Volkswagen will concentrate platforms, architectures and software into two hemispheres

Volkswagen Group’s supervisory board unanimously approved Future Plan 2030 on September 3, and the plan commits the group to developing for two halves of the world rather than one. The release said the group “is systematically tailoring its platforms, electronic architectures, driver assistance systems and software to the needs of both the Western and Eastern hemispheres.”

That sentence sat inside a section on cutting complexity. By 2035, the group said, it would streamline its model portfolio by around 50 percent and reduce its offering complexity by around 75 percent, with higher volumes per model and fewer variants.

The Future Plan page linked from the release put the direction more plainly. It describes platforms, electronic architectures and software landscapes as fields that “will each be harmonized and concentrated to meet the requirements of the western and eastern hemispheres respectively,” with the objective of eliminating technological parallel structures. The division therefore runs between two consolidated sets rather than across a growing number of them.

Volkswagen has been building separately for China for some time. It began production of the first vehicle on its China Electronic Architecture in January, describing it as developed, tested and produced entirely in China, and has said a second generation will follow in 2027.

The wider plan set a target of 135 billion euros for capital expenditure and research and development across 2027 to 2031, an operating margin of nine percent by 2030, and a workforce adjustment of approximately 50,000 positions.

An ad hoc disclosure issued the same evening carried no figures and said detailed information would follow, so the press release was the fuller record. It named no software organization, no platform generation and no date, and mentioned software once.