.

More comfortable working conditions – but fewer staff

Hanover has also made its entry into the new drive technology with the ID Buzz model, and the start in Wolfsburg will come in 2023, when the main plant there takes over part of the production of the ID 3 compact car.

"We are coming from a strategic planning phase, now the focus is on operational implementation," Porsche boss Oliver Blume, who will succeed Diess on September 1, wrote to the VW workforce a few days ago.

That is a statement that applies not only to many problem areas in the group but also to the realignment of the German locations.

In Emden, those employees who have already made the switch from conventional combustion engine production can look forward to more pleasant working conditions.

The new hall is not only surprisingly quiet, but also bright with daylight thanks to modern lighting.

The employees do not have to walk with the conveyor belt either, but drive on a belt parallel to the vehicle and can read production data on flat screens.