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Volkswagen has ended its Gigacasting production project for cost reasons and will not build the large-casting centre planned at its Wolfsburg home plant. Ground-breaking for the new casting hall was due next week.
The decision was taken at the latest meeting of the Group Board of Management and was first made public on 11 November 2026 by the works council in a special edition of its staff paper, Mitbestimmen. A company spokesperson then confirmed it: "Against the background of the company's tense economic situation, all investments are currently under review.
This goes hand in hand with the decision not to build the planned large-casting centre at the Wolfsburg site. Volkswagen stresses that development of its next electric platform, the Scalable Systems Platform (SSP), continues as planned, and that it still aims to make production of the next vehicle generation "simpler, more efficient and more competitive" in all its plants.
Credit: Martin Lagler
Gamechanger was the package of new production methods, large castings of body parts among them, that a cross-departmental team had been working on for years and that was meant to debut in Wolfsburg before spreading to the rest of the group. According to the works council, the SSP models for Wolfsburg, an electric Golf and an electric model in the T-Roc segment, will still come, but "apparently mainly with the existing, conventional methods" rather than the new processes. Handelsblatt reports, citing people familiar with the matter, that the cut is also linked to Audi's planned US plant in Georgia.
Works council chief Daniela Cavallo calls the move "a flagrant breach of our agreement from December 2024" and says the board is abandoning its own claim to technology leadership in manufacturing: "Only short-term profit thinking is in the foreground now." As leverage, she says the combustion Golf will not leave Wolfsburg for Mexico until the workforce gets full transparency on staffing, volumes and timing.
That December 2024 agreement had settled a dispute over plant utilisation: Wolfsburg would get the new production methods, including large castings, for the electric Golf and T-Roc, while the combustion Golf would move to Mexico. By then the group had already built up casting know-how at its Kassel foundry, Europe's largest die-casting operation, which opened a Large Castings Competence Centre in February 2024. Its management argued at the time that presses above 4,000 tonnes only make sense right next to vehicle assembly.
Credit: Volkswagen
At IAA Mobility in September 2025, Volkswagen showed its first large-casting application, a battery-tray frame for the ID. Polo, Cupra Raval, Škoda Epiq and ID. Cross. Cast on a 4,400-tonne machine (4,800 ton in series), it replaces 123 parts, cuts weight by 10% and costs by 15%. Front and rear underbody castings were still undecided, although new facilities with 8,400-tonne machines were floated. This summer that question seemed settled when Bühler received an order for around 16 machines of 9,200 tonnes for front and rear underbody castings on the next-generation platform.
Credit: Volkswagen
The squeeze then reached the products. At the end of October Volkswagen paused development of the next Golf, the ID. Golf, with brand chief Thomas Schäfer saying "we simply cannot afford this work right now". Two weeks later the casting hall followed.
None of the reports says what happens to the Bühler machines. The Wolfsburg hall was where the group's new large-casting methods were supposed to start. With that hall cancelled and the first SSP cars, according to the works council, built mainly with conventional methods, no source says where large castings for the next platform will now be made. Machine-by-machine status in The Gigacasting Database.
Multiple sources of The Gigacasting Newsletter familiar with the matter confirmed the Automobilwoche report.
Source: Automobilwoche (original report); Automobil Industrie; Handelsblatt; FAZ; Mitbestimmen (VW works council)
