Word: wolfsburger
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Last week, more than 19 million Beetles later, workers at the Volkswagen museum in Wolfsburg were busy enshrining the last Bug to be produced in West Germany. Some 300,000 Beetles a year will still be made in Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, mostly for local use. And the familiar shape will not fade very soon elsewhere. The company claims that well over half of the Beetles built are still on the roads around the world, including nearly 4 million...
...casualties was Rudolf Leiding, 60, who resigned as president last month. The company gave poor health as the reason, but by all appearances, Leiding's main problems were bad luck in sales and some brusque boardroom politics. When he took over the top job at Volkswagen's Wolfsburg headquarters in 1971, Leiding recognized that the basic Beetle, essentially a 1937 design, was steadily losing consumer appeal, and he moved quickly to develop new models to replace it. Unfortunately, the oil crisis and the subsequent economic slowdown hit just as Leiding was rolling out his new cars. Caught...
...Derrick L. Brewster, vice president of Chicago's Inland Steel, forecasts that steel imports will fall 20% this year, to about 14 million tons. Result: about 100,000 cars bought by Americans this year will be assembled by workers in Los Angeles or Flint, Mich., rather than in Wolfsburg or Yokohama, and the steel going into those cars will be rolled at mills in Gary, Ind., or Braddock, Pa., instead of Aachen or Kitakyushu...
...idea can be profitably applied even to auto plants or steel mills. The cost would be high, since the assembly line would have to be redesigned to give each worker at least some responsibility for assembling an entire component rather than tightening a single bolt. In Volkswagen's Wolfsburg plant, for instance, groups of workers put together large components. That allows for more human contact and freedom on the line, relieves the boredom and permits a worker to take several minutes off from time to time. Comparisons with Detroit's plants are not wholly valid because Volkswagens are much simpler...
...Wolfsburg, east of Hannover, 6,000 Italians make up one-fourth of the work force at the giant Volkswagen plant. They live in spartan company-owned rooms (rent: $10 a month) in a complex known as "the Italian village," grumble about the unfriendliness of German girls and at Christmas time, laden with gifts, pile aboard special trains for the annual visit home...