German automaker Volkswagen's CEO, Herbert Diess, said 30,000 jobs could be laid off if the company remains slow in its electric vehicle (EV) transformation.
Diess stated that the competition created by companies such as Tesla, which has just entered the German vehicle market, forced Volkswagen to increase its transformation speed.
While the US electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla plans to produce 500,000 vehicles per year with its 12 thousand employees in Germany, Volkswagen plans to produce only 700 thousand vehicles with its 25 thousand employees at its Wolfsburg factory.
Volkswagen's spokesperson confirmed Diess' statements that heated competition in the electric vehicle market is forcing the company to make a rapid transformation, but denied that calculations were made on the number of layoffs during this process.
"Tesla is setting new standards for efficiency and scale at Grunheide," said company spokesman Michael Manske, referring to Tesla's factory under construction near Berlin. When Tesla operates at full capacity at its factory in Berlin, it will be able to produce between 5,000 and 10,000 vehicles per week. This figure is more than double the number of battery electric vehicles Germany will produce in 2020.
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